🎙️ #42 - HeyGen’s AI Translation Steals The Show At Davos

Rick Huckstep & Shaun Weston demonstrate HeyGen’s AI language translation capabilities. Plus, OpenAI get into Education, the Mac turns 40, Samsung’s embedded AI and Perplexity’s Rabbit deal.

Jan 30, 2024

Episode 42/The Big Tech Little Tech Podcast

Hi BTLT listeners, episode 42 of the show is out now and ready to play where ever you listen to podcasts.

After our initial ramblings, Rick’s Tech of the Week is the 40 year anniversary of the Apple Mac computer. Even after all this time, the Mac still generates close to $30 billion a year in sales for Apple, and accounts for almost 1 in 10 computers sold worldwide. Shaun’s Tech was also Apple related, except that he went for the very latest feature in Apple Podcasts with automatic AI transcriptions for all shows.

Our first big story takes a look at what happened last week at Davos. The tech story that came out of the world leader’s annual get together was the AI real-time translation of the Argentinian President’s speech in Spanish. Using AI from HeyGen, the speech was translated into English, French and Mandarin whilst maintaining the mannerisms, expressions and voice of el presidente.

To demonstrate, Rick created samples of himself speaking fluent Spanish and Japanese. It’s worth listening to the show just for that!

Next we went onto talk about OpenAI’s partnership with Arizona State University, a smart first move by OpenAI as we see further moves towards AI integration into education. As we’ve said before, eventually, all students will have a one-on-one personalised AI tutor to help them navigate through school.

Given that Shaun and Rick talked about Perplexity and the Rabbit R1, which has now sold 50,000 units!, in the last show, the chaps needed to circle back around on the news that right after the last show went live, these two tech startups announced a partnership. PLUS…Perplexity is now available as the default search on the Arc browser, which Shaun loves and Rick doesn’t.

The point is that if you’re not yet using Perplexity for search, you need to start, it’s the future of search.

To close out the show, Shaun’s Award of the Week went to a Japanese writer who admitted to using ChatGPT to write some of her latest novel.

Rick’s Tech Hero of the Week was Gemini, the AI alternative to ChatGPT from Google that is now built into Samsung’s high end phones. Using only your finger to trace a circle, you can find out all you need to know about Gregory Porter’s hat…like, what’s it called! Click here to find the answer.

Thanks to all our new listeners and remember to keep sending us questions and feedback, you know that we respond to them all.

That’s all for this week, see you in episode 43.

ATB, Rick & Shaun

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🙏 Show Credits

➜ Additional music by Jason Shaw on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Audionautix.com⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Beatoven.ai⁠⁠⁠⁠, Alex-Productions at Soundcloud, and ⁠⁠⁠⁠Pixabay⁠⁠⁠⁠.

➜ Artwork created using Canva. The newsletter is created using Notion.

➜ Find out more about Rick Huckstep on his website and on LinkedIn.

➜ And more on Shaun Weston on his professional site and Linkedin profile.

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