Dear Prudence is Slate's advice column. For this edition, Hillary Frey, Slate's editor-in-chief, will be filling in as Prudie. My partner of five years and I just got married after two years of extensive wedding planning and preparation. We had a very large guest list with a variety of needs that needed to be taken into account, such as international travel and physical limitations, and I feel grateful that my husband was very intentional about making sure the labor of wedding planning was split as equitably as possible between the two of us. We agreed that we wanted to write our own vows because we thought it was more meaningful than using traditional ones.

In this paper, we analyse the error patterns of the raw waveform acoustic models in TIMIT's phone recognition task. Our analysis goes beyond the conventional phone error rate (PER) metric. We categorise the phones into three groups: {affricate, diphthong, fricative, nasal, plosive, semi-vowel, vowel, silence}, {consonant, vowel+, silence}, and {voiced, unvoiced, silence} and, compute the PER for each broad phonetic class in each category. We also construct a confusion matrix for each category using the substitution errors and compare the confusion patterns with those of the Filterbank and Wav2vec 2.0 systems. Our raw waveform acoustic models consists of parametric (Sinc2Net) or non-parametric CNNs and Bidirectional LSTMs, achieving down to 13.7%/15.2% PERs on TIMIT Dev/Test sets, outperforming reported PERs for raw waveform models in the literature. We also investigate the impact of transfer learning from WSJ on the phonetic error patterns and confusion matrices. It reduces the PER to 11.8%/13.7% on the Dev/Test sets.

OpenAI is rolling out the ability to carry on conversations with a human-sounding robot on the ChatGPT app. As artificial intelligence grows in popularity, the latest tech tools are creeping into just about every industry and endeavor -- including wedding planning. A luxury wedding planner this spring shared how brides and grooms are making use of sophisticated AI tools to ease the stress of their big day. Lisa Lafferty, a wedding and event planner in Beverly Hills, California, said she's helped throw some extravagant parties in her decade of experience -- which has given her an up-close look at AI's use in the wedding space. Owner of Beverly Hills Premier Catering, Lafferty expanded her catering business to event planning in 2018 and has since planned events for celebrities, real estate moguls, Fortune 500 brands and more, she said.

The United States has vowed to take "all necessary actions" to defend American forces after a drone attack killed three U.S. troops in Jordan, while Qatar said it hoped U.S. retaliation would not damage regional security or undercut progress toward a new Gaza hostage-release deal. Sunday's attack by Iran-backed militants was the first deadly strike against U.S. troops since the Israel-Hamas war erupted in October, and marks a major escalation in tensions that have engulfed the Middle East. White House National Security spokesman John Kirby said Monday the United States did not want a wider war with Iran or in the region, "but we got to do what we have to do."

Becky Jefferies made it to the front of the aisle amid her marriage ceremony in Greece when she realized her wedding dress was incomplete. Artificial intelligence is the hot new topic of conversation as AI tools are increasingly threatening to replace the "human" component in a variety of everyday tasks -- or are already doing so. For some, artificial intelligence apps like ChatGPT are being used to write or draft academic papers, answer medical questions and receive advice on a wide array of topics. Some engaged couples are now using the platforms for help when writing their wedding vows. Fox News Digital tried using ChatGPT to write wedding vows -- typing "write my wedding vows" into the platform.

Google's AI chatbot Bard launched for Australian users on Thursday as the company showcased its advancements in artificial intelligence and pledged to roll out the technology ethically. Until now, Bard was only available in the US and the UK, but on Thursday at the company's annual I/O conference Google announced it would open up the chatbot to users in more than 180 countries around the world, including Australia. Bard is the chat program built on Google's large language model, PaLM2, similar to how ChatGPT is built on OpenAI's GPT. It can provide information, write code, translate languages and analyse images. As part of future advancements to Bard announced by Google on Thursday, Bard will provide visual responses in addition to text-based responses. Using Google's Lens application, in the future users will be able to upload images to be analysed by Bard.

There's nothing more romantic than having an AI-powered bot write your vows for you. Earlier this month, wedding planning platform Joy launched a new OpenAI-powered "Wedding Writer's Block" tool that uses AI technology to generate a draft for one of the most important speeches of your life. The AI assistant is designed to help write vows and wedding toast speeches, among other "wedding-related wordage," the company claims, like a love story for your wedding website or thank-you notes, or if you're stuck on how to politely decline a wedding invite. There are also several different tones that the draft can be written in. For instance, if you want to sound like William Shakespeare or maybe a pirate for some reason.

The decision comes as part of "a company-wide move to limit the use of facial recognition in our products," Jerome Pesenti, Facebook's VP of Artificial Intelligence, said on Tuesday. When the feature is discontinued, sometime "in the coming weeks," more than a billion Facebook users who have opted in will have their facial recognition templates deleted and they will not be automatically recognized, Pesenti explained. "Looking ahead, we still see facial recognition technology as a powerful tool, for example, for people needing to verify their identity, or to prevent fraud and impersonation," Pesenti wrote, but noted also that "the many specific instances where facial recognition can be helpful need to be weighed against growing concerns about the use of this technology as a whole." Authorities around the world are still working to provide clear rules on the use of the technology, and Facebook is committed to "working with the civil society groups and regulators who are leading this discussion," the executive added. Back in August, South Korean regulators fined Facebook for presuming consent to the feature for 200,000 users and not letting them opt out of face recognition.

Microsoft will invest $1 billion in OpenAI and work with the San Francisco-based Artificial Intelligence powerhouse to create a computational platform of "unprecedented scale" to accelerate the development of advanced forms of AI. The expanded partnership gives Microsoft and its Azure cloud platform an influential ally in its competition with Google, Amazon and other rivals in the high-stakes race to develop next-generation AI platforms and technologies. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has called out AI as a pivotal area for the future of the company. OpenAI was formed in 2016 by leaders including Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO; and Sam Altman, former president of the Y Combinator startup accelerator. Musk, who has sounded the alarm over the risks of AI, said in May that he was no longer involved inOpenAI.

Authorities in Dallas are pursuing the use of drones to assist in their duties to locate suspects and access areas that are unreachable by helicopters. Paul Stokes, Dallas assistant police chief, outlined the department's planned use of the drones during a recent city council briefing, saying the technology would allow officers to make sure a building is clear before entering, assist in fires and large protests and help identify suspects, the Dallas Morning News reported on Monday. According to FOX 4, it seems as council members approved of the idea, with Councilwoman Sandy Greyson calling drones "such cool technology." "I can see 100 different uses," she told the station. Drone use in law enforcement has been a privacy concern raised by the community, and something Stokes was quick to ensure would not be compromised.