merry christmas
Amazon Alexa transforms into Santa Claus for Christmas
Alexa, Amazon's virtual assistant, can transform into Santa Claus especially for this festive season, the tech giant has revealed. Users can say'Alexa, enable Hey Santa' to hear him tell a story, sing a song, crack a joke, set a timer and more, as if he's speaking down the phone from the North Pole. The fun festive feature is sure to be particularly exciting for youngsters who want proof that Father Christmas exists in the run-up to the big day. Users can also ask Alexa a range of Christmas-themed questions such as'Alexa, where is Santa?' or'Alexa, how many days until Christmas?', The new Alexa feature lets families interact with Santa over the festive season, as if he's speaking down the phone from the North Pole'We've introduced Santa, a new personality for Alexa that will bring Christmas cheer for the whole family,' Amazon said.
Online translation breaks language barriers Science DW.COM 20.12.2012
The Internet connects the world, but most people are walled off from each other by language barriers. So free online machine translators like Google Translate, Microsoft's Bing and Systran are a godsend. More than 200 million global users click onto Google Translate alone every month, according to Franz Josef Och, who heads the search engine's machine translation group. "Most of the translation on the planet is now done by Google Translate," he wrote on the company's blog earlier this year. Still, Och has no illusions about the challenges of producing readable machine-translated text.