Leidos Australia scores AU$16m BoM data management contract

The three-year contract commenced in November and is part of the Bureau's wider IT transformation program.

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'Mario Kart Tour' multiplayer goes live on March 8th

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Sonantic scores €2.3M funding to bring ‘human-quality’ artificial voices to games

Sonantic, a U.K. startup that has developed “human-quality” artificial voice technology for the games and entertainment industry, has raised €2.3 million in funding.

Leading the round is EQT Ventures, with participation from existing backers, including Entrepreneur First (EF), AME Cloud Ventures and Bart Swanson of Horizons Ventures. I also understand one of the company’s earlier investors is Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin.

Founded in 2018 by CEO Zeena Qureshi and CTO John Flynn as they went through EF’s company builder programme in London, Sonantic (previously Speak Ai) says it wants to disrupt the global gaming and entertainment voice industry. The startup has developed artificial voice tech that it claims is able to offer “expressive, realistic voice acting” on-demand for use by game studios. It already has R&D partnerships underway with more than 10 AAA game studios.

“Getting dialogue into game development is a slow, expensive and labour-intensive task,” says Qureshi, when asked to define the problem Sonantic wants to solve. “Dialogue pipelines consist of casting, booking studios, contracts, scheduling, editing, directing and a whole lot of coordination. Voiced narrative video games can take up to 10 years to make with game design changing frequently, defaulting game devs to carry out several iteration cycles — often leading to going over budgets and game releases being delayed.”

To help remedy this, Sonantic offers what Qureshi dubs “dynamic voice acting on-demand,” with the ability to craft the exact type of character in terms of gender, personality, accent, tone and emotional state. The startup’s human quality text-to-speech system is offered via an API and a graphical user interface tool that lets its synthetic voice actors be edited, sculpted and directed “just like a human actor,” she tells me.

This sees Sonantic work directly with actors to synthesise their voices whilst also harnessing their unique skills in performance. “We then augment how actors work by offering them a digital version of themselves that can create passive income for them,” explains the Sonantic CEO.

For the games studios, Sonantic offers faster iteration cycles at a cheaper price because it cuts down logistical costs and has voice models ready to perform. Its SaaS model and API also makes it easier to create audio performances to test out potential narratives or to finesse a story, helping with editing and directing.

Meanwhile, Sonantic says it is gearing up to publicly reveal how its technology can capture “deep emotions across the full spectrum,” from subtle all the way through to exaggerated, which it says is usually something only very skilled actors can achieve.

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Connie Chan of Andreessen Horowitz discusses consumer tech’s winners and losers

Last week, I sat down with Connie Chan, a general partner with Andreessen Horowitz who focuses on investing in consumer tech. She joined the firm in 2011 after working at HP in China.

From her temporary offices located in a modest skyscraper with unobscured views of San Francisco, we talked about where she sees the biggest opportunities right now, along with how big of an impact fears over coronavirus could have on the startup industry — and for how long.

Our conversation has been edited for length. You can also find a longer version of our chat in podcast form.

TechCrunch: There’s so much money flowing into the Bay Area and startups generally from all over the world. What happens if that slows down because of the coronavirus?

Connie Chan: It’s interesting, I was just talking to a friend of mine who is an investor in Asia, in China. And she said that some industries are going to suffer significantly. Restaurants, for example, are hurting [along with] any store that relies on foot traffic [like] bookstores, so forth. Yet you see a lot of companies also doing really well in this time. You’ll see grocery delivery as something that’s in high demand. Insurance is in very high demand. People are spending more time at home, so whether it’s games or streaming or whatever they’re doing at home is doing well. Lots of my counterparts in China are also taking all their pitches via video conference. They’re still doing work, but they’re all just working from home.

Where do you think we’ll see the biggest impact most immediately?

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Oppo’s new smartwatch looks just like the Apple Watch

Oppo has given us its best look yet at its upcoming smartwatch on the way — and it looks almost exactly like an Apple Watch.

The new watch will be called the Oppo Watch, and more will be announced about it on March 6th at the company’s Oppo Find X2 launch event, according to a tweet the company posted on Monday.

It's time to say hello to #OPPOWatch.

Unveiled at the #OPPOFindX2 Launch Event March 6, 10.30am CET. ⏰ pic.twitter.com/IwbOJnHoyg

— OPPO (@oppo) March 2, 2020

There’s still a lot we don’t know about the device, including price or many of its features, but there are a few things we can speculate about from this one image. It looks like you can use the watch to make and receive calls. And if you look at the watch on the...

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Facebook pulls out of the SXSW conference citing coronavirus concerns

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Facebook has pulled out of the upcoming SXSW conference in Austin, TX, according to a company statement given to Business Insider. “Due to concerns related to coronavirus, our company and employees will not be participating in SXSW this year,” said the statement, which Facebook also shared with The Verge. Twitter announced earlier today that it had pulled out of SXSW as well. This evening, SXSW said the event was still proceeding as planned.

Over the past few weeks, Facebook has taken a number of actions in response to the coronavirus outbreak. Today, the company said it would be restricting social visits to physical offices and conducting job interviews primarily over video conferencing tools. Last week, it canceled the in-person...

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Google and Microsoft just canceled two conferences ahead of their major ones

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Google and Microsoft both announced on Monday that two industry conferences, Google’s Cloud Next in San Francisco and Microsoft’s MVP Summit in the Seattle suburbs of Bellevue and Redmond, are being cancelled due to the ongoing coronavirus outbreak. Google says it will be making its Cloud Next conference, an enterprise focused meetup dedicated to G Suite and other cloud computing tools, into a “digital-first” event. Microsoft plans to do the same with MVP Summit.

“We are transforming the event into Google Cloud Next ’20: Digital Connect, a free, global, digital-first, multi-day event connecting our attendees to Next ’20 content and each other through streamed keynotes, breakout sessions, interactive learning and digital ‘ask an expert’...

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The Morgan Plus Four looks ancient but is brand-new top to bottom video - Roadshow

Morgan customers don't like change, so the new Plus Four looks like it was built in the '50s even though every single part of it is as new as can be.

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2021 Morgan Plus Four packs BMW power and lots of new parts - Roadshow

Some 97% of the neo-vintage car's components are brand spanking new.

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Westworld seasons 1 and 2 recap: Everything to remember - CNET

Catch up on the must-remember details before the mind-bending sci-fi returns for season 3 mid-March.

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Disney trailer flips Artemis Fowl story to make him a hero - CNET

Our beloved criminal mastermind has been subverted by a Disney reimagining.

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Disney's Artemis Fowl movie: Release date, plot, trailers, cast, poster, director, rumors - CNET

It looks like Disney has changed up what was originally a twisted fairy tale about a 12-year-old genius kidnapping a police officer from the underground world of mythical beings.

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iBaby monitor vulnerable to hacking - CNET

Hackers could access saved videos and pictures and view live video, Bitdefender researchers found.

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Weird 'cotton candy' planets might be rocking rings, scientists suggest - CNET

Researchers are taking a closer look at oddball exoplanets known as super-puffs.

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UFC 248: Adesanya vs. Romero -- start time, how to watch and full fight card - CNET

Israel Adesanya, the UFC's brightest new star, defends his middleweight title at UFC 248 against terrifying Cuban Yoel Romero.

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Half-Life: Alyx drops 3 new gameplay videos ahead of release - CNET

Ready to go back to City 17?

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Samsung Galaxy S20 5G: What you need about 5G on Samsung's latest - CNET

Everything you need to know about which carriers will have the Galaxy S20 and Z Flip, and which plans will work for 5G.

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Pixel 4 feature drop adds new emoji, scheduled dark mode, faster Google Pay

• 

  The Pixel 4 is getting some new features. (Be warned that this is a gif-heavy gallery.) [credit: Google ]

Android's March Security Update is starting to roll out, and with it Google is announcing the second-ever "Feature Drop" for the Pixel 4. Feature Drops are a new update scheme that sees Google leverage its OS development skills into quarterly mini-updates for the Pixel line. This quarter the Pixel line is getting new emojis, the scheduled dark mode feature from Android 11, faster access to Google Pay, and several other features.

The Pixel 4 is currently on Android 10, which comes with Unicode Emoji 12.0. The Pixel 4 is getting an emoji update, but this isn't 2020's Unicode Emoji 13.0, which should be out along with Android 11. The Pixel is getting Emoji 12.1, which as the name suggests, this is a half-step between 12 and 13 that accelerates the release of some Emoji 13 features. As Emojipedia details, it includes 23 new gender-neutral emojis like "a gender-neutral fire fighter, astronaut, person in wheelchair, judge, and more. With skin-tone support included, the tally equals 138 additions." Additionally, there are new skin tone combinations for the "couple" emoji that weren't supported in Emoji 12. Google says there are 169 new emoji in this update.

The Android 11 Developer Preview introduced a scheduled dark mode that could turn on at sundown and off at sunrise, and that feature is being backported to the Pixel 4 on Android 10. There's also a new feature that goes in the complete opposite direction—a high-brightness mode. The Pixel 4 has a pretty undersized battery, and higher-brightness won't help, but sometimes you're outside and really just want to see the display.

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Steve Wozniak’s viral tweet shows how quickly coronavirus misinformation spreads

Apple co-founder tweets that illness began in early January after China trip

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Games are leaving GeForce Now just as the cloud gaming service gets started

Activision-Blizzard and Bethesda games have already left the service

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Top Gun: Maverick: Everything we know about the movie so far

Tom Cruise returns as hot-shot pilot Pete Maverick Mitchell in Top Gun: Maverick. Here's what we know so far.

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Waymo's first outside investment round includes car industry heavyweights

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Apple Agrees to Pay Some iPhone Owners $25 Each

A settlement for as much as $500 million would resolve a lawsuit accusing Apple of slowing old iPhones as it released new ones.

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