Media
Sonos Ray review: A soundbar that nails the basics
With the $279 Ray soundbar, Sonos is going after a new market. The company's previous home theater products have all been $400 or more and have primarily been geared toward people intent on getting the best sound possible. The Ray, meanwhile, is more accessible for people who want better sound than their TV speakers can provide, but don't necessarily care about things like Dolby Atmos support or room-shaking bass. The Ray isn't exactly a budget speaker, though, so I set out to discover if Sonos made the right compromises here in its effort to make a more mainstream soundbar. Physically, the Ray is smaller than the already-compact Beam, with a tapered design that's wider in the front than it is in the back.
AI trends 2022 -- I -- Large Language models
The language model is the "brain" of language understanding. These AI models rely on machine learning to determine how related phrases, sentences, or paragraphs are. It learns and understands the language by ingesting a large amount of text and building a statistical model that understands the probability of phrases, sentences, or paragraphs related to each other. Language models are getting larger while becoming more refined in understanding language. Artificial intelligence can process and generate more human-like interactions while using semantic techniques that improve the quality of its results.
The Contribution of Lyrics and Acoustics to Collaborative Understanding of Mood
Naseri, Shahrzad, Reddy, Sravana, Correia, Joana, Karlgren, Jussi, Jones, Rosie
In this work, we study the association between song lyrics and mood through a data-driven analysis. Our data set consists of nearly one million songs, with song-mood associations derived from user playlists on the Spotify streaming platform. We take advantage of state-of-the-art natural language processing models based on transformers to learn the association between the lyrics and moods. We find that a pretrained transformer-based language model in a zero-shot setting -- i.e., out of the box with no further training on our data -- is powerful for capturing song-mood associations. Moreover, we illustrate that training on song-mood associations results in a highly accurate model that predicts these associations for unseen songs. Furthermore, by comparing the prediction of a model using lyrics with one using acoustic features, we observe that the relative importance of lyrics for mood prediction in comparison with acoustics depends on the specific mood. Finally, we verify if the models are capturing the same information about lyrics and acoustics as humans through an annotation task where we obtain human judgments of mood-song relevance based on lyrics and acoustics.