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Dell Technologies is announcing new capabilities and services to Unified Workspace , its visionary approach to end-user computing, including a… Read more at VMblog.com.
The content below is taken from the original ( Can Fairphone 3 scale ethical consumer electronics?), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
Fairphone, the Dutch social enterprise that’s on a mission to rethink the waste and exploitation that underpins the business of consumer electronics, has unboxed its third smartphone.
The handset, which is sold with the promise of longevity rather than cutting edge obsolescence, goes on pre-sale from today in Europe via Fairphone’s website with a suggested retail price of €450 (depending on local taxes and levies). It will ship to buyers on September 3.
Like its predecessor, the design is modular to allow the user to swap out damaged parts for replacement modules that Fairphone also sells.
Out of the box the phone comes with Android 9 preloaded. A post-launch update will make it easy for buyers to wipe Google services off their slate and install the Android Open Source Project instead.
Commenting in a statement, CEO Eva Gouwens said: “We developed the Fairphone 3 to be a real sustainable alternative on the market, which is a big step towards lasting change. By establishing a market for ethical products, we want to motivate the entire industry to act more responsibly since we cannot achieve this change alone.”
“We envision an economy where consideration for people and the planet is a natural part of doing business and according to this vision, we have created scalable ways to improve our supply chain and product,” she added.
Fairphone 3 running Android 9 out of the box
Since 2013, the hardware startup has focused on selling smartphones attached to a pledge of fairer working conditions for the people who assemble them, and greater transparency around the sourcing of minerals and materials needed to make them — as well as designing for longevity and repairability.
More than 80% of the volume of the Fairphone 3 is recycled, according to founder (and former CEO) Bas van Abel. He also touts its own research that suggests a Fairphone 3 owner who’s able to keep and maintain the device can save 30% of CO2 emissions or more over the product’s lifetime.
In seeking to achieve its flagship ‘fair phone’ pledge the team behind Fairphone has had to go beyond the surface hardware — and innovate on developing supply chains that can live up to an ethical agenda.
Fairphone 3’s PR flags “responsibly sourced and conflict-free tin and tungsten, recycled copper and plastics”, as well as fair trade gold which it sourced for the handset (and is working to integrate into its supply chain). It also says it’s in the process of setting up an initiative for “better sourcing of cobalt”, aka the key mineral for energy transition.
Malachite, copper and cobalt. Image credit: Fairphone
On the labor and human rights front, the Fairphone 3 is assembled by Taiwanese manufacturing partner Arima — which Fairphone says it has collaborated with to “improve employee satisfaction by improving worker representation, health and safety and by paying a bonus to workers with the aim to bridge the gap between minimum and living wages in the factory”.
In practice van Abel says this means Fairphone pays the assembly workers employed by Arima a bonus based on increased performance around its social goals. Rather than, per more usual industry practice, punishing the manufacturing partner if it fails to hit stringent delivery targets — which then encourages a punishing spiral of forced overtime that erodes workers rights and welfare.
It also has social incentives programs in three other factories that put together components for the device, such as its speakers.
Despite what are clearly laudable and lofty goals, selling fairer and more ethical smartphones remains a niche business for now, with Fairphone’s total shipments to date representing less than 0.1% of the Western European smartphone market. It is also still a European-only business. But it’s a niche that van Abel says is “growing at high speed”.
“I do believe it’s very feasible for Fairphone to [ship 200,000 smartphones per year] in the next couple of years,” he says, adding: “We can address a small part of the conscious consuming market” — pointing to Gouwens’ background at a Dutch confectionary company, Tony’s Chocolonely, which was set up in 2005 to campaign for fair trade and slave-free chocolate, and now has the biggest marketshare on chocolate in Holland.
Phones are of course far more complex to make than bars of chocolate. But in recent years a maturing smartphone market has seen a slow down in the pace of technological innovation coupled with rising commoditization that’s made differentiation a major challenge for Android OEMs especially.
So if there’s a point in time when a fair trade smartphone might stand a chance against the Samsungs, Huaweis, Xiaomis, Oppos, LGs and so on then the current moment has a fair bit to recommend it.
At the same time, concern about the environmental cost of business models that depend upon continuous resource use and generate mountains of e-waste is also growing — thanks to greater visibility and awareness of the damage caused at both ends of the pipe (including as countries like China put hard limits on the types of foreign waste they’ll accept).
“I believe that we are more and more ready for [sustainability and fair trade] in consumer electronics and I do see that the conversation in consumer electronics is definitely changing — it’s much more mature on sustainability,” says van Abel. “More and more companies are looking into it, and it’s also more demanding from the consumer perspective. You see that that’s changing as well. So it will happen. It’s just that it’s not happening fast enough.”
“We’ve been not so successful in disconnecting the [consumer electronics] business models from the use of resources yet but that is a legacy from an economic system that was set up centuries ago,” he adds. “Where growth is connected to the use of resources — and that has to do with sustainability and change and a changing mindset.”
The wider conviction, for Fairphone as a social enterprise, is to work to generate momentum that pushes the consumer electronics industry towards a circular future — where fairer conditions for workers and a reduction in waste and resource use; a focus on product longevity via repairable design and component reuse; and end of life recycling are no longer exceptional but what every player strives for.
The project is indeed a massive one. And Fairphone remains very much a work in progress — an ambitious attempt at reforming all the tarnished links in the smartphone supply chain. So yes, it’s by no means perfect.
The industry that it has to interact with still contains plenty of murky corners which a tiny company has only very limited power to sway. Even as Fairphone has punched above its weight by using campaigning roots to build consumer awareness and industry buy in that’s enabled it to enact small on-the-ground changes which have the potential to scale into something bigger.
Its investors include Bethnal Green Ventures, Pymwymic, Doen Participaties, Quadia, Dutch Good Growth Fund and ABN Amro Fund. More than $40M has gone into the business since Fairphone was founded — in seed, VC and debt financing.
“The problem with the industry is that the deeper you go into the supply chain — like the third, fourth tier — the worse it gets,” says van Abel. “So the assembly factories where you have a direct relationship are basically the ones that are doing pretty well, also because they have all these rules and things put upon them by big manufacturers. Companies are most vulnerable on the ODMs.
“So the further you go into the supply chain where they’re really making the plastics and the small metals and that kind of stuff the worse it gets. So we really want to also make sure that that is being surfaced and that we put some attention on it… Are we able to change that deep into the supply chain? It’s really difficult to get that far as a small player but we’re trying.”
“On the supply chain we’ve been going along investing into programs all along the way,” he goes on, giving the example of a child-labor free mining program it’s set up in Uganda to source fair trade gold.
“We’re working really hard with lots of partners on the ground. It’s getting off the ground now but the gold that we get from there is not connected to the supply chain of the [Fair]phone yet — so that will be an innovation that will come along the way, coming in 2020.
“What we do now is we’ve taken all the supply chains that we had for Fairphone 2 and were able to get that into Fairphone 3. So at least we have everything that we covered with Fairphone 2 but in a way that is also more scalable. Previously we had the gold through our own supply chain going into the factories. Right now we have it set up in such a way that other companies can use that same gold and the factory can scale up with that gold as well. So it’s a higher amount, it’s more scalable but we’re also setting up new initiatives.”
“Another one is cobalt which we’re investing in a lot — which is used for batteries,” he adds. “If we get that initiative up and running it’s also very interesting for the car industry to actually use that same supply chain. Because one of the things that a lot of the industry is focusing on is recycling. But we all know that there’s not enough to recycle to actually feed the supply chain with the amount of minerals we need to make our products. So we still need mining. And that’s one of the things that the industry has not been very open about.”
Virgin resources being necessary to manufacture shiny gadgets and electronics-packed machines is the industry’s dirty not-so-little secret. This means mines where minerals are dug out of the earth in order to be refined or smelted for use in the modules and components packed inside devices.
Even consumer tech giants that make claims for the labor and welfare standards of their third party assembly factory workers aren’t typically making promises that extend all the way back to the mines where the minerals essential to their devices are dug out and processed. Fairphone is at least trying to dig into the dirtiest stuff.
Conflict-free tungsten mine in Rwanda now integrated into Fairphone’s supply chain. Image credit: Fairphone
“We have an approach where we look at closed pipe supply chains for certain materials from the mines all the way to the component. And we look at the factories that are involved along the line per component because we can’t do all the factories — so we can at least say along that whole supply chain we’ve looked at the factories working it in,” says van Abel.
“If you look at mining there’s nothing beautiful about mining… Mining in itself is bad for the environment, there’s a lot of harsh working conditions, it’s in third world countries many of the times, so it’s not a focus area of a lot of these companies because it’s… a far away story. So many of these manufacturers and phone companies focus on recycling.
“In itself recycling is not bad it’s just that we still need all these virgin materials. Also recycling is kind of a last resort as I see it — reusing components would be a better thing. And even the best thing would be using the phone as long as possible.”
Like its predecessor, the latest Fairphone’s flagship feature — aside from fairer and more ethical assembly — is that it’s designed to be repairable. A fact that’s front and center when you open the box and find a tiny screwdriver nestled alongside what otherwise looks a fairly standard (if slightly chunky) Android smartphone.
There’s no charger, USB cable or headphones in the box — intentional omissions to reduce unnecessary e-waste. The novel presence of a tiny metal and plastic screwdriver seems a fair trade for the usual accessories which Fairphone has calculated most phone buyers will already own. (If not, it can sell you a charger.)
Its big promise with this, its third generation handset, is that it will be supported for the next five to seven years.
van Abel tells TechCrunch he’s confident it can deliver on that “bold” pledge — having learnt some hard lessons over the past five+ years of pushing against ingrained industry habits baked into clockwork component upgrade cycles.
It wasn’t always like this. Some buyers of the first-gen Fairphone were disappointed and even angry when it announced it was ending support for that device in 2017 — meaning an early adopter would only have had between two and 3.5 years’ support for a smartphone that was sold as ‘repairable by design’.
The problem Fairphone found itself first crashing into, and next seeking to tackle head on, is that the consumer electronics industry as a whole is not geared up for sustainability and repairability but rather locked to regular (wasteful) upgrade cycles which in turn drive regular ~two-year component refresh cycles.
This tick-tock onward march of upgrades makes supporting older hardware a challenge. In seeking to go against the grain Fairphone has literally had to stockpile enough components to ensure it can offer years of spare part runway to support its devices.
In parallel, industry software has also needed to evolve so chipsets can be supported for longer — and van Abel says “a lot of software is actually changing. You can upgrade more and more easily to new software” — so it’s finally in a position to be confident that the latest handset can last.
“Our company has gotten much more mature,” he also says. “We are better equipped to deal with the scaling, the financial position has increased and has changed up to a point which is much more solid — so the whole support system, the ecosystem, around the phone has improved a lot.”
The Fairphone 3 is its second handset design to incorporate repairable modules that are designed to be accessible to the user. It comes in a translucent shell that also acts as a protective bumper and is stamped proudly down the side with the words “designed to open”.
Crack into it and you’ll find six modules that can be swapped out with a little bit of elbow grease and a Phillips #00 screwdriver — including the display, speaker and camera, as well as the battery (harking back to days when replaceable batteries were a smartphone norm).
Fairphone 3 — modularity refined
The aim of this type of modularity is not for customization or upgrades but for sustainability by increasing longevity by making it easy and cheaper to replace a damaged or defunct component vs junking the whole phone or having to take it to a specialist shop for expensive repair.
To be clear Fairphone is not offering upgradable hardware modules to boost phone performance over time but like for like replacements. It wants each Fairphone user to keep the same handset for longer — even if it gets dropped and the screen cracked, or used so much the battery loses its capacity to hold a charge.
“One of the biggest changes we’ve seen in the phone industry is that there’s small incremental innovation — which is in our benefit. So I think the time is right now,” says van Abel. “We are able to support phones longer. It has to do with the hardware, it also has to do with the software. The software you see that many of the software platforms… offer a better integration with the chipset. So also for future upgrades.
“You will see the software will run for longer time also on these chipsets — which basically are at a point where you will not run WhatsApp faster on a newer chipset. For some [other] stuff, especially on 3D gaming and the really high end computing stuff, it makes sense to go to the new processors but most of the stuff you will be able to do on the average processor on the phone. So it paves the way to keep phones in the hands of the consumers for a longer time, which makes sense. Because it’s cheaper for consumers… and it also is more sustainable.”
With the Fairphone 3 he says the company sought to dial down the “radical” modularity of its earlier crack at the concept — so the result is less of a ‘party trick’ smartphone design, as the Fairphone 2 was (he dubs it a “show off” phone) — and more, well, dull but worthy; modularity as a utility that’s there to enable (occasional) repairs.
“You don’t need the phone to be so super smooth in taking apart to be able to repair it,” he says. “Fairphone 2 goes beyond the idea of repairability. It’s more a show off phone in that sense. And that also comes with risks.”
Fairphone 2 — its earlier, flashier earlier crack at modularity
Refining its approach to modularity also means Fairphone has been able to reduce the cost of the handset. Consumers will see that in a cheaper price-tag (€75 less than the prior model) — which puts it in reach of a bigger group of potential buyers.
The design is a cost (and risk) saver for Fairphone too in that it’s easier to manufacturer. And cost and sales volume are important when you’re trying to demonstrate that making sustainable hardware can still turn a profile. (Not that Fairphone is there yet — but finding a path to profitability is a core part of the mission.)
For users the only slight downsize of the reconfigured modular design — which has a full 13 screws just holding the display module in place — is that getting to the guts involves more fiddling than it used to. Which again seems a fair trade given how rarely you should need to get into it.
“Fairphone 3 there’s less risk involved in manufacturing, the design is more sturdy so in that sense it’s also a phone we can scale with as a company — so the whole ecosystem around it; the quality control,” says van Abel. “We have a big team now in China which we didn’t have with Fairphone 2. So we are much more confident with this phone we can offer a very high qualitative product.”
If the aim of your social enterprise is to reduce e-waste and overall environmental impact by selling phones that are designed to last longer than rival devices there is something of a natural tension about releasing any new handset model at all.
When I put this to van Abel he agrees but points to the push and pull around the product, given the unavoidable need for Fairphone “to stay relevant” by appealing to smartphone buyers, and given the industry “not working int he way that we would like it to work”, as he puts it — i.e not being geared for longevity.
Fairphone definitely needs to be able to sell phones if it’s to make a positive dent in consumer electronics practices and processes. Which means enticing buyers is important.
And on that front its last model wasn’t an amazing success — saddled with uninspiring hardware at a fair trade premium price. (A pretty biting 2016 review by Wired called it “ethical but ugly”, complaining also that it had a slow camera and dated hardware.) Closing that ‘compromise gap’ is thus a key aim with Fairphone 3.
van Abel enthusiastically talks up the performance specs, noting particularly that they’ve put a lot of work into improving battery performance (the removable cell is 3000mAh, and includes fast charging) and on software engineering to integrate the camera — which he claims, as far as performance and photo quality goes, is “on par” with high end smartphones “that cost twice as much”.
At a glance the 5.7 inch full-HD screen also looks clear and crisp. Plus there’s a fingerprint reader on board, as well as NFC and 4G. Inside is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 632 engine, 4GB of RAM and a generous 64GB of storage (further expandable via an SD card slot). Dual SIM slots are another welcome touch.
The handset comes preloaded with a vanilla implementation of Android 9 (Pie). But as noted above buyers will be able to switch for a non-Google alternative — via an updater that will let them wipe and install the Android Open Source Project flavor of the OS. (The updater will come post-launch, according to van Abel, who notes that around 5% of Fairphone users opt to go full open source.)
Ethics aside, one straight up hardware boast the Fairphone 3’s got going for it is that it has a 3.5mm headphone jack. Which is something you won’t find on Apple’s latest iPhones. Nor on Samsung’s newest flagship. The march of tech progress has erased the accessory-friendly hole from premium devices.
So it’s a nice additional perk for Fairphone 3 buyers who’ve invested in wired headphones — meaning they can keep using other kit for longer too.
The smartphone industry has marched at a pretty steady clip since Fairphone 2 was released at the back end of 2015, with rivals updating their own much more expansive product portfolios at least annually. So an upgrade more than three years after the last Fairphone doesn’t seem overly wasteful or indulgent.
And while Fairphone has never pretended it’s going to be able to compete, like for like, with top tier smartphones on pure hardware specs and features it does need to be able to offer a phone that’s compelling enough to convince buyers to switch.
Good enough smartphone hardware with a guarantee of repairability and which is combined what it calls “fair specs” — i.e. a minimum wage for a workers in its supply chain plus a bonus that aims to close the gap with that and a living wage — is its sales pitch for Fairphone 3.
Who Fairphone buyers are is also expanding, according to van Abel. So while, two years ago, he talked of the typical user being a ‘Gen X German with a master’s degree’, now the target is any conscientious consumer.
Selling at least 100,000 handsets per year is the goal. To date it’s only sold ~175,000 Fairphones in total — through pre-sales and organic growth — but it reckons the new device will enable it to scale beyond that core fan-base to address a wider community of ethical consumers.
It’s being helped to that end by expanded carrier partnerships — such as one with Orange in France which will see the mobile operator range the handset in 600 stores.
Scaling sales is another necessary part of the social mission, says van Abel — as Fairphone needs to show its social impact investors that it’s growing demand and building a market for ethical alternatives.
When — or even whether — there will be a Fairphone 4 is a question he isn’t keen to engage with. Clearly the hope is Fairphone 3 packs enough smartphone punch to go the distance. Though he hints it might look to offer additional smartphones in order to enter the US, a major market it’s so far not addressed at all.
While Fairphone has had a singular device focus to date, van Abel says it’s thinking about applying its hard won learnings around electronics supply chains to other types of consumer devices — suggesting ‘Fair’ could end up as a brand prefix atop an assortment of consumer gadgets.
“I think Fairphone has developed itself — even though it’s called Fairphone — into a brand that I’m pretty sure can go into a full blown, sustainable, consumer electronics brand. Because there are none,” he tells TechCrunch. “There are not so many brands in the industry that can differentiate on what they stand for. Apple does pretty well on design. But for the rest I don’t know a lot of premium brands that can differentiate on something that they’re really good at. And we’re good at creating social innovation and sustainability. And a lot of the supply chains that we’re using already can be used for other products as well.”
More broadly, the business is evolving to sell sustainably-minded process change back to the electronics industry itself — which of course needs to reform wholesale in order to enact the kind of root and branch change needed to support a fully circular economy.
In practice this means the ethical supply chains it establishes are intended to be open for others in the industry to use too. So Fairphone’s business of making ‘fairer’ handsets also functions as a showcase and case study to encourage wider industry reform — including via some direct partnerships that allow its own tiny orders for key minerals to be fulfilled by it piggybacking and scaling the order with the help of larger buyers.
Of course everything in electronics is connected. So real change isn’t going to happen overnight. Which makes being committed to stick at it and drive consumer awareness essential. It’s a long game. Even ethical chocolate took its sweet time to take over the market.
“With Fairphone 1 we had our own supply chains, with Fairphone 2 we were more and more exploring incorporating into scalable solutions for other parties as well, and with Fairphone 3 we already have consortia — for example the cobalt we’re doing together with Royal Philips and Signify… and some other big brands I can’t mention,” van Abel tells us. “Systemic change only happens when the whole system changes — so we can’t do that as a small company ourselves.”
He says the key shift the consumer electronics industry must make to pull off transformative reform to a circular economy that’s better for humans and better for the environment is to change its business model — a centuries old model that’s still obsessed with pushing “as much as possible into the hands of consumers at the fastest rate possible”.
On this front he believes services business models offer exciting potential to retune incentives for consumers and businesses to flip the conventional model on its head.
Fairphone is currently experimenting with a service based smartphone offering — working with a local an insurance company on a trial to offer Fairphone as a service, where the phone is leased not owned.
“If you sell a phone every three to five years to a person you can also survive as a company. It’s not that you can’t survive. But — having said that — one of the things we are experimenting with is Fairphone as a service… And the beautiful aspect around running a product as a service is on the profit and loss of the company. When I sell you a phone you become a cost center right away as a customer, because all the after sales, everything around it basically is cost,” he says.
“If I sell you a service and a hardware product comes with it for you to be able to use… then I’m intrinsically motivated to have you use that phone as long as possible because every time I need to make a new phone it’s cost. Whereas every month I get my money from you as a customer and I can actually keep developing my service up to a point that it is more tailor made.”
While leasing has been very common in the smartphone industry on the mobile operator side, Fairphone is approaching it from a phone maker perspective — which van Abel reckons offers potential for disconnecting “as much as possible” the use of resources from the business model attached to smartphones.
‘Fairphone as a service’ is just a pilot for now, and he concedes the model would require a lot of money to be put on the table up front to cover the cost of use of the device for several years (further lengthening already lengthy repairable-oriented device cash cycles) — but recurring subscription payments at least sound like a model that could unlock the necessary up-front capital.
(van Abel also points to changes going on in the funding space — saying impact investing is now “hot”, and adding: “We’ve been pretty successful at finding the right impact investors to support our growth.”)
“I’m pretty hopeful because [humans have] been pretty successful at selling people stuff they don’t need so I’m pretty sure that we can also reverse that into marketing stories around products that last longer and people wanting products to last longer,” he says. “There’s a whole playground [with services]. Can you imagine that you start rewarding people if they actually keep their phone longer, if they have less parts broken… Now you reward a loyal customer with a new phone — what if you reward a customer that has their phone for a very long time with a lower subscription rate, for example. So there’s so much stuff to play with in that area. Not only by phone companies but also operators and everyone that is in connection with customers.”
Fairphone founder, Bas van Abel. Image credit: Fairphone
“My vision is really the disconnect from the use of resources and the business models. That is really the key problem that we’re still dealing with — if you look at sustainability,” he adds. “From a human rights perspective we’re dealing with multiple complex situations where politics, countries, wars, all these things are attached to these supply chains — which have nothing to do with consumer electronics specifically, it has to do with the human condition. So that’s even a bigger challenge — in terms of how do we create world peace basically?”
While no one would pretend there’s an easy answer for that, changing anything for the better means being willing to start somewhere.
The content below is taken from the original ( Amazon Transcribe Now Supports Mandarin and Russian), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
As speech is central to human interaction, artificial intelligence research has long focused on speech recognition, the first step in designing and building systems allowing humans to interact intuitively with machines. The diversity in languages, accents and voices makes this an incredibly difficult problem, requiring expert skills, extremely large data sets, and vast amounts of computing power to train efficient models.
In order to help organizations and developers use speech recognition in their applications, we launched Amazon Transcribe at AWS re:Invent 2017, an automatic speech recognition service. Thanks to Amazon Transcribe, customers such as VideoPeel, Echo360, or GE Appliances have been able to quickly and easily add speech recognition capabilities to their applications and devices.
A single API call is all that it takes… and you don’t need to know the first thing about machine learning. You can analyze audio files stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and have the service return a text file of the transcribed speech. You can also send a live audio stream to Amazon Transcribe and receive a stream of transcripts in real time.
Since launch, the team has constantly added new languages, and today we are happy to announce support for Mandarin and Russian, bringing the total number of supported languages to 16.
Introducing Mandarin
Working with Amazon Transcribe is extremely simple: let me show you how to get started in just a few minutes.
Let’s try Mandarin first. Starting from this Little Red Riding Hood video, I extracted the audio track, saved it in MP3 format, and uploaded it to one of my Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets. Here’s the actual file.
Then, I started a transcription job using the AWS CLI:
$ aws transcribe start-transcription-job--media MediaFileUri=https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/jsimon-transcribe-demo/little_red_riding_hood-mandarin.mp3 --media-format mp3 --language-code zh-CN --transcription-job-name little_red_riding_hood-mandarin
After a few minutes, the job is complete. Looking at the AWS console, I can either download it using the URL provided by Amazon Transcribe, or read it directly.
Unfortunately, I don’t speak Mandarin, but using Amazon Translate, this text is about a sick grandmother and a big bad wolf, so it looks like Amazon Transcribe did its job!
Introducing Russian
Let’s try Russian now, using the dialogue in this short video.
| Здравствуйте! | Greetings! |
| Добрый день! | Good day! |
| Давайте познакомимся. Меня зовут Слава. | Let’s introduce ourselves. My name is Slava. |
| Очень приятно, а меня – Наташа. | Nice to meet you, and mine – Natasha. |
| Наташа, кто вы по профессии? | Natasha, what is your profession? |
| Я врач. А вы? | I (am a) doctor. And you? |
| Я инженер. | I (am an) engineer. |
This time, I will ask Amazon Transcribe to perform speaker identification too.
$ aws transcribe start-transcription-job --media MediaFileUri=https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/jsimon-transcribe-demo/russian-dialogue.mp3 --media-format mp3 --language-code ru-RU --transcription-job-name russian_dialogue --settings ShowSpeakerLabels=true,MaxSpeakerLabels=2
Here is the result.
As you can see, not only has Amazon Transcribe faithfully converted speech to text, it has also correctly assigned each sentence to the correct speaker.
Now Available!
You can start using these two new languages today in the following regions:
The free tier covers 60 minutes for the first 12 months, starting from your first transcription request.
As always, we’d love to hear your feedback: please post it to the AWS forum for Amazon Transcribe, or send it through your usual AWS contacts.
— Julien;
The content below is taken from the original ( New wristband could predict aggressive outbursts in people with autism), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
The content below is taken from the original ( Buying a Chromebook? Don’t forget to check that best-before date), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
It is unlikely to be printed on the box, but every Chromebook has an “Auto Update Expiration (AUE) Date” after which the operating system is unsupported by Google.…
The content below is taken from the original ( Plan migration of your Hyper-V servers using Azure Migrate Server Assessment), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
Azure Migrate is focused on streamlining your migration journey to Azure. We recently announced the evolution of Azure Migrate, which provides a streamlined, comprehensive portfolio of Microsoft and partner tools to meet migration needs, all in one place. An important capability included in this release is upgrades to Server Assessment for at-scale assessments of VMware and Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs.)
This is the first in a series of blogs about the new capabilities in Azure Migrate. In this post, I will talk about capabilities in Server Assessment that help you plan for migration of Hyper-V servers. This capability is now generally available as part of the Server Assessment feature of Azure Migrate. After assessing your servers for migration, you can migrate your servers using Microsoft’s Server Migration solution available on Azure Migrate. You can get started right away by creating an Azure Migrate project.
Server Assessment earlier supported assessment of VMware VMs for migration to Azure. We’ve now included Azure suitability analysis, migration cost planning, performance-based rightsizing, and application dependency analysis for Hyper-V VMs. You can now plan at-scale, assessing up to 35,000 Hyper-V servers in one Azure Migrate project. If you use VMware as well, you can discover and assess both Hyper-V and VMware servers in the same Azure Migrate project. You can create groups of servers, assess by group, and refine the groups further using application dependency information.
The assessment determines whether a given server can be migrated as-is to Azure. Azure support is checked for each server discovered. If it is found that a server is not ready to be migrated, remediation guidance is automatically provided. You can customize your assessment and regenerate the assessment reports. You can apply subscription offers and reserved instance pricing on the cost estimates. You can also generate a cost estimate by choosing a VM series of your choice, and specify the uptime of the workloads you will run in Azure.
Assessment reports provide detailed cost estimates. You can optimize on cost using performance-based rightsizing assessments. The performance data of your on-premise server is taken into consideration to recommend an appropriate Azure VM and disk SKU. This helps to optimize and right-size on cost as you migrate servers that might be over-provisioned in your on-premise data center.
Once you have established cost estimates and migration readiness, you can go ahead and plan your migration phases. Use the dependency analysis feature to understand the dependencies between your applications. This is helpful to understand which workloads are interdependent and need to be migrated together, ensuring you do not leave critical elements behind on-premises. You can visualize the dependencies in a map or extract the dependency data in a tabular format. You can divide your servers into groups and refine the groups for migration using this feature.
Note that the inventory metadata gathered is persisted in the geography you select while creating the project. You can select a geography of your choice. Server Assessment is available today in Asia Pacific, Australia, Azure Government, Canada, Europe, India, Japan, United Kingdom, and United States geographies.
When you are ready to migrate the servers to Azure, you can use Server Migration to carry out the migration. You will be able automatically carry over the assessment recommendations from Server Assessment into Server Migration. You can read more in our documentation “Migrate Hyper-V VMs to Azure.”
In the coming months, we will add assessment capabilities for physical servers. You will also be able to run a quick assessment by adding inventory information using a CSV file. Stay tuned!
In the upcoming blogs, we will talk about tools for scale assessments, scale migrations, and the partner integrations available in Azure Migrate.
The content below is taken from the original ( Electric Dump Truck Produces More Energy Than it Uses), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
Electric vehicles are everywhere now. It’s more than just Leafs, Teslas, and a wide variety of electric bikes. It’s also trains, busses, and in this case, gigantic dump trucks. This truck in particular is being put to work at a mine in Switzerland, and as a consequence of having an electric drivetrain is actually able to produce more power than it consumes. (Google Translate from Portugese)
This isn’t some impossible perpetual motion machine, either. The dump truck drives up a mountain with no load, and carries double the weight back down the mountain after getting loaded up with lime and marl to deliver to a cement plant. Since electric vehicles can recover energy through regenerative braking, rather than wasting that energy as heat in a traditional braking system, the extra weight on the way down actually delivers more energy to the batteries than the truck used on the way up the mountain.
The article claims that this is the largest electric vehicle in the world at 110 tons, and although we were not able to find anything larger except the occasional electric train, this is still an impressive feat of engineering that shows that electric vehicles have a lot more utility than novelties or simple passenger vehicles.
Thanks to [Frisco] for the tip!
The content below is taken from the original ( How to set up a new Chromebook), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
Editor’s note: This is the third post in an ongoing tips series. If your company recently switched to Chrome OS, use these tips to get up to speed on Chromebooks. If you’re an IT administrator, pass these tips along to your users to help them stay productive.
We recently shared tips on how to use a Chromebook if you’ve switched from using a Mac or a PC. This month, we asked Googlers to share basic tips for Chromebooks that are helpful regardless of which operating system is used.
But before we get into this month’s tips, if you’re in the process of deciding whether a Chromebook is right for you or your business, this four-question quiz can help you get started. If you’re on the hunt for a certain size, need durability, have a certain price point in mind or require flexibility in form (laptops vs. convertibles vs. detachable options), there are many options to fit your needs.
Okay, now let’s get to the tips.
1. How to set up a monitor
While enjoying the portability of a new Chromebook, you may sometimes need a bigger screen for a project. You can connect a Chromebook to a monitor or TV with an HDMI, DisplayPort, DVI or VGA port. Check the Chromebook instructions to see if you need an adapter cable to do this.
After adapter needs are assessed, here’s how you can connect your Chromebook to a monitor:
Find the display output and input ports on your Chromebook (Information is included in the instructions.).
Use the display output and input ports to figure out the adapter needed.
Plug the adapter into the monitor and then into your Chromebook.
Choose the correct input source, or the cable type you’re using to connect your laptop to your monitor. Note: if you’re connecting your Chromebook to two monitors, you’ll need a USB multiport adapter or USB-C dock.
These step-by-step instructions explain how to project your Chromebook screen onto a monitor, as well as how to adjust screens.
2. How to change the background wallpaper
Personalize your Chromebook by changing the wallpaper (no trip to the home improvement store needed). There are dozens of desktop wallpaper options, everything from landscape photos to colorful patterns to illustrations. Or you can use one of your own photos. Here’s how:
Click anywhere on the desktop background and select Set Wallpaper.
Explore the collections.
When you find the wallpaper you want, double-click on it and enjoy the new view.
To add your own photo, scroll down to My photos and select one.
Explore instructions for using the same background wallpaper across multiple Chromebooks.
3. How to prevent files from being deleted
One of the biggest advantages of a Chromebook is that it’s a cloud-native device, meaning important information can be backed up in the cloud. When you download files on a Chromebook, they automatically appear in your Downloads folder, a temporary folder on the Chromebook’s hard drive.
Think of the Downloads folder like you do the front hall of a house. It’s an effective entrypoint but not a good place to linger. Files in the Downloads folder can get deleted if a Chromebook runs out of space. In addition, when you delete a file in your Downloads folder, it cannot be recovered. Because of this, it’s a good idea to back up your information to the cloud versus always storing files in your Downloads folder.
Here’s how to move previously downloaded files to a permanent folder in the cloud to prevent them from being deleted:
Click on the Launcher, which is the button that looks like a circle with a dot in the left-hand bottom of your screen. If you have a touchscreen, drag your finger up from the bottom part of your screen (we call this the “app shelf”).
Click on Files and all downloaded files will appear.
On the left, click Downloads.
Drag a downloaded file to the appropriate permanent Drive folder.
Follow these instructions to help protect your files.
4. How to change where files are saved
Another way to prevent accidentally losing files is to change where files are default saved. By default, your files are saved in the Downloads folder on a Chromebook. Here’s how to make them automatically save to a permanent folder in Google Drive instead:
Click the time in the bottom right corner of your screen. It will pull up different tools for you to use.
Click the gear/settings icon in the top right.
Scroll to the bottom and click Advanced.
From there, scroll down to Location under Downloads and select Change.
Pick the Drive folder where you’d like your files to save and select open.
Explore how to open, save, delete and zip files.
5. How to switch back and forth between my personal account and work account
While at work, you may want to switch to your personal account to check your personal email, book tickets, or check your bank balance. You can do this easily, but first, you need to add your personal account to your Chromebook:
Click the time in the bottom right corner of your screen. It will pull up different tools for you to use.
Click the gear/settings icon in the top right.
Scroll down to People and select Manage Other People.
Click Add person.
Choose a name and a photo and enter your personal account password.
Click Save. A new window will open and ask you to turn on sync.
With Sync turned on, you can be on any computer with Chrome Browser and Chrome OS and your personal preferences will sync, including settings, bookmarks, and tabs. To switch from your work profile to your personal account or the reverse, click the time in the bottom right corner again, scroll down to People, and select the profile you want to switch to. Now you can stay productive all in one place.
More resources for IT admins to help users
If you’re an IT admin, use these tips to help new users adjust to Chromebooks, and keep an eye out for more advice you can share—we’ll link new posts here as we publish them.
The content below is taken from the original ( GitHub adds 21 new partners to its free Student Developer Pack), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
For a few years now, GitHub has been running a program that gives students around the world free access to GitHub Pro and various free and discounted services from other partners as part of its GitHub Education program. In total, more than over 1.5 million students have now signed up for the program, with about 750,000 being currently active. With active, and with the new school year about to start, the company today announced that it is doubling the number of partners in the Student Developer Pack program by adding an additional 21 companies to the list.
The new partners cover a wide range of developer tools and services. They range from web design tools like Bootstrap Studio, which actually quietly joined the program over the summer, to the domain registrar .TECH, SSH client Terminus, ConfigCat for feature flag and configuration management management, and Icons8 for making applications look better.
“Our philosophy when what it comes to the pack is that it is about preparing students for all the premier tools they are going to encounter in the workplace,” said Scott Sanicki, the senior program manager Senior Program Manager for the GitHub Student Developer Pack. That means that there can be partners with competing products, too, but as Sanicki noted, GitHub hasn’t seen any pushback from existing partners so far, including Microsoft.
Indeed, over the summer, GitHub’s new owner, Microsoft also added its Azure cloud computing services to the Student Pack. That’s no surprise, but it’s worth noting that AWS, DigitalOcean and Heroku were already part of the pack and offered students free and discounted cloud computing resources. They remain in the program and, and as Sanicki told me, it’s part of the company’s promise to remain open, even after having been acquired by Microsoft.
“[GitHub CEO Nat Friedman] was asked directly at the time of the acquisition whether we were going to sunset the student developer pack and he committed that we were continuing the pack and, in fact, make it stronger and that’s what we’ve we’ve attempted to continue to do,” Sanicki said. “We’ve seen support from Microsoft, from leadership, to give us the resources that we need to not only dream bigger with what we want to do with the pack and GitHub Education but to actually now attempt to accomplish it.”
Sanicki expects that the team will continue to add new partners over the course of the next few months. To sign up and see if you qualify for the program, head over here.
Below, you can find a list of all the new partners and what they are offering.
The content below is taken from the original ( IBM hears the RISC-V kids partying next door, decides it will make its Power CPU ISA free, too), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
IBM is planning to allow chip designers around the world to freely create OpenPower-compatible processors.…
The content below is taken from the original ( Sticker sensor monitors your body using wireless power), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
Their…
The content below is taken from the original ( Cramming Dual SIMs & A Micro SD Card Into Your Phone), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
There are plenty of dual SIM phones on the market these days, but most of them are a hamstrung by packaging issues. Despite their dual SIM capability, this usually comes at the expense of the microSD card slot. Of course, hackers don’t accept such nonsense, and [Tweepy] went about crafting a solution. Sadly the make and model of phone aren’t clear.
It’s a simple case of very carefully shaving both the microSD card and the nano-SIM down until both can fit in the card tray. The SIM is slimmed down with the application of a heat gun helping to remove its plastic backing, saving precious fractions of a millimeter. The SD card is then filed down to make just enough space for the SIM to fit in underneath. Thanks to the springiness of the contacts in the phone, it’s just barely possible to squeeze both in, along with some Kapton tape to hold everything in place.
Your mileage may vary, depending on the construction of your SD card. Overall though, it’s a tidy hack that should prove useful to anyone with a dual SIM phone and limited storage. We saw a similar hack a few years ago, too.
[Thanks to Timothy for the tip!]
The content below is taken from the original ( Two ways you can visit an Acorn World event in September), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
The first is to use a time machine1 The second method is much easier. All you need to do is be in Cambridge – more specifically the Centre for Computing History – on Saturday, 21st and/or Sunday, 22nd September, because that’s when the museum will be holding its own Acorn World event – as it […]
The content below is taken from the original ( ARMClient (1.4.0)), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
A simple command line tool to invoke the Azure Resource Manager API
The content below is taken from the original ( How to add personalized attachments to Email Merge in Microsoft Outlook), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
If you are looking for a way to get the body of an Outlook email merged with its Drafts folder (Email Merge) so that you can add a personalized attachment to every draft email and then send them out, one […]
This post How to add personalized attachments to Email Merge in Microsoft Outlook is from TheWindowsClub.com.
The content below is taken from the original ( Google Makes it Easier to Migrate VMs from Azure to Google Cloud), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
To say that the ‘cloud wars’ are heating up, would be an understatement and quite frankly, outdated way of contextualizing one of the largest shifts in computing since the invention of the desktop PC. Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are spending billions to try and capture the largest piece of the cloud computing pie as possible and there are no signs of the spending slowing down.
While Amazon has the lead in the segment and Microsoft is holding firm in second place, Google continues to play catch-up when it comes to attracting new business. That being said, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has the cash-flow to play in the cloud waters and continues to add new features and functionality.
This week, Google announced a new feature for its Google Cloud Platform that makes it significantly easier to migrate from Azure to Google Compute Engine. The new feature called Migrate for Compute Engine, allows you to lift and shift VMs out of Azure and move them to Google Compute Engine with minimal friction; Google previously had announced this feature for AWS.
Google is not alone in this space, Microsoft offers services to help move away from AWS and of course, to migrate from on-premises to its cloud offering. For Google, this is one more check-box item that will help it attract more customers who may be tempted to deploy a multi-cloud setup, instead of relying on a single vendor.
Will this new feature dramatically move the needle for Google? Probably not, but for Google to grow, they need to be as flexible as possible as they chase down AWS and Azure and with the new migration tool, they take one small step towards achieving that goal.
The post Google Makes it Easier to Migrate VMs from Azure to Google Cloud appeared first on Petri.
The content below is taken from the original ( Find the lowest latency Azure regions from your place using azping), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
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The content below is taken from the original ( Digital Currency Regulation Around the World), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
A conversation with Michelle Bond, Ripple’s Global Head of Government Relations
The entrance of Facebook’s Libra whitepaper has caught the world’s attention. While many look to the U.S. to help define a framework for digital assets and blockchain regulation, the question remains: Will policymakers strike the right balance between fostering innovation and protecting consumers? What are the implications, not just in the U.S., but around the world?
In a live discussion, Michelle Bond, Ripple’s Global Head of Government Relations, discusses the current global regulatory landscape and what lies ahead with Ripple’s SVP of Marketing Monica Long.
Bond previously noted, “Globally, there isn’t a single jurisdiction that isn’t paying attention to the fintech space, especially when it comes to blockchain and digital assets.” In the United States alone, three Senate hearings in July evaluated the potential impact of digital asset regulation on industry growth and economic development. CEO Brad Garlinghouse and Executive Chairman and Co-Founder Chris Larsen wrote an open letter to Congress urging these legislators to support fintech policy that fosters responsible innovation and classifies digital assets in a way that recognizes their fundamental differences—not painting them with a broad brush.
Around the world, many governments and policy makers are working together to establish regulation that does just that. Regions, including the U.K., Singapore, Switzerland and Abu Dhabi, already have in place digital asset market frameworks that both support innovation and address risk. For example, the U.K. recently issued guidance classifying XRP with non-security attributes. As Commissioner Hester Peirce of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) recently noted, these frameworks can serve as a model for countries with less clarity that are looking to take cues and “co-learn” how to navigate digital asset and blockchain regulation.
No doubt, as the industry continues to mature, governments and policy makers are feeling the urgency for more regulatory clarity. The U.S. and other pro-innovation countries can set the tone for the rest of the world to follow. A principles-based approach would be most conducive because it is predictable and workable. Jurisdictions should also have clear definitions for digital assets. The industry is still in early stages and needs policy frameworks now to help it evolve and scale over time.
Interested in learning more about how you can use digital assets in cross-border payments to source liquidity on demand, as an alternative to pre-funding? Contact us.
The post Digital Currency Regulation Around the World appeared first on Ripple.
The content below is taken from the original ( Huawei reveals HarmonyOS, its alternative to Android), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
“Harmony OS,” which is said to be faster and sa…
The content below is taken from the original ( Four Secrets of Speaker Placements – a one-page summary), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
A $2000 pair of speakers that was positioned poorly in the room will sound worse than a $200 pair, placed correctly.
New to speaker placement? Read this.
In my opinion this is the best one-page summary on speakers positioning. It explains very well the basic setup and the changes you should hear while tweaking and making adjustments to the distances between the speakers, the listener and the walls.
I own the book by Robert Harley, from which this excerpt was taken, and it is a great overall introductory guide to audiophiles. Thanks to his advice I had found ideal location for KEF LS50s in my small room. The difference between “before” and “after” was like night and day.
submitted by /u/dennem to r/audiophile
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The content below is taken from the original ( letsencrypt-win-simple (2.0.9)), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
A Simple ACME Client for Windows
The content below is taken from the original ( R-Comp releases tool to protect RISC OS computers from prying eyes), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
Lock down, lock all eyes out – there’s no way to pry!1. New-ish2 from R-Comp is an application designed to lock down your RISC OS computers in a way similar to other platforms. On those platforms, it’s normal to be prompted to enter a password at start-up, and possibly when the machine has been left […]
The content below is taken from the original ( Microsoft is closing its long-running MSDN developer magazine), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
The content below is taken from the original ( The UK’s National Health Service is launching an AI lab), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
The UK government has announced it’s rerouting £250M (~$300M) in public funds for the country’s National Health Service (NHS) to set up an artificial intelligence lab that will work to expand the use of AI technologies within the service.
The Lab, which will sit within a new NHS unit tasked with overseeing the digitisation of the health and care system (aka: NHSX), will act as an interface for academic and industry experts, including potentially startups, encouraging research and collaboration with NHS entities (and data) — to drive health-related AI innovation and the uptake of AI-driven healthcare within the NHS.
Last fall the then new in post health secretary, Matt Hancock, set out a tech-first vision of future healthcare provision — saying he wanted to transform NHS IT so it can accommodate “healthtech” to support “preventative, predictive and personalised care”.
In a press release announcing the AI lab, the Department of Health and Social Care suggested it would seek to tackle “some of the biggest challenges in health and care, including earlier cancer detection, new dementia treatments and more personalised care”.
Other suggested areas of focus include:
Google-owned UK AI specialist DeepMind has been an early mover in some of these areas — inking a partnership with a London-based NHS trust in 2015 to develop a clinical task management app called Streams that’s been rolled out to a number of NHS hospitals.
UK startup, Babylon Health, is another early mover in AI and app-based healthcare, developing a chatbot-style app for triaging primary care which it sells to the NHS. (Hancock himself is a user.)
In the case of DeepMind, the company also hoped to use the same cache of NHS data it obtained for Streams to develop an AI algorithm for earlier detection of a condition called acute kidney injury (AKI).
However the data-sharing partnership ran into trouble when concerns were raised about the legal basis for reusing patient data to develop AI. And in 2017 the UK’s data watchdog found DeepMind’s partner NHS trust had failed to obtain proper consents for the use of patients’ data.
DeepMind subsequently announced its own AI model for predicting AKI — trained on heavily skewed US patient data. It has also inked some AI research partnerships involving NHS patient data — such as this one with Moorfields Eye Hospital, aiming to build AIs to speed up predictions of degenerative eye conditions.
But an independent panel of reviewers engaged to interrogate DeepMind’s health app business raised early concerns about monopoly risks attached to NHS contracts that lock trusts to using its infrastructure for delivering digital healthcare.
Where healthcare AIs are concerned, representative clinical data is the real goldmine — and it’s the NHS that owns that.
So, provided NHSX properly manages the delivery infrastructure for future digital healthcare — to ensure systems adhere to open standards, and no single platform giant is allowed to lock others out — Hancock’s plan to open up NHS IT to the next wave of health-tech could deliver a transformative and healthy market for AI innovative that benefits startups and patients alike.
Commenting on the launch of NHSX in a statement, Hancock said: “We are on the cusp of a huge health tech revolution that could transform patient experience by making the NHS a truly predictive, preventive and personalised health and care service.
“I am determined to bring the benefits of technology to patients and staff, so the impact of our NHS Long Term Plan and this immediate, multimillion pound cash injection are felt by all. It’s part of our mission to make the NHS the best it can be.
“The experts tell us that because of our NHS and our tech talent, the UK could be the world leader in these advances in healthcare, so I’m determined to give the NHS the chance to be the world leader in saving lives through artificial intelligence and genomics.”
Simon Stevens, CEO of NHS England, added: “Carefully targeted AI is now ready for practical application in health services, and the investment announced today is another step in the right direction to help the NHS become a world leader in using these important technologies.
“In the first instance it should help personalise NHS screening and treatments for cancer, eye disease and a range of other conditions, as well as freeing up staff time, and our new NHS AI Lab will ensure the benefits of NHS data and innovation are fully harnessed for patients in this country.”
The content below is taken from the original ( Setting up a Security lab in Azure), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
I came across the following article about setting up a security lab environment.
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/motiba/2018/05/11/building-a-security-lab-in-azure/
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