Media
AI piano plays Bach just like legendary pianist Glenn Gould
Yamaha's self-playing piano has been intricately designed to mimic the celebrated 20th-century Canadian pianist and Bach interpreter down to the finest musical detail. Yamaha has invented a piano that not only plays itself, but also mimics one of the best pianists and Bach interpreters of the 20th century – Glenn Gould. The piano was born of Yamaha's Dear Glenn project, which uses machine learning to teach the artificial intelligence that drives the instrument's self-playing capability the interpretative idiosyncrasies and stylistic nuances of Gould's playing. In a video released by Yamaha, the'Glenn Gould as AI' piano performs Bach's Goldberg Variations in a concert setting – offering audiences, it is hoped, as close a version of the late Gould's performances as they can ever hope to see live. The self-playing aspect of the piano was made possible by the same technology used for Yamaha's existing Disklavier instrument.
Bias and Artificial Intelligence: Ghosts in the Machine -- Red Herring
With a gigantic bottleneck in tech talent, companies are turning to tech to speed up the recruitment process. But baked into hiring startups' algorithms are biases and prejudices as old as time – and it's unsure whether more AI is making things better or worse. Of the many revelations to come from The Inventor, HBO's blockbuster film about the rise and fall of medtech startup Theranos, one of the more personal is how founder Elizabeth Holmes artificially lowered her voice to a baritone, slipping out of character every now and then; giving the game away. While many found the detail funny, others understood exactly why Holmes did it. Holmes was mimicking a man.
YouTube Music gets Siri and desktop web app support
YouTube Music is getting a pair of small but helpful updates today: full support for Siri, and support for being installed as a desktop web app. If you're on an iOS device, you'll now be able to ask Siri to play songs straight from YouTube Music. For the longest time, Siri only supported Apple's own music sources. But in iOS 13, Apple added the ability for Siri to tap into third-party apps with a long-overdue update. Spotify added support for this feature earlier this month, and now YouTube is following suit with support from its own music streaming service. Today's other new feature, desktop web app support, means you can now have a standalone YouTube Music app on your computer, instead of having to visit the site in your browser.
The 5 best Amazon deals you can get this Wednesday
Don't miss out on the top five Amazon deals this Wednesday. If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA Today's newsroom and any business incentives. The art of hunting for deals has become is a finely crafted skill. Above all else, the motto to stand by is as follows: you can never find a good deal on a bad product.
10 most important tech trends of the decade
Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveils the iPad on January 27, 2010, in San Francisco. When I hustled out of CNET headquarters in San Francisco on May 26, 2010, and slipped into a rental car with two of my co-workers to head to a meeting across the Bay, one of them slipped me a copy of The Wall Street Journal and pointed to a headline that announced Apple had passed Microsoft to become the world's most valuable tech company. "What do you think of that?" she said. "Unreal," I responded, shaking my head. Just over a decade earlier, Apple had nearly been on its deathbed and needed a $150 million investment from Microsoft simply to stay alive. But then the iPhone arrived in 2007, and Apple rewrote the playbook on the mobile revolution.