Zoom announced that it is planning to roll out support for automatic closed captioning to free accounts this fall.
This is part of the company’s efforts to make the service more accessible.If you are a free account holder who needs the access to the feature before then, Zoom will be allowing users to manually request access to the Live Transcription feature via a Google Form linked in its announcement.
Automatic transcriptions are not a completely new Zoom feature. The service has offered AI-powered live transcription for all its paid accounts before. But now the feature will be available to millions of those that rely on Zoom’s free services.
Automatic closed captions are also available with other conferencing services such like Google Meet. Given how widely used Zoom became since the beginning of the pandemic, it’s great to see it adding more accessibility features.
Zoom plans to add automatic closed captioning for all free accounts
Spotify will let you filter your liked songs by genre and mood
Spotify is rolling out a new feature that will let users filter their liked songs by mood and genre. This way, you can enjoy more of what you like without compromising the vibe.
For example, I have songs that would be good in the dance club but also folk songs for relaxation, both are under my liked songs. This new feature would allow me to decide what mood I am in and then listen.
You have to have at least 30 liked songs to access the filters. Then, you can go to your library, tap into like songs, and select a filter listed across the top. You can remove the filter whenever you want and swap for a new one.Spotify says the filters will change as you like new songs. At the moment the feature will only roll out to English-speaking markets such as in the UK, US and Canada.
Twitter announces paid Super Follows
Twitter announced a big upcoming feature: the ability for users to charge their followers for access to additional content.
The payment feature is called Super Follows and it will allow Twitter users to charge followers and give them access to extra content; that could be access to a community group, bonus tweets, subscription to a newsletter, or even a badge indicating your support.Twitter showed an example in a mockup screenshot where a user charges $4.99 a month to receive a series of perks. Twitter sees this as a way to let publishers and creators get paid directly by their fans.
In recent years, Direct payments tools have become increasingly significant for creators. Patreon has been massively successful and other platforms such as Facebook, Github and Youtube.Twitter will presumably take a cut — the company has been hinting at subscriptions features that would offer it a new source of revenue — though it doesn’t appear to have said yet what that fee will be.
Wix.com hits 200 million users
Wix.com helps small businesses create and operate websites.
The company said on Thursday that it had reached 200 million users globally after adding by more than 31 million users in 2020.The increase comes amid a surge in demand from companies who want to create an online presence due to the pandemic.
At the end of 2020, Wix had 96.7 million subscribers, 5.5 million of which were premium subscriptions.
“The trend of businesses, brands and commerce moving online accelerated in 2020, and we believe this momentum will continue to 2021,” said Wix’s president Nir Zohar.
The Israeli company said it will continue to invest across multiple areas of business including infrastructure and product development.
Twitter is planning a feature to let you mute and auto-block abusive accounts
Twitter is planning to introduce a new way for users to automatically mute and block abusive accounts, the company at its Analyst Day presentation on Thursday. The feature will be a toggle you can turn on in a new “safety mode”.
Here’s Twitter’s description of how the toggle will work if you flip it on:
“Automatically block accounts that appear to break the Twitter Rules, and mute accounts that might be using insults, name-calling, strong language, or hateful remarks.”
With the new safety mode, Twitter will be able to automatically detect accounts that “might be active spammy or abusive” and limit how those accounts can engage with your content.
Twitter has historically had some tools in place to remove abusive tweets, and it said in 2019 that it removed more than 50 percent of abusive tweets before users report them.
NYPD deploys a Robot dog
In the video, The NYPD deploys a robotic dog equipped with cameras, lights, and transmitters. It can navigate using artificial intelligence.
Watch composer Yuzo Koshiro play his legendary chiptunes through an NEC PC-88
Yuzo Koshiro, the legendary gaming composer, has been posting nostalgic videos on Twitter playing songs he made or games like Streets of Rage, Streets of Rage 2, and the 8-Bit Game Gear and Sega Master System versions of Sonic The Hedgehog.And playing them using an NEC PC-88, the 39-year-old PC that was a popular gaming platform in Japan, as well as Koshiro’s machine of choice for creating music.
T-Mobile:How To Change your Advertising Settings
In this tutorial video, T-Mobile shows you how to update your T-Mobile account advertising settings to opt-out.
Now You can embed Pinterest Pins in OneNote and Microsoft Word
Microsoft now allows OneNote and Word for Web users to embed Pinterest Pins into their documents. The new feature will allow Pinterest users to paste a URL of any Pin into a Word document or OneNote page to render it as interactive content.
The embeds also work in Word, but only on the web version at the moment. You can now embed Pinterest content into a Word document online and will be displayed when you open the document on the web or mobile versions of Word.
Microsoft is targeting this new feature at schools and students, particularly the OneNote embeds for Pinterest. “Over the past few years, we have heard many requests for a Pinterest integration with OneNote,” explains Mike Tholfsen, a product manager on Microsoft’s education team.
Australia passes law requiring Google and Facebook to pay for new content
The Australian government has passed the law that requires Facebook and Google to negotiate with news outlets to pay for their content or face arbitration.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) says the law will address “a significant bargaining power imbalance between Australian news media businesses and Google and Facebook.”
The new code has seen fierce opposition from the two tech giants; the most vocal being Facebook, which temporarily blocked users and publishers from sharing news content on its main social network and only relented after the Australian government agreed to make a series of amendments to the proposed law.
The News Media Bargaining Code requires Google and Facebook to pay a negotiated fee to use or link news content and includes a mandatory arbitration process if an agreement on fees cannot be reached.It is the threat of arbitration that both Facebook and Google are hoping to avoid, a process in which an independent body decides the value of new content in search results and feeds.
However, amendments to the law mean the government can also take into account any commercial agreements a tech company has made with news publishers before formally designating it as a platform under the code. The law is due to be reviewed a year after it comes into effect to assess its impact.
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