Machine-Facing English (MFE) is an emergent register shaped by the adaptation of everyday language to the expanding presence of AI interlocutors. Drawing on register theory (Halliday 1985, 2006), enregisterment (Agha 2003), audience design (Bell 1984), and interactional pragmatics (Giles & Ogay 2007), this study traces how sustained human-AI interaction normalizes syntactic rigidity, pragmatic simplification, and hyper-explicit phrasing - features that enhance machine parseability at the expense of natural fluency. Our analysis is grounded in qualitative observations from bilingual (Korean/English) voice- and text-based product testing sessions, with reflexive drafting conducted using Natural Language Declarative Prompting (NLD-P) under human curation. Thematic analysis identifies five recurrent traits - redundant clarity, directive syntax, controlled vocabulary, flattened prosody, and single-intent structuring - that improve execution accuracy but compress expressive range. MFE's evolution highlights a persistent tension between communicative efficiency and linguistic richness, raising design challenges for conversational interfaces and pedagogical considerations for multilingual users. We conclude by underscoring the need for comprehensive methodological exposition and future empirical validation.

Tech expert Kurt Knutsson reveals how WalkON enhances walking and jogging with sensors and artificial tendons. Get ready for some pretty cool innovations that are lighting up CES 2025, the world's biggest annual tech event. From AI-powered smart glasses to revolutionary TVs and mind-blowing gadgets, this year's show is proving that the future isn't just knocking. We've scoured the show floor to bring you the most exciting tech that's not just pushing boundaries but completely obliterating them. Enter the giveaway by signing up for my free newsletter.

Smart glasses are traditionally long on promise, short on delivery, especially at these sorts of consumer electronics shindigs. There's always a steady stream of companies promising we're on the cusp of having our very own Gary-from-Veep attached to our faces before fading away. The weight of promises Halliday has laid upon the table is a sign of braggadocio, but it'll take a while before we know if it's deserved or not. Halliday has turned up at CES 2025 in Las Vegas with a pair of eponymous smart glasses filled to the brim with technology. There's a waveguide display in the right eyecup that will project the equivalent of a 3.5-inch screen into the wearer's view.

One important aspect of language is how speakers generate utterances and texts to convey their intended meanings. In this paper, we bring various aspects of the Construction Grammar (CxG) and the Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) theories in a deep learning computational framework to model empathic language. Our corpus consists of 440 essays written by premed students as narrated simulated patient-doctor interactions. We start with baseline classifiers (state-of-the-art recurrent neural networks and transformer models). Then, we enrich these models with a set of linguistic constructions proving the importance of this novel approach to the task of empathy classification for this dataset. Our results indicate the potential of such constructions to contribute to the overall empathy profile of first-person narrative essays.

The Covid-19 coronavirus crisis is accelerating the pace of digital transformation among companies of all shapes and sizes, and the public sector is no exception, as decision-makers rally to find digital solutions to meet fast-changing requirements despite underlying legacy challenges. While the immediate focus is to limit the human, social and economic loss, operating in the "new normal" will mean extra pressure on IT in the months to come. Public sector bodies need to use digital channels to inform and serve citizens, while at the same time, many functions have gone all-digital during the coronavirus outbreak, increasing demand for efficient back-end systems. The pandemic has exposed the need to improve technology efficiency for the continuity of government. Computer Weekly spoke to specialists operating in the public sector to gain an overall view of the key trends and hurdles facing buyers as the crisis unfolds.

Slate has relationships with various online retailers. If you buy something through our links, Slate may earn an affiliate commission. We update links when possible, but note that deals can expire and all prices are subject to change. All prices were up to date at the time of publication. The simplest way to summarize the plot of Ready Player Two is to repeat the plot of its predecessor, Ready Player One, as they are largely the same.

There's a long-running line of children's books where you provide the kid's details – name, age, favourite hobbies – and they all get mail-merged into the narrative, making the youngster the central character in their own story and providing the illusion of personalisation at a low cost. Ready Player Two, the sequel to the hugely popular Ready Player One, offers a similar experience. Like its predecessor, it's a tedious slog through arcane pop culture references – The Silmarillion, the music of Prince, the movies of John Hughes – sprinkled in so lazily that you could replace them with your own favourites, or swap them right out and be left with a much shorter, and probably better book. The action picks up immediately after the events of Ready Player One, which is set in the near-future, in a world where vast swathes of the population spend most of their day living inside a virtual reality simulation called the OASIS, to escape from the poverty, crime and general awfulness of life on Earth. The protagonist, Wade Watts, is a nerdy teenager living in the'stacks' outside Oklahoma City – a shanty-town comprised of literal stacks of trailers and RVs – who devotes all of his time to an in-OASIS treasure hunt devised by billionaire James Halliday, the late co-creator of the simulation, as a Willy Wonka-esque means to find an heir to his fortune.

Ready Player One opens less than two weeks after the eruption of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which is only the most recent reminder that we must be vigilant about the tech industry, as that vigilance likely won't come from within. Directed by Steven Spielberg, the video game–inspired sci-fi epic--a hybrid between live action and motion-capture-assisted animation--initially seems to be exactly the kind of plugged-in dystopia tale we need right now. Twenty-seven years in the future, the film's Columbus, Ohio, setting is a teeming scrapyard. Trash lines the streets, trailers resembling shipping containers are perilously stacked on top of one another, and the stench of mass civic disengagement pervades the neighborhood. The only reality that matters to almost everybody is the virtual one known as the OASIS, the control of which went up for grabs five years earlier, with the death of its founder, James Halliday (Mark Rylance).

It took Ernest Cline 10 years to write Ready Player One. There were times he thought he would never finish the manuscript, let alone publish it. But the novel, mostly set in a global online pleasure world called Oasis, went on to become a bestseller and was translated into more than 20 languages. Now a film adaptation by Steven Spielberg is in cinemas – a real-life geek-to-riches drama so reflective of the book's plot it seems almost unfeasible. The sci-fi story's setup is simple.

It's 2045 and Earth has been brought to its knees by catastrophic climate change and a worldwide energy crisis, not to mention famine, poverty, disease and war. In short, everything we presently fear has come to pass. It is the ultimate dystopian future. Wade Watts, the story's protagonist, is born into a generation that feels failed by reality. The only thing making life bearable is the OASIS, a globally networked virtual reality world.