Consumer & Gadgets news

Consumer & Gadgets

Storytelling study provides a window into the inner workings, ongoing limitations of generative AI tools like ChatGPT

Imagine you decide to write a short story about a protagonist who creates an artificial human and then falls in love with it. What gender is your protagonist? What about the artificial human? Would you write a moving love ...

Consumer & Gadgets

More user control may help ease negative reactions to ads on voice assistants

Voice assistants (VAs) like Alexa and Siri continue to gain popularity in households and on personal devices. According to digital trends research company Emarketer, the number of VA users will surpass 150 million in 2025. ...

Consumer & Gadgets

Showing AI users diversity in training data can boost perceived fairness and trust

While artificial intelligence (AI) systems, such as home assistants, search engines or large language models like ChatGPT, may seem nearly omniscient, their outputs are only as good as the data on which they are trained. ...

Consumer & Gadgets

DeepMind researchers find LLMs can serve as effective mediators

A team of AI researchers with Google's DeepMind London group has found that certain large language models (LLMs) can serve as effective mediators between groups of people with differing viewpoints regarding a given topic. ...

Consumer & Gadgets

New tool can detect malware on Android phones

Screen readers, voice-to-text, and other accessibility features have enabled people with disabilities to use smartphones. Yet these same features make the phones more accessible to hackers, too.

Consumer & Gadgets

Exploring the hidden costs of free apps

Procrastination, sleep deprivation and reduced focus are part of the price we pay for free mobile apps. This is according to researchers at Linköping University and RISE, who have investigated the costs hidden behind the ...

Consumer & Gadgets

Q&A: Generative AI embraced faster than internet, PCs

ChatGPT's debut in November 2022 caused a near-instant sensation. It gave most users their first opportunity to try out a new type of artificial intelligence that uses existing data and published materials to create content ...

Consumer & Gadgets

Will Meta's Orion smart glasses be the next 'iPhone moment'?

Meta supremo Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Orion smart glasses, a new augmented reality (AR) prototype, at the annual Meta Connect developer conference. Ten years in the making, and still not expected on high streets until 2027, ...

Consumer & Gadgets

Kanye West agrees to buy social network Parler

Social network Parler announced Monday a deal for Kanye West to buy the platform popular with US conservatives, just over a week after the rapper's Twitter and Instagram accounts were restricted over anti-Semitic posts.

Consumer & Gadgets

Meta calls FTC suit to block VR fitness deal 'ill-conceived'

Meta Platforms Inc. urged a judge to reject the U.S. Federal Trade Commission attempt to block the company's acquisition of virtual reality app Within Unlimited, saying the agency's claims about competition in the area are ...

Consumer & Gadgets

Overwatch 2 illustrates challenges facing esports industry

Blizzard Entertainment positioned its popular shooter Overwatch as a major player on the esports scene. But the company has hit some stumbling blocks and faced criticism as it launches a sequel, Overwatch 2, including problems ...

Consumer & Gadgets

Assess these 13 risks when investing in cryptocurrencies

Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies can be a revolutionary digital innovation and opportunity for the whole finance industry, but they are not risk-free. A new doctoral dissertation by Niranjan Sapkota from the University of ...

Consumer & Gadgets

Science using smartphone downtime

A smartphone application that can utilize a device's idle time could reduce the computational and bandwidth loads for scientific research team members who have large amounts of project data to download from the cloud. Akshay ...