Americans love their pets. More than 60 percent of US households have them; more than half of pet owners say they’re as important to their families as any human. So maybe it makes sense that more people are taking their pets on flights. More than 1 million pets travel by …
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Synthetic voices have been proliferating for years, and the generative AI boom of the new ’20s has sped that process right along. AI voices are everywhere—in podcasts, in political campaigns, and in chatbots where they maybe-not-so-subtly replicate celebrity voices. Soon, they’ll be all up in your audiobooks too. Audible, the …
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One of the things enterprise storage and destruction company Iron Mountain does is handle the archiving of the media industry's vaults. What it has been seeing lately should be a wake-up call: Roughly one-fifth of the hard disk drives dating to the 1990s it was sent are entirely unreadable. Music …
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Tradition dictates that to properly enjoy a premium whisky you pour it from an elaborately chunky crystal decanter into an unfeasibly heavy tumbler. Weight has long been an outward signifier of quality in the whisky industry, and the luxury industry in general, but this week, Johnnie Walker launched the world’s …
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If Apple wanted to bury the fact it’s leaving its most expensive headphones as the least technically capable in its lineup, it didn’t do a very good job. It all started promisingly. At Apple’s September Glowtime event, CEO Tim Cook teed up VP of hardware engineering Kate Bergeron for the …
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In an age when you can get just about anything online, it's probably no surprise that you can buy a diamond-making machine for $200,000 on Chinese ecommerce site Alibaba. If you, like me, haven't been paying attention to the diamond industry, it turns out that the availability of these machines …
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It Feels Like we have been saying goodbye to Apple’s Lightning cable for some time, and that farewell appears to be all the closer following the company’s September Glowtime event. With the slew of devices announced, Apple has transitioned all of its flagship products to USB-C. However, the proprietary connector …
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If you didn’t hear the big news at Apple’s “It’s Glowtime” event on Monday, well, the company has plans to help with that. Imminent upgrades to Apple’s second-generation AirPods Pro wireless earbuds will soon outfit the ubiquitous headphones with hearing aid features, further disrupting a market well in the throes …
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Apple's forthcoming iOS 18 is loaded with a slew of artificial-intelligence-powered capabilities. The new mobile OS can rewrite your text messages, summarize emails, and identify objects in photos. But one of the most fun features is Image Playground, which generates cartoonlike illustrations based on a text prompt. While Apple has …
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Sony’s PlayStation 5 mid-cycle upgrade, the PS5 Pro, is coming November 7. Lead PlayStation architect Mark Cerny revealed the console today during a brief video presentation. “Simply put, it’s the most powerful console we’ve ever built,” Cerny said of the $700 device. It’s been four years since the PlayStation 5’s …
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