Google is celebrating Translate’s 20th birthday by launching pronunciation practice, which the company says is one of the most requested features for the product. The feature is only rolling out on Android at the moment for English, Spanish and Hindi in the US and India. If it’s available for you, you’ll see a button at the bottom of the app that says “Practice,” which gives you the option to either “pronounce” what you’ve translated or to “listen” to how it’s actually pronounced by native speakers.
If you choose the “pronounce” option, Translate will listen to you speak and then use artificial intelligence to analyze how you said the words to provide instance feedback. It will then show you a phonetic spelling of how specific words should be pronounced. In the example Google provided, for instance, the speaker pronounced the Spanish word for juice as “jugo” with the English “j” sound instead of with the Spanish “j” sound. So, Translate spells it out as “HU-go” in its pronunciation suggestion.
Google said around third of users on mobile use Translate to practice speaking and listening in order to be able to hold real-world conversations, making this new feature a very useful addition. The company also revealed other stats about the app. Apparently, it now supports over 250 languages, including some endangered and indigenous ones, and has over 1 billion monthly user who have been translating over 1 trillion words every month.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/google-translate-uses-ai-to-help-you-practice-pronunciation-160000542.html?src=rss
The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) union has accused Apple of unlawfully discriminating against the unionized employees of the company’s Towson, Maryland retail store. IAM has filed an unfair labor practice charge against Apple with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) after the company announced on April 9 that it was shutting down three of its US stores. One of those locations was the Towson retail outlet, which employed nearly 90 workers and became the first Apple Store in the country to unionize back in 2022.
In its complaint, IAM said that Apple didn’t offer the employees it represents the transfer opportunities it provided to non-unionized employees from its other stores. Unlike those non-represented employees, Towson personnel were allegedly told that they had to reapply for positions through the same process as external candidates. “Apple is denying union-represented workers the same opportunities it is giving to others — and doing so because these workers chose to organize,” the organization said. “That is discrimination, and it is exactly what federal labor law is designed to prevent.”
In addition to the Towson location, Apple also shut down its stores in Trumbull, CT, Escondito, CA. Back when the closures were announced, IAM said that “Apple’s claim that the collective bargaining agreement prevents relocation is simply false and raises serious concerns that [the] closure is a cynical attempt to bust the union.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/union-accuses-apple-of-unlawful-discrimination-against-represented-workers-094531505.html?src=rss
Tesla completely ended its free lifetime Supercharging offer way back in 2018, but it has given customers the perk for certain promotions since then. It brought back free Supercharging for Model S and X a couple of times in 2019, for instance. The automaker’s latest offer is for new purchases for a Model 3 Premium or Performance vehicle in North America. On its website, Tesla has announced that it’s including one year of free supercharging with a Model 3 Premium or Performance, though the offer is “subject to change or end at any time.”
As Electrek notes, this is a nice freebie to have but most likely not a deciding factor for people who charge at home. For those who don’t have access to a home charger, however, this could represent significant savings.
The free Supercharging offer starts at delivery and cannot be postponed or redeemed for cash. Owners will also still have to pay certain fees, such as congestions fees that the automaker adds if a vehicle remains plugged into a Supercharger after its battery reaches 80 percent when a site is busy. The offer doesn’t apply to vehicles used for commercial purposes, such as ridesharing, taxi and delivery services, as well. As for those who traded in their gas vehicles to get the 2,000-mile Supercharging incentive, they can enjoy this freebie first and redeem those miles after their first year of ownership.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/evs/tesla-is-giving-away-one-year-free-supercharging-with-model-3-premium-and-performance-purchases-144431817.html?src=rss
DeepSeek has released its latest AI models, the V4 Pro and Flash versions, a bit over a year after it went viral and became the top rated free app on Apple's App Store in the US. “Welcome to the era of cost-effective 1 million context length,” DeepSeek said in its announcement. Context length is what you call the maximum number of tokens that an AI model can remember, so the bigger it is, the more coherent and consistent an AI is when it comes to extended conversations. OpenAI’s recently announced GPT‑5.5 has a context window ranging from 400,000 to 1 million, for instance.
The new model is still open-source, allowing users to download its code and modify it if they want. DeepSeek says V4 Pro has enhanced agentic capabilities and claims that it rivals top closed-source models when it comes to reasoning. It also says that it trails only Gemini-3.1-Pro in rich world knowledge. Meanwhile, V4 Flash isn’t quite as powerful as the V4 Pro, but it has faster response times. Still, its reasoning abilities closely approach V4 Pro, DeepSeek says, and it performs on par with with the Pro version on simple Agent tasks.
Shortly after DeepSeek topped the App Store charts, it was banned for use by US federal agencies and on government-owned devices. Authorities believed it was a national security risk and posed a threat to US AI stocks. South Korea also paused downloads of its app over privacy concerns.
🚀 DeepSeek-V4 Preview is officially live & open-sourced! Welcome to the era of cost-effective 1M context length.
🔹 DeepSeek-V4-Pro: 1.6T total / 49B active params. Performance rivaling the world's top closed-source models. 🔹 DeepSeek-V4-Flash: 284B total / 13B active params.… pic.twitter.com/n1AgwMIymu
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/deepseek-promises-its-new-ai-model-has-world-class-reasoning-115733512.html?src=rss
Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, has announced the launch of custom timelines, which lets you curate what you see on your feed based on your topics of interest. He called the update “one of the biggest changes to X” and a ”huge undertaking” that took the team “many months” to develop. The feature lets you pin specific topics to your home tab, so you can switch from one to the other to see the latest discussions about your interests and hobbies.
Bier said that X’s custom timelines is “powered by Grok's understanding of every post with the algorithm's personalization.” You have 75 topics to choose from, including food, art, photography, business, finance, movies and TV. As you’d expect, the personalization aspect of the feature works better if it’s a topic you already engage with regularly. X’s new feature is similar to Bluesky’s and Threads’ custom feeds, which also allow you to pin topic-based timelines to the home screens of the apps, and which their users have been enjoying since 2023 and 2024, respectively.
At the moment, X’s custom timelines is still in its early access phase and is only available to Premium subscribers on iOS. It will be rolling out to Premium users on Android “very soon,” as well. Bier has also announced that X has released a tool to snooze topics on the For You tab. With the tool, you’ll be able to hide certain topics, such as politics or sports, for 24 hours from your feed. It’s now available for Premium users on iOS and the web.
Ladies and gentlemen, today we're launching one of our biggest changes to 𝕏
Introducing Custom Timelines
This feature allows you to pin a specific topic to your home tab. With support for over 75 topics, you can dive deep into your favorite niche on X.
Rob Bonta, the Attorney General of California, has released an unredacted copy of a legal document that the state filed in relation to its lawsuit against Amazon, containing details of the company’s alleged price fixing scheme. In it, the state of California accuses the e-commerce company of reaching out to brands and asking them to “fix” the retail prices of their products on competitors’ websites. Due to Amazon’s “overwhelming bargaining leverage” and out of fear of punishment, the brands agree to raise their products’ prices on other retailers like Walmart and Target or to remove them altogether, the filing reads.
California filed an antitrust lawsuit accusing Amazon of price fixing back in 2022. It said the company prevented sellers from offering lower prices on other sites and that vendors risked losing buy buttons and prominent listings if they defied Amazon. In February this year, Bonta filed for a preliminary injunction, asking the court to put a stop to Amazon’s “illegal conduct” while the state’s lawsuit is ongoing and waiting to go to trial next year.
In the unredacted filing, California said that Amazon instructs vendors and brands to increase their prices on other retailers and threatens them with “significant penalties for failure to comply.” State officials gave several examples in the filing, including one incident wherein Amazon allegedly emailed security systems provider Arlo.
The company talked to Arlo about “external price matching,” along with a screenshot of one of its cameras on Walmart, noting that its price of $549.93 “did not go back up.” Arlo reportedly responded that it would get it addressed, and Amazon told the company to “get [it] corrected by EOD.” Afterward, Arlo sent Amazon a screenshot, showing the same Walmart page now listing the camera’s price at $649.99. Amazon ended the conversation by thanking Arlo for its “quick action.” Other samples include Amazon asking Levi’s to “resolve” the lower prices of its khaki pants on Walmart and Hanes to increase the prices of its clothing items on Walmart and Target.
Amazon shrugged off the filing’s release and called California’s case against the company weak. “The Attorney General’s motion is a transparent attempt to distract from the weakness of its case, coming more than three years after filing its complaint and based on supposedly ‘new’ evidence it has had for years,” an Amazon spokesperson told Engadget. “Amazon is consistently identified as America’s lowest-priced online retailer, and we’re proud of the low prices customers find when shopping in our store. Amazon looks forward to responding in court at the appropriate time.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/amazon-allegedly-pressured-companies-to-raise-product-prices-with-other-retailers-115302642.html?src=rss
If Instagram has been turning your color photo posts into black and white recently, don’t worry, there’s no problem with your camera or your account. The Meta-owned app has confirmed to Engadget that the issue is caused by a bug that’s affecting HDR photos in particular. "Earlier today, a technical issue caused some HDR photos to appear incorrectly as black-and-white for a subset of accounts,” Instagram has told us. However, we see complaints dated April 18 and 19, so the issue has been going on a bit longer for some people.
Regardless of when the bug started causing problems, the Instagram team said it has since corrected the issue. If your posts are still showing up in black and white, Instagram said the fix will automatically turn your affected photo posts back to their original state over the next few hours. “We apologize for any inconvenience,” they added.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/instagram-says-a-bug-turned-your-photos-black-and-white-061802389.html?src=rss
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