“Compared with rapidly aging countries such as Japan and the UK, India has a retiree industry that’s still in its infancy, but many operators are ‘expanding aggressively,’ says Rahul Vaidya, a senior director at real estate broker Jones Lang LaSalle. India today has roughly 60 upscale retirement communities, up from 36 in 2020, and the market will expand at 10% annually over the next five years, Anarock Property Consultants in Mumbai predicts.”
From Bloomberg.
“‘All right, so today we are going to dive deep into some cutting-edge tech,’ a chatty American male voice says. But this voice does not belong to a human. It belongs to Google’s new AI podcasting tool, called Audio Overview, which has become a surprise viral hit.
The podcasting feature was launched in mid-September as part of NotebookLM, a year-old AI-powered research assistant. NotebookLM, which is powered by Google’s Gemini 1.5 model, allows people to upload content such as links, videos, PDFs, and text. They can then ask the system questions about the content, and it offers short summaries.
The tool generates a podcast called Deep Dive, which features a male and a female voice discussing whatever you uploaded. The voices are breathtakingly realistic—the episodes are laced with little human-sounding phrases like ‘Man’ and ‘Wow’ and ‘Oh right’ and ‘Hold on, let me get this right.’ The ‘hosts’ even interrupt each other.”
From MIT Technology Review.
“Amazon.com Inc.’s Audible will begin inviting a select group of US-based audiobook narrators to train artificial intelligence on their voices, the clones of which can then be used to make audiobook recordings. The effort, which kicks off this week, is designed to add more audiobooks to the service, quickly and cheaply — and to welcome traditional narrators into the evolving world of audiobook automation which, to date, many have regarded warily.”
From Bloomberg.
MIT Technology Review | Science & Technology
“Roblox plans to roll out a generative AI tool that will let creators make whole 3D scenes just using text prompts, it announced today.
Once it’s up and running, developers on the hugely popular online game platform will be able to simply write ‘Generate a race track in the desert,’ for example, and the AI will spin one up. Users will also be able to modify scenes or expand their scope—say, to change a daytime scene to night or switch the desert for a forest.
Although developers can already create similar scenes like this manually in the platform’s creator studio, Roblox claims its new generative AI model will make the changes happen in a fraction of the time. It also claims that it will give developers with minimal 3D art skills the ability to craft more compelling environments.”
From MIT Technology Review.
“Four private citizens are set to launch on an ambitious, first-of-its-kind space mission next week that is expected to include the first spacewalk conducted entirely by a commercial crew.
The mission, dubbed Polaris Dawn, is scheduled to lift off Monday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida sometime between 3:30 a.m. and 7 a.m. ET…
They will ride into space in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule atop a Falcon 9 rocket. The plan for the five-day mission is to send them to an orbital altitude more than three times higher than the International Space Station — the highest that humans have reached since the final Apollo moon mission in 1972.
Three days into the flight should come the spacewalk, in which two crew members will exit the capsule on a tether for up to 20 minutes. Previously, only astronauts from government space agencies have conducted spacewalks to build or upgrade space stations in orbit, repair satellites and complete science experiments.”
From NBC News.
