ScotRail is set to replace a controversial AI voice on trains, after criticism from a professional voiceover artist. Gayanne Potter's Scottish accent was used to teach station announcer "Iona", but she said it was a surprise to hear a "dreadful" robotic version of herself. ScotRail introduced the voice in May, provide by Swedish tech firm ReadSpeaker, to replace pre-recorded human announcements on some services. Transport Scotland said the rail operator now intended to introduce an alternative voice "as soon as practicable". ScotRail has not confirmed if this will be a human recording or another AI-trained voice.

We formalise the notion of an anonymous public announcement in the tradition of public announcement logic. Such announcements can be seen as in-between a public announcement from ``the outside" (an announcement of $ϕ$) and a public announcement by one of the agents (an announcement of $K_aϕ$): we get more information than just $ϕ$, but not (necessarily) about exactly who made it. Even if such an announcement is prima facie anonymous, depending on the background knowledge of the agents it might reveal the identity of the announcer: if I post something on a message board, the information might reveal who I am even if I don't sign my name. Furthermore, like in the Russian Cards puzzle, if we assume that the announcer's intention was to stay anonymous, that in fact might reveal more information. In this paper we first look at the case when no assumption about intentions are made, in which case the logic with an anonymous public announcement operator is reducible to epistemic logic. We then look at the case when we assume common knowledge of the intention to stay anonymous, which is both more complex and more interesting: in several ways it boils down to the notion of a ``safe" announcement (again, similarly to Russian Cards). Main results include formal expressivity results and axiomatic completeness for key logical languages.

A whole lot has happened since Emily St. John Mandel published her literary science-fiction novel Station Eleven ten years ago this week--including certain global disruptions that made the book appear startlingly prescient. Station Eleven traces the aftermath of a swine-flu pandemic that kills most of the human population, following a group of traveling players who tour the Great Lakes region performing Shakespeare. Station Eleven sold over a million copies, was shortlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and recently secured a top spot on the New York Times readers' list of the best books of the century. The 2021 miniseries, creatively adapted for HBO by Patrick Somerville, scored several Emmy nominations and the deep, abiding love of television critics. This list of accolades still fails to represent how many readers connected to this particular story of postapocalyptic society, going so far as to get "Survival Is Not Enough" tattoos--a reference to a motto the Traveling Symphony favors in the book.

Fox News Flash top sports headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. As the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris draws closer, a high-profile announcer is set to lend his voice to the Games coverage. But longtime NFL play-by-play broadcaster Al Michaels will not be doing the heavy lifting. An artificial intelligence generated version of Michaels' voice will be used for Olympic recaps, NBC announced.

The Wimbledon announcer sounds a little like Helen Mirren if she'd just been hit with a polo mallet. I'm watching match highlights between Ons Jabeur and Magdalena Fręch on the tournament's website when a voice says, "Jabeur, from Tunisia, will play Fręch, from Poland, on the renowned No. 1 court in the first round." Fręch is mispronounced, as is Tunisia, and the word renowned is used oddly dispassionately, as if it were being repeated for a competitor at a spelling bee. This is a commentary chatbot, introduced with considerable fanfare at the All England Club this year. Another version, a "male" voice, sounds like your uncle from Queens trying to do a Hugh Grant impression.

'Gutfeld!' panelists react to Vice President Kamala Harris leading the White House's AI meetings with the CEOs of Alphabet, Anthropic, Microsoft and OpenAI. It's official, this is now the best late night show in America, because it's the only late night show in America. So today, senior intel officials testified on Capitol Hill on worldwide threats, among the topics, China, Russia, Iran, artificial intelligence, and also Geraldo removing his shirt in front of children. Yeah, AI is now in the same discussion as some of our biggest, most dangerous adversaries. So you think we'd put someone serious in charge of it, right?

I like to watch rugby, even though I know very little about it. They rightfully believe they're talking to people who watch rugby a lot, so they feel no need to address me, personally, with rugby-for-dummies spiels that might give me an appreciation for the game. But emerging technology could soon solve my problem. Some companies are working on AI that will generate custom sports commentary, which means I could potentially tune into a streaming rugby game and listen to a human-sounding, AI-driven robot commentator that already understands my level of rugby savvy. Maybe my robot commentator will patiently explain the difference between a blood bin and a tight head.

François Maillet doesn't consider himself to be overly into hockey -- he says he watches about a quarter of the Montreal Canadiens' regular-season games. Not even a gigantic fan," he says. But when it comes time for the playoffs, he's admittedly a full-fledged bandwagon-jumper. "Right now, I think like most people, I watch every game," Maillet says. And now he's got a reason to watch -- he's hacked into his Verdun home's smartphone-controlled lighting system to generate a sound and light show every time the Habs score. When the Habs score, red, white and blue lights flash for about 30 seconds while playing the Habs' old goal song (appropriately titled "Le Goal Song" by Montreal band L'Oreille Cassée). It helps that he's a computer scientist who specializes in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Last year, he had set up a manual button he would push to play the goal song used by the Montreal Canadiens. Having moved recently, he got new programmable Phillips Hue lights installed in his living room. The lights can be told to brighten, dim and change colours with a smartphone control system. "I was talking to some colleagues and I said, 'Wouldn't it be cool if I just made them flash to the music?'" After talking it out with his co-workers at Montreal startup Datacratic, he took the long Easter weekend to develop a prototype written with the Python programming language. "Computer science is really, really cool.