February 5, 2025

XOi raises $230M, acquires Specifx to expand its tech for field service technicians

Field service engineers may not be the first group of customers that come to mind when you think about lucrative opportunities in B2B technology. But that same blind spot speaks of the opportunity in the space for those who are stepping up and targeting “the job site.” One of the players in that space, XOi  […]

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Technology

The quest to type Chinese on a QWERTY keyboard created autocomplete

May 27, 2024
This is an excerpt from The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age by Thomas S. Mullaney, published on May 28 by The MIT Press. It has been lightly edited. ymiw2 klt4 pwyy1 wdy6 o1 dfb2 wdv2 fypw3 uet5 dm2 dlu1 … A young Chinese man sat down at his QWERTY keyboard and…

5 Common AI Buzzwords All PR Pros Need to Know

May 24, 2024
With so many AI buzzwords flying around, it can be difficult for communicators to understand what’s what in the field of artificial intelligence. Here’s a glossary of the most common AI buzzwords you should know to have a better grasp of this groundbreaking technology.

The Download: head transplants, and filtering sounds with AI

May 24, 2024
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. That viral video showing a head transplant is a fake. But it might be real someday.  An animated video posted this week has a voice-over that sounds like a late-night TV ad, but…

Splashy breakthroughs are exciting, but people with spinal cord injuries need more

May 24, 2024
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.  This week, I wrote about an external stimulator that delivers electrical pulses to the spine to help improve hand and arm function in people who are paralyzed. This…

Noise-canceling headphones use AI to let a single voice through

May 23, 2024
Modern life is noisy. If you don’t like it, noise-canceling headphones can reduce the sounds in your environment. But they muffle sounds indiscriminately, so you can easily end up missing something you actually want to hear. A new prototype AI system for such headphones aims to solve this. Called Target Speech Hearing, the system gives…

The Download: Nick Clegg on electoral misinformation, and AI’s carbon footprint

May 23, 2024
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Meta says AI-generated election content is not happening at a “systemic level” Meta has seen strikingly little AI-generated misinformation around the 2024 elections despite major votes in countries such as Indonesia, Taiwan, and…

AI is an energy hog. This is what it means for climate change.

May 23, 2024
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Tech companies keep finding new ways to bring AI into every facet of our lives. AI has taken over my search engine results, and new virtual assistants from Google and OpenAI announced…

Meta says AI-generated election content not happening at “systemic level”

May 22, 2024
Meta has seen strikingly little AI-generated misinformation around the 2024 elections despite there having been major elections in countries such as Indonesia, Taiwan, and Bangladesh, said the company’s president of global affairs Nick Clegg on Wednesday.  “The interesting thing so far — I stress, so far— is not how much, but how little AI-generated content…