Category: UNCATEGORIZED

At its hardware event in Seattle, Amazon today announced that it is launching a new Neural Text to Speech model for its Alexa personal assistant. This new model, which isn’t unlike what some of Amazon’s competitors like Google and Microsoft have launched in the past, uses the latest machine learning techniques to allow the company to build this new model which is meant to be more “emotive and expressive.”

In addition, the company today announced that your Echo can soon sound like Samuel L. Jackson, too. Using the same technology (instead of pre-recorded phrases), Alexa can now mimic celebrity voices, with Jackson’s being the first of them. That Samuel L. Jackson mode also comes in an explicit version.

Additional voices will roll out next year, but they won’t be available for free. Instead, they’ll cost $0.99 each (at least at first). It’s a fun gimmick, I guess, but it’s really not much more than that and harkens back to the days of stand-alone GPS units that often had a similar feature.

“The pace of innovation is incredible and what we can do with machine learning really never ceases to amaze me,” Amazon’s Dave Limp said in today’s keynote. “This same neural network technology though gives us a lot more flexibility now in and around what we can do with the Alexa voice.”

Today at a special event Amazon unveiled a bevy of new Echo devices including several aimed a bit upmarket.  The Echo Studio is Amazon’s answer to the Google Nest Max and Apple HomePod. It’s larger than a normal Echo, supports 3D audio and Dolby Atmos.

The seems to have device five drivers: one, downward facing woofer, front-firing tweeter and three mid-range speakers aimed at different directions. Inside are several microphones that allow the speaker to work like a standard Echo device.

“It is the most innovative speaker we have ever built and has unbelievable sound,” David Limp, SVP of Devices. “It has space, it has clarity, has depth.”

Amazon entered this market last year with the Amazon Echo Link and Echo Link Amp. Both were clearly designed for consumers looking for a better way to bring voice services to existing home audio systems. The Echo Studio enters the same space but in a different way. Consumers looking for better sound with Alexa no longer have to lean on a traditional audio system.

Amazon’s just getting started with the new hardware this morning. In addition to the Echo Dot With Clock (which, as mentioned, is an Echo Dot that has a Clock), the company refreshed the baseline Echo. Once again, the refresh revolves around improved sound.

The new version incorporates audio improvements introduced on the Echo Plus, though it doesn’t appear to have the Plus’s Hub functionality built in, leave the two products distinct. The new audio hardware includes neodymium drivers, more volume and a stronger midrange.

The new Echo features a new, multicolored fabric covers, as well. Like the new Dot, it’s available for preorder starting today. It will be priced the same as its predecessor, at $99.

Facebook has pumped billions into virtual reality and it may be a long way from making that investment back, but it is making a little money.

Onstage at Oculus Connect, Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company had surpassed $100 million in revenue in the Oculus store. This figure spans several different virtual reality headsets, but Zuckerberg noted than 20% of that revenue was for Quest titles sold in the past four months, suggesting that users of the new headset are spending plenty of cash on content.

The company has marketed its standalone Quest headset heavily and it’s clear the company sees the low-friction product as its best ticket to mass user adoption. This milestone is a long time coming after hundreds of million in content investments specifically, but Facebook hasn’t shown signs of slowing investment.

Amazon is launching multilingual mode for its Alexa-supporting devices, the company announced today at its Devices event in Seattle. The new multilingual mode will initially be available in the U.S., where it’ll work with English and Spanish; Canada, where it’ll offer French and English support, and Hindi and English in India.

These bilingual modes will mean that households can use their Alexa devices in both languages simultaneously, which is obviously a great feature for families where more than one language is spoken at home. Alexa will switch between languages, and employ new natural-sounded voices modeled using neural network processing to provide more realistic and expressive responses.

This multi-lingual mode is just a start, Amazon says, since Amazon SVP of Devices Dave Limp noted at the event that there are “billions of households around the world that have dual speakers, and sometimes three languages, in a single household,” all of which would benefit from expanded multilingual options.

Facebook today announced a virtual reality sandbox game where you can build your own environments and games, socialize with friends, and more.

The venture capital industry has seen record amounts of capital in recent years, with many firms raising their biggest funds ever and new funds popping up every week. Professionalization in this once small industry has led to hiring at historic levels. Many of my clients are looking outside of the existing world of venture for the human capital to fuel that growth, seeking to build teams with more diverse experiences.

Switching careers is not easy, and VC is often not as glamorous or as lucrative as it can be perceived to be, but you are thinking of getting into the industry; maybe you made a seed investment once, maybe you started a company and loved your VC board member and thought their job looked interesting, maybe you’ve been an advisor to a friend’s startup and it sparked your interest.

What do VCs look for, and what’s it like to interview for these roles? I’ve worked on many senior investor searches for VC firms and I’ll share as much as I can.

What kinds of backgrounds do VCs like?

VCs generally see value in networking. So if you come from a company a VC might know, they’ll probably have a coffee with you even if they don’t have any real interest in hiring you, because that coffee could have several “successful” outcomes —you may be right for a role in their portfolio, you may find a startup of interest in the future, you might even be a good hire for their investment team.

What’s the sort of operating background that a VC firm is actually interested in hiring? In my experience, two types of backgrounds tend to fare well with VCs.

Image via Getty Images / katleho Seisa

Today’s deluge of Amazon hardware kicked off with a new addition to the Echo Dot line, the Echo Dot With Clock. That’s it. That’s the name. It is, as advertised, an Echo dot with a digital alarm clock built into the front, next to the speaker grille.

The new version of Amazon’s insanely popular entry level smart speaker doesn’t replace the current Dot, but will instead exist along side it in the company’s current Echo lineup. It’s available for pre-order starting today, priced at an extremely reasonable $59 — that’s $10 more than the standard Dot.

Like the Echo Spot and Echo Show 5, the Echo Dot With Clock seems well suited to serve as a bedside alarm clock. Though, honestly, the lack of a display and camera could make it even more appealing for that purpose, given the laundry list of privacy concerns the company laid out at the top of the event.

The addition of a built-in clock also gives the product added utility beyond serving as a smart speaker. It’s a clever touch and Amazon’s bound to sell a ton of the things.

Oculus is going to be further blurring the lines between its standalone virtual reality headset and what it’s built on PC with a new software update in November, Mark Zuckerberg announced onstage at the company’s Oculus Connect 6 conference.

Oculus Link will allow Quest users to tether their Quest to PCs via USB-C and play PC content that is more graphically-rich and power-intensive than what’s currently possible.

We don’t know any limitations of the system yet, but both the Quest and Rift S share plenty of system specs, so this may be a clear sign that Facebook is pushing Oculus to go all-in on the Quest and perhaps leave PC VR behind.

We’ll get more details soon on Oculus Link.

Updating

With the EU’s sweeping GDPR privacy laws and the upcoming California Consumer Privacy ACT (CCPA), companies have to figure out how to deal with keeping private data private or face massive fines. Segment announced a new Privacy Portal today, that could help companies trying to remain in compliance.

Segment CEO and co-founder Peter Reinhardt says companies have built a false dichotomy between personalization and privacy, and he says that it doesn’t have to be that way. “We’ve noticed that a lot of companies feel this tension between privacy and growth. They basically see a paradox between being either privacy-respectful versus providing a very personalized experience,” he said.

The new Privacy Portal is designed to be a central place where customers can sort their data in an automated way and create an inventory of what data they have inside the company. “By introducing a single point of collection for all the data, it creates a choke point on the data collection to allow you to actually govern that, a single place to inspect, monitor, alert and have an inventory of all the data that you’re collecting, so that you can ensure that it’s compliant, and so that you can ensure that you’ve got consent, and all of those things,” he said.

The way this works is that as the data comes into the portal, it automatically gets put into a bucket based on the level of concern about it. “We are basically giving customers monitoring and a consolidated view over all of the different data points that are coming in. So we have matches that basically look for things that might be PII, and we automatically grade most of them with green, yellow or red in terms of the level of potential concern,” Reinhardt explained.

On top of that, companies can apply policies, based on the grades, say letting anything that’s green or yellow through, but preventing any red data (PII) from being shared with other applications.

In addition, to make sure that the product can connect to as many marketing tools as possible to get the most complete data picture, the company is releasing a new feature called Functions, which lets customers build their own custom data connectors. With thousands of marketing technology tools, it’s impossible for Segment to build connectors for all of them. Functions lets companies build custom connectors in a low-code way in instances where Segment doesn’t provide it out of the box.

The two tools are available to Segment customers starting today.