Milton Powell, a Houston rapper who performed under the name Big Pokey, has died after performing a show in Texas over the weekend

If the Chicago Bulls decide to trade Zach LaVine, here are three avenues that feel mutually beneficial.With under three minutes left in the final Eastern Conference play-in game, the Chicago Bulls led the Miami Heat. We know how that story ended: Miami came back, sent Chicago packing, and rocket...

Maybe the two best teams in baseball occupy the same division. The Tampa Bay Rays are the only team with over 50 wins at 51-24 and the Baltimore Orioles are third in the majors in wins at 44-27. These division rivals will meet for a quick two game set starting tonight in Tampa Bay.For the first ...

Curious about pet name trends for 2023? Here are the most popular for dogs and cats across the United States.

The MLB season is just heating up and DraftKings Sportsbook has a new promotion to keep you excited all summer long.You’ll be rewarded with $150 in bonus bets simply for signing up with DraftKings and betting your first $5 on ANY MLB game!Here’s how you can become an instant...

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

People in the South are storm weary. I've heard it from friends and family in my home state of Louisiana, where storms have hit exceptionally hard, and the damage extends much further.

While Hoda Kotb was enjoying a sorority formal, her brother Adel, who had also been a student at the same university, reached out to share the news

Officials say multiple tornadoes swept through Mississippi overnight, killing one and injuring nearly two dozen

United States golf legend Tom Watson called on the PGA Tour to provide full details of its merger with the Saudi backers of LIV Golf on Monday, saying the deal...

With temperatures rising, Milan designers focused on fluidity in dressing, allowing the body to move without constrictions

Reddit has been filled with images of John Oliver, as user’s protests against the site’s management take a bizarre new turn. In recent weeks, controversy has been brewing on Reddit after the site announced that it would be charging new fees to developers who wanted to get access to its data. The company said that the change was required to offset the costs incurred by running the site. Third-party developers said that the site’s prices were too high, and many developers – including those behind the most popular apps, such as Apollo – said they would instead shut down. That prompted outcry from the moderators who run the site. In protest, thousands of the site’s forums, or subreddits, went “dark” earlier this month. Administrators turned the forums private so that users were unable to see them, in a protest that ran from 12 to 14 June. That protest led to no change from Reddit. Its chief executive, Steve Huffman, said instead that users would get over the changes and staff suggested those administrators could be removed from their posts. Since then, many of the site’s biggest forums have been discussing how to continue the protest, given that their demands had not been met. And many – including its “aww”, “pics” and “gifs” subreddits, which rank among the site’s most popular – have committed instead to post pictures of TV comedian John Oliver. Oliver appeared to enjoy the attention. On Twitter, he wrote “Dear Reddit, excellent work” and went on to share a large thread of pictures of himself, apparently to ensure that users had enough to post. Other subreddits have continued the protest in their own ways. The subreddit devoted to Apple has filled with posts of its chief executive Tim Cook, for instance. And two of the site’s top 10 most popular forums – those focused on science and music – are no longer dark, but new posts cannot be added. Read More Reddit says people will get over outrage and causes further outrage Reddit hit by outage as fight over its future escalates Reddit just went ‘dark’, and the site is in chaos