Media
Chappell Roan collaborates with Fortnite one year after Radio 1 plea
Chappell Roan fans will soon be able to transform into the US pop star when playing the video game Fortnite. The singer has been announced by developers Epic as the latest icon for the game's next festival season, which kicks off on Thursday. As part of collaboration, players will be able to wear some of the singer's most iconic outfits and listen to some of her hit songs. The collaboration comes after Roan told BBC Radio 1 last year that she would love to feature in the game. During the interview with Radio 1 presenter Jack Saunders, the singer professed her love for the video game and asked the developers: Please give me a skin, please.
Team Mirai could overtake more established parties in Lower House
Team Mirai leader Takahiro Anno stumps in Tokyo's Shibuya Ward on Jan. 27, the first day of campaigning for the Lower House election slated for Sunday. A small, 9-month-old party that has only one seat in the Upper House may gain as many seats as decadesold peers such as the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) in Sunday's Lower House election with its unconventional campaign pledges to change politics and the government through digital technology. A weekend poll conducted by the Asahi Shimbun showed Team Mirai could win up to 10 seats under the proportional representation system, more than the JCP's nine seats and Reiwa Shinsengumi's six. The party didn't have any seats in the Lower House before its dissolution. The party's founder and leader is a 35-year-old artificial intelligence engineer behind two AI startups -- Takahiro Anno. He had been working on societal reform through digital transformation when he pivoted from business to politics with the launch of Team Mirai last May.
EXCLUSIVE: DeepL to Release Interpretation Software for Japan
BERLIN - German technology firm DeepL, known for its artificial intelligence-powered translation software, plans to release a Japanese-language version of its real-time interpretation software by the end of this year, a senior company official has said. The age of machine interpretation has arrived, said Leonardo Doin, head of engineering and research for real-time voice translation service DeepL Voice, in a recent interview. You can just wear an earpiece and ... you can just hear it (foreign-language speech) in your language anytime, Doin said. The interpretation software will integrate DeepL's speech recognition and machine translation technologies, and speech synthesis technology that mimics the tones of the speakers' voices. It will be able to handle multiple languages and speakers, he said, with the software's use in online meetings of multinational companies in mind. DeepL plans to roll out the software on smartphones as well.