As promised, Google employees who led the large-scale walkouts in November have held a town hall meeting to share more allegations of a retaliatory culture at the company. Bloomberg understands that Claire Stapleton and Meredith Whittaker provided "more than a dozen" additional stories of reprisals at the gathering, which gave participants a chance to offer input. Details of those extra stories weren't available as we wrote this, but Stapleton described the tales in company email as evidence of "systemic issues" that wouldn't be addressed without collective action. Stapleton and Whittaker started the outcry after explaining their own accusations. Stapleton said she was going to be demoted from her marketing role at YouTube and was asked to take a medical leave she didn't need, saving her position only after she retained a lawyer.

The technology is based on newly prepared algorithms, which are designed to overcome a limitation with'computer vision'. This is with turning audio clips into realistic, lip-synced videos of the person who is speaking the words. The developed algorithms learn from videos that exist "in the wild", such as on the Internet or elsewhere. READ MORE: New software edits voices like text To do so involved training a neural network (a collection of connected units called artificial neurons) to view videos of an individual and then to translate different audio sounds into basic mouth shapes. The second area was using a new mouth synthesis technique to realistically superimpose mouth shapes and textures onto an existing reference video of a given person.