The rise of visualizing your success reflects a desire for people to exert control over their lives, even when the outcome might be largely out of their hands.

Apple called out Meta for seeking access to software tools that it said could compromise user privacy, a criticism that comes as the EU tries to force the iPhone maker to give developers greater access to its technology.

The six-time Tony winner takes furious hold of a legendary role in George C. Wolfes revival of the classic American musical.

In Taylor Hahns bittersweet holiday tale, a musician gets a fresh perspective on her late mothers life and dreams.

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Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition Home Assistants Voice Preview Edition is a little box with big privacy powers Home Assistants voice device is a $60 box thats both focused and evolving. Kevin Purdy Dec 19, 2024 4:00 pm | 53 Credit: Home Assistant Foundation Credit: Home Assistant Foundation Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreHome Assistant announced today the availability of the Voice Preview Edition, its own design of a living-room-friendly box to offer voice assistance with home automation. Having used it for a few weeks, it seems like a great start, at least for those comfortable with digging into the settings. That's why Home Assistant is calling it a "Preview Edition."Using its privacy-minded Nabu Casa cloudor your own capable computerto handle the processing, the Voice Preview Edition (VPE) ($60/60 euros, available today) has the rough footprint of a modern Apple TV but is thinner. It works similarly to an Amazon Echo, Google Assistant, or Apple Siri device, but with a more focused goal. Start with a wake wordthe default, and most well-trained version, is "Okay, Nabu," but "Hey, Jarvis" and "Hey, Mycroft" are available. Follow that with a command, typically something that targets a smart home device: "Turn on living room lights," "Set thermostat to 68," "Activate TV time." And then, that thing usually happens. Home Assistant's Voice Preview Edition, doing what it does best. I had to set a weather service to an alias of "the weather outside" to get that response worked out. "That thing" is primarily controlling devices, scenes, and automations around your home, set up in Home Assistant. That means you have to have assigned them a name or alias that you can remember. Coming up with naming schemes is something you end up doing in big-tech smart home systems, too, but it's a bit more important with the VPE.You won't need to start over with all your gear if you've got a Google Home, Alexa, or Apple Home ecosystem, at least. Home Assistant has good "bridge" options built into it for connecting all the devices you've set up and named inside those ecosystems.It's important to have a decently organized smart home set up with a VPE box, because it doesn't really do much else, for better or worse. Unless you hook it up to an AI model.The voice device that is intentionally not very chattyThe VPE box can run timers (with neat LED ring progress indicators), and with a little bit of settings tweaking, you can connect it to Home Assistant's built-in shopping lists and task lists or most any other plug-in or extension of your system. If you're willing to mess with LLMslike ChatGPT or Google's Geminilocally or through cloud subscriptions, you could trigger prompts with your voice, though performance will vary. Home Assistant's Voice Preview Edition, not quite sure what to do with non-home-related questions. What else does Home Assistant's hardware do? Nothing, at least by default. It listens for its prompt, it passes them onto a Home Assistant server, and that's it. You can't ask it how tall Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen is or how many consecutive Super Bowls the Bills lost. It won't do simple math calculations or metric conversions. It cannot tell you whether you should pack an umbrella tomorrow or a good substitute if you're out of eggs.For some people either hesitant to bring a voice device into their home or fatigued by the failures of supposedly "smart" assistants that can seem quite dumb, this might be perfect. When the Home Assistant VPE hears me clearly (more on that in a moment), it almost always understands what I'm saying, so long as I remember what I named everything.There were times during the month-long period when I muted Google Assistant and stuck with Home Assistant that I missed the ability to ask questions I would normally just look up on a search engine. The upside is that I didn't have to sit through 15 seconds of Google explaining at length something I didn't ask for.If you want the VPE to automatically fall back to AI for answering non-home-specific questions, you can set that up. And that's something we'll likely dig into for a future post.The hardware Home Assistant's Voice Preview Edition device, with Apple TV (4K, 2022) for scale. Kevin Purdy Home Assistant's Voice Preview Edition device, with Apple TV (4K, 2022) for scale. Kevin Purdy Tape measure, for scale. Kevin Purdy Tape measure, for scale. Kevin Purdy Three-quarters product image with mute switch showing. Home Assistant Foundation Three-quarters product image with mute switch showing. Home Assistant Foundation Tape measure, for scale. Kevin Purdy Three-quarters product image with mute switch showing. Home Assistant Foundation The side speakers on the Voice Preview Edition. Do not tuck this thing into a corner. Home Assistant Foundation A Grove port on the bottom of the VPE offers hardware tinkerers intriguing access. Home Assistant Foundation As a product you want to keep somewhere it can hear you, the Home Assistant VPE blends in, is reasonably small, and has more useful buttons and switches than the competition. It looks entirely innocuous sitting on a bookshelf, entertainment center, kitchen counter, or wall mount. It's quite nice to pay for a functional device that has absolutely no branding visible.There are four neat things on top. First is two microphone inputs, which are pretty important. There's an LED ring that shows you the VPE is listening by spinning, then spinning the other way to show that it's "thinking" and reversing again when responding. A button in the middle can activate the device without speech or cancel a response.Best of all, there is a physically rotating dial wheel around the button. It feels great to spin, even if it's not something you'll need to do very often.Around the sides is clear plastic, with speaker holes on three sides. The speakers are built specifically for voice clarity, according to Home Assistant, and I agree. I can always hear what the VPE is trying to tell me, at any distance in my living room.There's a hardware mute switch on one side, with USB-C inputs (power and connection) and a stereo headphone/speaker jack. On the bottom is a grove port for deeper development.Hearing is still the challengeThe last quasi-official way to get a smart speaker experience with Home Assistant was the ESP32 S3 Box 3, which was okay or decent in a very quiet room or at dining room table distance. The VPE is a notable improvement over that device in both input and output. If I make a small effort to speak clearly and enunciate, it catches me pretty much everywhere in my open-plan living room/dining room/kitchen. It's not too bad at working around music or TV sound, either, so long as that speaker is not between me and the VPE box. It is best with its default wake phrase, "Okay, Nabu," because that's the most trained and sampled by the Open Wake Word community.And yet, every smart speaker I've had in my home at some pointa Google Home/Nest Mini, Amazon Echo (full-size or Dot), Apple HomePod (original), the microphones on Sonos speakershas seemed better at catching its wake word, given similar placement as the VPE. After all, Home Assistant, a not-for-profit foundation, cannot subsidize powerful microphone arrays with advertising, Prime memberships, or profitable computer hardware ecosystems. I don't have lab tests to prove this, just my own experienceswith my particular voice, accent, phrasing, room shape, and noise levels.Ive been using this device with pre-release firmware and software, and its under active development, so it will almost certainly get better. But as a device you can buy and set up right now, its very closebut not quiteto the level of the big ecosystems. It is notably better than the hodgepodge of other devices you can technically use with Home Assistant voice prompts.Is it better for my privacy that the VPE is not great at being triggered by ambient speech in the room? Maybe. At the same time, I'm more likely to switch away from said big-tech voice devices only if I don't feel like I have to say everything twice or three times.Its fun to craft your own voice systemI've been able to use the VPE on a bookshelf in my living room for weeks, asking it to turn on lights, adjust thermostats, set scenes with blinds and speakers, and other automations, and the successes are far more common than failures. I still want to test some different placements and try out local hardware processing (requiring an Intel N100 or better for common languages), since I've only tested it with Home Assistant's cloud servers, the generally faster solution.The best things about the VPE are not the things you'll notice by looking at or speaking to it. It's a smart speaker that seems a lot more reasonable for private places, especially if you're running on local hardware. It's not a smart speaker that is going to read you an entire Wikipedia page when it misunderstands what you want. And it doesn't demand you to use an app tied into an ecosystem to use, other than the web app running off your Home Assistant server.Paulus Schoutsen said on the VPE's launch stream that the VPE might not be the best choice for someone switching over from an established Google/Amazon/Apple ecosystem. That might be true, but I think the VPE also works as a single-user device at a desk, or for anyone who's been waiting to step into voice but concerned about privacy, ecosystem lock-in, or their kids' demands to play Taylor Swift songs on repeat.This post was update at 5 p.m. to note the author's wake word experience may relate to his voice and room characteristics.Kevin PurdySenior Technology ReporterKevin PurdySenior Technology Reporter Kevin is a senior technology reporter at Ars Technica, covering open-source software, PC gaming, home automation, repairability, e-bikes, and tech history. He has previously worked at Lifehacker, Wirecutter, iFixit, and Carbon Switch. 53 Comments

Artificial intelligence capabilities are coming to a desktop near you with Microsoft 365 Copilot, Google Gemini with Project Jarvis, and Apple Intelligence all arriving (or having arrived). But what are the risks?

The stones that make up Stonehenge came from all over BritainHeritage Image Partnership Ltd /AlamyStonehenge may have been built to symbolise a unification in Stone Age Britain. The idea could explain why so many of the stones making up the monument were brought in over huge distances.Located on Salisbury plain in southern England, Stonehenge seems to have been built in phases between 3100 and 1600 BC. There is an outer ring of vertical sarsen stones topped by horizontal lintels; inside that is a smaller ring of vertical bluestones and a number of other stones, including a horizontal

MindFeaturing everything from eggnog to uranium oxide, these 12 brain-twisting conundrums will get you in the festive spirit and test your scientific knowledge 11 December 2024 Kyle EllingtonHere are the questions. The answers can be found at the bottom of this page, but dont scroll down until youve given them a good go.1. Uncle Johannes has outdone himself this year, serving up an eight-course Christmas feast (though some of the dishes are a little unusual). In order, the first seven courses are: mousse, vol-au-vents, eggnog, milkshake, jelly, soup and upside-down cake. What might the final course be?2. This entity can be found travelling at near the speed of light under the Swiss-French border. Change one letter and you get the name of something it turns into. What are these two things?3. What does this code, which might be delivered to you upon opening your front door, represent? (Hint: 262 usually appears in the middle.)587 / 523 494 523 587 494 523 / 494 440 494 523 440 494 / 440 392 440 494 392 440 / 392 370 392 440 370 392 / 370 330 349 392 330 370 / 330 2944. After the frontal lobe makes a call and the limbic system sends a signal, 15 facial muscles contract, including the zygomaticus major. The muscles between the ribs spasm, forcing air out of the lungs. Speech may become strained and reach a higher pitch than normal. Tears may emerge. But there is no reason to be alarmed. Why?5. All three of the following describe different objects that share a name, and all might be seen during December at least in the northern hemisphere. What is the name? A mixture including emulsified vitellus, crystalline sucrose, alcohol and acid A

HumansAround 3000 years ago, several empires and kingdoms in the Mediterranean collapsed, with a group of sea-faring warriors implicated as the culprit. But new evidence shows that many of our ideas about this turbulent time need completely rethinking 8 May 2024 Coke NavarroRamesses III was one of Egypts great warrior pharaohs. A temple he built at Medinet Habu, near the Valley of the Kings, highlights why. On its walls, carvings tell the story of a coalition of fighters that swept across the eastern Mediterranean 3200 years ago, destroying cities, states and even whole empires. No land could stand before their arms, this account tells us. Eventually, the invaders known today as the Sea Peoples attacked Egypt. But Ramesses III succeeded where others had failed and crushed them.In the 200 years since hieroglyphics were first deciphered, allowing us to read Ramesses IIIs extraordinary story, evidence has come to light to corroborate it. We now know of numerous cities and palaces across the eastern Mediterranean that were destroyed around that time, with the Sea Peoples often implicated. So widespread was the devastation that, for one of the only times in history, several complex societies went into a steep decline from which they never recovered. Little wonder, then, that this so-called Late Bronze Age collapse has fascinated scholars for decades. So, too, has the identity of the mysterious sea-faring marauders.Today, new genetic and archaeological evidence is giving us the firmest picture yet about what really went on at this dramatic time and who, or what, was responsible. This shows that many of our ideas about the Sea Peoples and the collapse need completely rethinking.