Bayern Munich has signed Israeli goalkeeper Daniel Peretz from Maccabi Tel Aviv

Southern California has hired D’Anton Lynn away from archrival UCLA to be Lincoln Riley’s new defensive coordinator

Auto workers have launched strikes at three General Motors facilities in Canada

Warzone Caldera is shutting down on Sept. 21, 2023, and all original Warzone skins, cosmetics, and movement will disappear.

Japanese auto giant Nissan announced Friday it would invest up to £2 billion in UK electric car manufacturing, which the government touted as a sign...

Meta has created a new system that it says can generate convincing speech in a variety of styles – but will not release it for fear of the risks. The new tool is called “Voicebox” and can be set to create outputs in different styles, new voices from scratch as well as with a sample. It makes speech across six languages, as well as a variety of other tools such as noise removal. It says that it is a major development on previous speech systems that required specific training for each task. Instead, Voicebox can just be given raw audio and a transcription, and then be used to modify an audio sample. It is far more effective than its competitors, Meta claimed in its announcement. It can generate words with a 5.9 per cent error rate compared to 1.9 per cent from competitor Vall-E, for instance, and do so as much as 20 times more quickly. Meta said that it had been built on the foundation of a new model it called “Flow Matching”. That allows the system to learn from speech that has not been carefully labelled, so that it can be trained on more and more diverse data. Voicebox was trained on 50,000 hours of speech and transcripts that came from public domain audiobooks in English, French, Spanish, German, Polish, and Portuguese, Meta said. Now that it has been trained, it can be given an audio recording and fill in the speech from the context, Meta said. That could be used to create a realistic sounding voice from just two seconds of speech, for instance, potentially being used to bring voices to people who cannot speak or to add people’s voices into games. It could also be used to translate a passage of speech from one lanagueg to another in a way that keeps the style, Meta said, allowing people to talk to each other authentically even if they don’t speak the same language. It could also be useful in more technical scenarios, such as audio editing, where it can be used to replace words that were not properly recorded, for instance. But Meta said that the risks were such that it would not be releasing the model. It did not point to specific harms, but said that “as with other powerful new AI innovations, we recognize that this technology brings the potential for misuse and unintended harm”. Numerous reports have warned that such systems could be used to copy people’s voices without their consent and in ways that could be harmful, such as creating fake videos of news events or using people’s voices to pose as them during scam calls, for instance. “There are many exciting use cases for generative speech models, but because of the potential risks of misuse, we are not making the Voicebox model or code publicly available at this time,” Meta said in a statement. “While we believe it is important to be open with the AI community and to share our research to advance the state of the art in AI, it’s also necessary to strike the right balance between openness with responsibility.” It also pointed to a separate paper, published on its website, in which it detailed how it had built a “highly effective” system that can distinguish between authentic speech and audio that had been generated with Voicebox. Read More Mark Zuckerberg reveals what he thinks about Apple’s headset – and it’s not good Meta scrambles to fix Instagram algorithm connecting ‘vast paedophile network’ Reddit user’s protests against the site’s rules have taken an even more bizarre turn

Fire might seem like one of the most elemental things in the natural world, but it’s never been found anywhere other than Earth. It’s because the creation of fire relies on very specific circumstances. In fact, if fire was ever found on another planet, it would be a good indicator of the possible existence of life. Oxygen is key to fire, and while it’s particularly prevalent in the universe, Earth’s atmosphere features an abundance of the element in the right molecular form for it to form. Even then, the way the Earth’s atmosphere has changed over its lifespan is also crucial to conditions being fostered where fire can form [via IFLScience]. For millions of years, in fact, there wasn’t enough oxygen in the atmosphere to create fire. Before the Middle Ordovician period, when there was far less oxygen, there’s no evidence of fire whatsoever. Most of the fuel that fire needs is also directly related to life existing on the planet – think wood, oil and coal. Without life, there isn’t an awful lot of fuel going around, which just shows why the existence of fire on another planet would be a very promising sign when it comes to exploring the universe for life. Despite fire being much rarer in the universe than most might think, it was previously confirmed that humans in Europe may have mastered fire long before we previously thought. According to a study published in Scientific Reports, humans made the discovery around 245,000 years ago, up to 50,000 years earlier than scientists believed, Researchers studied samples from the Valdocarros II, a huge archaeological site found east of Madrid, Spain. Using chemical analysis, they found certain compounds that show things were burnt by fire in "organised" social events, rather than through accidents or wildfires. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter How to join the indy100's free WhatsApp channel Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings

Gary Lineker has brushed off criticism from his Match of the Day predecessor Des Lynam who said he should “get on with the football” and stay away from controversial topics outside the game. Lineker, 62, had to “step back” from presenting the BBC’s flagship football show earlier this year until he and the corporation reached an “agreed and clear position” on his use of social media, the broadcaster said. His tweets have attracted controversy while he has been the BBC’s highest-paid on-air talent for the sixth consecutive year and the only star to earn more than £1 million in the year 2022/2023, according to the corporation’s annual report. Lynam, 80, told BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House programme: “I like him as a chap, I like him as a broadcaster. But I think there are some areas that he should stay out of. “For example, the last World Cup was in Qatar and he went very, very strongly about the limitations of society in Qatar. And he’s right, there are, but he’s not the person to say it. Get on with the football”. Lineker, a former Tottenham and Leicester striker, later commented: “Des is entitled to his opinion… as, of course, am I.” His response came in a tweet replying to a comment by Adil Ray, the creator and writer of BBC1’s Citizen Khan show. He wrote: “Love Des Lynam but just heard a clip on Radio 4 this morning saying @GaryLineker should stick to football. In 2013, Lynam, still an influential figure, came out publicly as a supporter of Farage and UKIP.” Lineker has tweeted widely about refugees and immigration policy where he has voiced support for a liberal approach to border controls, and he also expressed support for a second EU referendum. During last year’s Qatar World Cup he led criticism of Foreign Secretary James Cleverly for suggesting LGBT+ fans be “respectful of the host nation”. He posted in response to the cabinet minister’s comments: “Whatever you do, don’t do anything gay. Is that the message?” Lineker has been the face of Match Of The Day for more than 20 years but his future at the BBC came under the spotlight in March amid questions about impartiality. He was taken off air by the broadcaster after posting a tweet in which he said the language used by the Government to promote its asylum plans was not dissimilar to 1930s Germany. Lineker missed one edition of the Saturday night show, before returning to his presenting role after a boycott by top on-air talent. Read More Peers to grill BBC bosses about governance following Huw Edwards furore Jeremy Vine agrees deal with Twitter user who wrongly named him in presenter row BBC should ‘stand up for itself more,’ Blair says amid Huw Edwards furore The Huw Edwards affair should remind us we are lucky to have the BBC Gary Lineker remains at top of list of BBC’s highest paid on-air talent Gary Lineker slams Tory MP for ‘outrageous’ Nazi claim comments

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BEN GURION AIRPORT, Israel (Reuters) -U.S. President Joe Biden arrived in Israel on Wednesday, beginning a visit to show solidarity

Some 2,000 troops are reportedly involved in what is described as the largest-scale attack in the area.

Fiji goes again in search of the result that will confirm its evolution from everyone’s favorite Rugby World Cup underdog to a consistent threat