Deeper message in adverts, powerful Voice Engine AI and Apple’s new MacBook Air

This past week was just proof again that I don’t waste your time with irrelevant matters (did you really need this proof?). As I was writing my weekly Tech Tonic column for HT Premium (the link is below, I’d urge you to read), little did I know what the good folks over at Indian tech company Boat were planning for their advertising campaign. The ad release, and my column, released for the good of humankind, on the same day. One may or may not agree with the “Think Different Better” positioning for its wireless earbuds space, and you may have strong opinions about the claims made about “better bass, better active noise cancellation and better battery life”. At this point, I must say, even the slightest hint of comparisons with the Apple AirPods are fallacious and hyperbole. But for Boat, it gets the attention. That’s what ads are for.

(Premium): Tech Tonic | Why Indian tech brands are dominating the wearables industry

This is very much a case of a tech brand using their dominant position in a marketspace, to widen the lead they have over the competition. As I’d pointed out, Boat’s 26% market share among earwear (that’s wearables such as true wireless earbuds) is significantly cushioned with Noise (12.1%) and Fire-Boltt (10.1%) following. But the point of my piece was more about why Indian tech start-ups have held such domination in wearables, even when we talk more about the likes of Apple, Samsung, OnePlus, Nothing, and Oppo among smartphone brands and the likes of Sony, Marshall, and Sennheiser to name a few of the legacy audio brands. The answer is simple – a really broad range, and affordable price points that give users two propositions. Minimal monetary outlay to get attuned to an experience, and subsequently, the urge to upgrade to a different (perhaps more features, or simply something different) without regrets about wasting money previously.

You can always argue that affordable wireless earbuds offer limited experience in terms of sound, and the overall experience isn’t as refined, but remembering what I mentioned to someone the other day, there is a big enough demographic in India that’s primed to be welcomed into the “new adopter” category, and an equally big number of users who’d want to not spend too much money immediately. They search for value, and their definition of value is perhaps different from how we perceive value.

Indian tech companies aren’t shy about innovating too. I have two examples to share with you. One is Noise’s latest and most expensive true wireless earbuds yet (the Noise Buds Xero) and WatchOut Wearables’ blending of a smartwatch and true wireless earbuds in one. I’ve tested both, written about what works and where improvements are needed, but the takeaway is, Indian tech start-ups that have dominated the ultra-affordable price points thus far, have the tools to make their mark in a price band higher. It simply tells me, the Boat advertising campaign may be pushing the limits of factual accuracy, but there is an aspiration that’s very apparent. That’s the first step towards writing a new chapter. Or so we hope.

VOICE

A 15-second clip of someone’s voice is all it takes, along with a text prompt. Don’t be too surprised. OpenAI’s powerful text to voice generation platform, needs just that duration of someone’s voice, to create a synthetic audio clip in return. It is so far being categorised as a “small-scale preview of a model” they’ve called Voice Engine. They’ve been at work on it, for more than a year now. The envisioned utility includes reading assistance, translations and applications for the differently abled.

But don’t rush just yet to try this tool yet. There’s little surprise that despite everything, OpenAI has deemed Voice Engine too risky for general release, at least for now. The apprehension is understandable. Generative AI tools are arguably the most transformative technology of our time, but in a world where our social media is filled with generated content that is difficult to distinguish from authentic media, deepfakes making a mockery of content moderation policies and very limit skillset of those consuming the content to identify the red flags, having deepfake audio of such high quality may be difficult to tame.

In OpenAI’s announcement, I was therefore more interested in what they’re saying about the implementation and fail-safes. Here’s what they say so far…

• OpenAI is working with partners globally, to get feedback. That’ll include government, media, entertainment, education and civil society.
• The very limited availability for the test version of Voice Engine is because the selected partners have agreed to a strict set of usage policies, including a strict restriction on impersonation of another individual or organisation without consent.
• “Our terms with these partners require explicit and informed consent from the original speaker and we don’t allow developers to build ways for individual users to create their own voices”, says OpenAI.
• Those who have access to Voice Engine trials put in place a disclosure for the audience, that the voices they're hearing are AI-generated.
• To add to that, they’ll will implement watermarking as well (something we’ve covered extensively off late), to trace the origin of any audio generation by Voice Engine, “as well as proactive monitoring of how it's being used.”

MOVE

A new chapter began to be written a couple of years ago, when the iconic wedge design of the MacBook Air was swapped for a more modern (arguably; but there’s strong argument for periodical refreshes) one that brings some resemblance parity with the MacBook Pro. It is not as if the MacBooks needed design similarities to achieve higher consumer perception. Importantly, the new chapter broadened the ultra-slim laptop benchmark’s target audience – with a 13-inch and a 15-inch avatar. A part of that new chapter is the latest generation processor, the M3. That’s not the reason we are having this conversation. Instead, the actual peg (and something Apple hopes consumers would focus on) is AI. An AI pitch was expected from Apple, and it has finally arrived. After all, the Windows 11 PC ecosystem with Intel’s latest Core Ultra chips, has been pushing a case for “AI PCs” since the turn of the year. We’ve tested some examples from Asus and HP too.

Intel’s neural processing unit or NPU is crucial to present and upcoming AI features in PCs. Think of it this way. The webcam’s intelligent features such as keeping a user centered during a video call or AI processing on-device happen on the neural processing unit, which could consume as much as a fourth of the power that would otherwise be used if the same tasks are done by the processor’s performance cores. The foundations for Apple’s approach are similar, at the core of which is the 16-core Neural Engine. While Windows PCs and Intel may have made a case for AI PCs, it is only to be expected that Apple will do the entire approach better – complete control over the hardware and software (we’ve talked about its benefits time and again) of Macs, will allow for the sort of performance optimisations that’d likely make the same functionality return a better experience on a Mac than just any other laptop. Case in point, Adobe’s apps. Or even Microsoft 365.

There are two parts to Apple’s pitch. The macOS integration will involve improving camera features, real-time speech to text, translation, text predictions and visual understanding. Third-party apps will be able to take advantage of the Neural Engine optimisations. Popular photo editing app Pixelmator’s enhance will be able to utilise this, as would AI math assistance in Goodnotes 6. Canva’s AI suite, Adobe’s generative AI Firefly and even the Copilot integration within Microsoft 365, will draw on the NPU to speed up AI compute. This app list will only grow longer as developers optimise support for the M3 chip, and that’s good news, irrespective of whether you actively use generative AI or not. AI app experience will only get better, with time.

KNOW

• Another day, another tech giant collecting data you’d no idea they were collecting. A class action lawsuit filed against Google by users in 2020 accusing the tech giant of illegally collecting user data, is nearing settlement. From Google’s side, they have agreed to destroy the data it had wrongfully collected from users who’d browsed the web on the Chrome web browser in Incognito Mode. After Google’s initial attempts at claiming they’ve done nothing wrong, it was Judge Lucy Koh who made it very plain in 2021 that Google hadn’t notified users that it was collecting data while Incognito mode was active. So much for expecting data privacy in this day and age?
• If you’re apprehensive about the European Union’s pursuit against monopolistic tendencies of tech giants not having a global impact (or change things in your part of the world), think again. Late last year, Microsoft had to unbundle the Teams video meeting app from the Microsoft 365 (and Office 365) subscriptions, and sell that subscription separately. Now, the same subscription structure is being expanded globally. After all, why would you want to pay for Teams if you use Microsoft’s Office apps but prefer Zoom or Google Meet for video calls?