iStick flash drive plays nice with the iPhone

 

 

  Although the iPhone and iPad may indeed pack a whole plethora of features, they still lack a plain ol' USB port. This means that they can't share files with a Mac or PC via a regular flash drive. The iStick, however, isn't regular. According to its creators, it's the world's first Lightning-to-USB flash drive.

It is, of course, already possible to move content between iDevices and computers. You can use a Lightning-to-USB cable, you can send files by email, or you can upload content from one device to the cloud, then download back from the cloud to the other device.
The iStick, however, is designed to make things easier. First of all, unlike a cable, files can be stored on it. This means, for example, that you could load a movie from your computer onto it, then watch that movie on your iPhone directly from the iStick – you wouldn't have to actually load the movie into the phone's limited memory space, in other words.
It's also much quicker than loading to and from the cloud, and doesn't require internet access. Additionally, users don't have to set up an account, or worry about the security of data stored online.

The iStick (not to be confused with the smartwatch-like thing of the same name) is made by Hyper, which also manufactures the streaming iUSBport. The company is now raising production funds on Kickstarter, with pledge levels starting at US$65 for an 8GB iStick and ranging up to $199 for a 128GB model. A free iOS app is also required to use the stick.
It should be noted that iPhones older than the 5/5c/5s don't have a Lightning port, so an unmodified iStick won't work with them. If you own one of those older phones, you might instead want to check out the i-FlashDrive HD, which plugs into the phone's 30-pin connector.

A major mystery behind Microsoft's 'brain-like' speech-to-speech translator 

 Speech-to-speech translation technology Microsoft is prepping for Skype has an unexplained capability: the more languages it learns, the better it becomes at the languages it learned first.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella introduced Skype Translate at the Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., saying that it could translate between spoken languages, but he had no explanation for why its facility with languages learned early-on get a turbo boost from learning more.
 “Say you teach it English, it learns English,” Nadella says. “Then you teach it Mandarin, it learns Mandarin but it becomes better at English. And then you teach it Spanish, it’ll get good at Spanish but it gets great at both Mandarin and English, and quite frankly none of us know exactly why. It’s brain-like in the sense of its capability to learn. It’s magical.”


The phenomenon is known as transfer learning, Nadella says, and is part of a pre-beta application for Skype that will be available to a limited test group later this year, according to Gurdeep Singh Pall, who heads up Skype for Microsoft.
In the demonstration, Pall spoke Indian-accented English via Skype with a German-speaking Microsoft employee, Diana Heinrichs.
The scripted conversation was stilted in that there was a little lag waiting for the translation to start, then the recipient had to listen to the translation and respond. For example, Pall said, “Hello, Diana, how are you doing?”, which took two seconds to say, followed by a two-second pause until the translation started. There was an apparent network delay, too, as Heinrichs seemed still to be listening after the translation heard on Pall’s end was complete.
The translations were spoken with mechanical voices, one male and one female, and simultaneous written translations appeared across the bottom of the screen. Microsoft says the application employs both Skype speech and instant messaging.
Not all the translation was perfect. One sentence spoken by Heinrichs was translated into English as, “I have many meetings with my colleagues in Redmond, and I take the opportunity to see her fiancée my.”
Skype Translate draws on technology demonstrated two years ago at a conference in China, Microsoft says. That demonstration translated the keynote spoken in English into Mandarin. It differed from the Skype demo in that the Mandarin translation mimicked the voice of the speaker, Rick Rashid, who was worldwide head of Microsoft Research at the time, according to a Microsoft Research blog.
The technology introduced at the time called for translating the spoken word into text, then translating that into Mandarin and reproducing it as speech using an algorithm that approximated the sound of Rashid’s voice.
Microsoft didn’t say what the process was beneath the covers for Skype Translate, but Nadella says it is a mix of speech recognition, machine translation and speech synthesis. “It’s not just about daisy-chaining these three technologies and bringing it together. In fact it’s this deep neural net that you build that synthesizes a model to be able to do speech recognition,” he says.

The underpinnings of the Skype Translate are also drawn upon to power Microsoft’s digital assistant, Cortana, that responds to oral queries with spoken answers.
Microsoft says it will have more details closer to the beta test about how many languages Skype Translate will support and how it becomes aware of what languages it is dealing with in each conversation.