We propose a voting-driven semi-supervised approach to automatically acquire the typical duration of an event and use it as pseudo-labeled data. The human evaluation demonstrates that our pseudo labels exhibit surprisingly high accuracy and balanced coverage. In the temporal commonsense QA task, experimental results show that using only pseudo examples of 400 events, we achieve performance comparable to the existing BERT-based weakly supervised approaches that require a significant amount of training examples. When compared to the RoBERTa baselines, our best approach establishes state-of-the-art performance with a 7% improvement in Exact Match.

The Venn diagram of HomePod owners and YouTube Music subscribers probably doesn't have a lot of overlap. However, those who use both Apple's speakers and Google's music streaming service may be pleased to learn that the two now play more nicely together. YouTube Music is now available natively on HomePod, meaning that you can ask Siri to play tracks from the service even if your iPhone, iPad or Apple Watch aren't close by. It's now possible to set YouTube Music as the default music service on HomePod. That means you won't have to add "on YouTube Music" when you bark a command at Siri.

If you pay attention to the music industry, you've probably heard about spatial audio. The promise is that music will envelop the user from all directions without needing a room full of speakers to achieve the effect. Apple has pushed it a lot in the last few years, in Apple Music, its line of AirPods headphones and the latest HomePod speaker. Amazon's streaming service also offers spatial audio, and its Echo Studio speaker can play back compatible tracks. Sonos has been paying attention, as well – its recent Arc and Beam soundbars support Dolby Atmos for movies, and now the company is releasing its first music speaker designed for spatial audio, the Era 300.

Apple has conquered the world of audio several times over. First with the iPod and iTunes, then with its ubiquitous AirPods - all of which changed the way the world listened to music and made phone calls. But the one device that failed to shift the dial was the HomePod, a voice-controlled Siri smart speaker that launched in 2018 and was discontinued in 2021 after lackluster sales. The smaller HomePod Mini remains on sale. But it never held a candle to the larger device, which sounded better than just about any rival when it launched in 2018, even if it lacked some of the'smart' features offered by rivals from Google and Amazon.

Humanoid robots have been deployed in a Minnesota nursing home to care for patients with early-stage Alzheimer's. These robots, developed by a team of researchers at the University of Minnesota, are equipped to assist individuals with their emotional, physical and cognitive health - are believed to be the first in the US to focus on caring for patients with dementia. 'I am extremely excited to be making history with my students by deploying humanoid robots in nursing homes to help care for our elderly,' said Arshia Khan, a professor of computer science at the University of Minnesota at Duluth's Swenson College of Science and Engineering. The humanoid robots are meant to provide a wide range of support and help patients who are experiencing early stage Alzheimer's. One robot is a two-foot-tall model called NAO, and the other one stands four feet and is known as Pepper - but Khan emphasizes that the machine's will supplement human workers rather than replace them.

ATHENS, June 17, (Reuters) - Alexandra Kerlidou sits in her wheelchair on stage in Athens. With only the shift of her eyes across a computer screen, the 21-year-old fills the air with harp music. The student with cerebral palsy, who cannot use her hands or speak, is playing the "Eyeharp", gaze-controlled digital software which allows people with disabilities to play music, something she had never thought possible. "I felt strange, I had never imagined such a thing," said Alexandra, using a speech-generating computer program as she described trying the "Eyeharp" for the first time in her home on Lesbos with creator Zacharias Vamvakousis. A computer scientist and musician, Vamvakousis was inspired to create the program after a musician friend was hurt in a motorcycle accident shortly before they were to play a concert together.

The future of search is a conversation -- at least, according to Google. It's a pitch the company has been making for years, and it was the centerpiece of last week's I/O developer conference. There, the company demoed two "groundbreaking" AI systems -- LaMDA and MUM -- that it hopes, one day, to integrate into all its products. To show off its potential, Google had LaMDA speak as the dwarf planet Pluto, answering questions about the celestial body's environment and its flyby from the New Horizons probe. As this tech is adopted, users will be able to "talk to Google": using natural language to retrieve information from the web or their personal archives of messages, calendar appointments, photos, and more.

Amazon's Echo Buds were successful in offering an AirPods alternative to people who prefer Alexa to Siri. Hands-free access to the assistant worked well, the earbuds were affordable at $130 and the company offered a decent amount of customization. However, the first-gen model didn't sound great, battery life was short and Bose-powered Active Noise Reduction (ANR) wasn't as powerful as true active noise cancellation (ANC). Today, Amazon is introducing a redesigned second-gen version of the Echo Buds that are cheaper, smaller and address all the key flaws from the initial release. The main feature of the all-new Echo Buds is still hands-free access to Alexa.

So you just got a smart speaker as a holiday present. Now what to do with them? You've come to the right place. On command, by saying "Hey Siri," for the HomePod, "Hey Google" for the Nest Audio or "Alexa," on Echo speakers, you can instruct them to play music of your choice, either via a subscription service, or more generically, as part of a themed radio station via the Pandora service. Amazon's speakers play music from Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora and iHeartRadio, while Apple plays just from Apple Music and Pandora.

Apple is late to the consumer priced smart speaker market, but it finally joined Amazon and Google with the $99 HomePod Mini. Here's what you need to know: The Mini is way smaller in size than both the new Amazon Echo fourth generation speaker and Google Nest Audio. And while it doesn't sound as great for music as either of them, (it is way smaller, after all) in our unscientific home ears test, it probably doesn't matter. This is a really useful speaker for anyone living in the Apple ecosystem and it makes the Siri personal assistant way more competitive with Amazon's Alexa and the Google Assistant. The HomePod Mini sounds fantastic as a TV speaker.