DoNotPay, the AI lawyer for your inbox, now lets you report businesses for tax fraud

Here’s a cool one: DoNotPay, the legalese-trained email crawler that scours your inbox for ways to save you money (or earn you payouts from class action lawsuits), now helps you collect government tax fraud bounties. Natural language processing just keeps getting better. The software’s pretty simple to use. You open the DoNotPay client, input the details...

26m

Ableist capitalist individualism

Coronavirus in Context is a weekly newsletter where we bring you facts that matter about the COVID-19 pandemic and the technology trying to stop its spread. You can subscribe here. Hola pandemic pals, I saw an elderly gentleman selling face masks outside of a convenience store today. He shook hands with almost everyone who spoke to him as they passed.I...

2h

Are you a poet? / Google’s new AI will help / Rewrite your shit prose

If you’re an aspiring poet who doesn’t know your sonnets from your stanzas, a new Google AI app could transform you into a legendary wordsmith. Or at least, a decent impersonation of one. Verse by Verse is described by the Big G as “an experimental AI-powered muse that helps you compose poetry inspired by classic American poets.” It’s powered by a combination...

9h

10 unique tech holiday gifts you can get now with Black Friday discounts

TLDR: Check out these 10 unique gift ideas at early Black Friday prices that will help you win holiday gifting this year. With the holiday season already shaping up to be a strange one for many, consider this idea — be the person who gives the most strangely cool gifts. Like a record player that spins while the record lays flat. Or reusable paper. Or...

10h

Meshmerize is the winner of the Start-up Games

Digital Hub Initiative’s Start-up Games event was back again for a second edition on 29 October 2020. 10 of the most innovative up and coming startups from across Germany’s digital hubs were invited to pitch their ideas to a panel of five leading international VCs. But only one would come out on top... …and the winner was Dresden-based Meshmerize! ...

10h

Elon Musk eclipses Bill Gates to become the world’s second richest person

Elon Musk is now worth more than $128 billion, making him the second richest person in the world behind Amazon bald-king Jeff Bezos. Tesla’s chief exec barely eclipsed Microsoft’s Bill Gates to claim the number two position overnight, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index. Mostly, Musk’s gains can be attributed to Tesla‘s rampaging share price....

10h

Battle of the affordables: Pixel 4a vs OnePlus Nord vs Poco X3

In the Indian smartphone market, the ₹10,000-₹20,000 ($135-270) price bracket is extremely popular. Many folks get their first or second handset in that range. However, when they are upgrading, they might have to look for devices beyond the ₹35,000 ($470) mark to get a good value for money products. However this year, because of plenty of noteworthy...

12h

California paves way to let self-driving taxis charge for rides

Regulators in California have given the go ahead for self-driving taxis to charge riders for their services. The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has approved two programs: the Drivered Autonomous Vehicle Deployment Program and the Driverless Autonomous Vehicle Deployment Program, The Verge reports. According to the report, these programs...

14h

Targeting Trump fans, QAnon ad slips through Facebook’s filters

Despite Facebook’s efforts to tamp down on the fringe conspiracy QAnon movement, its backers are still finding ways to push its message on the platform — even paying Facebook to do so. Just days after announcing last month that it would ban QAnon theories from the site, Facebook allowed an advertisement featuring a cartoon Pepe the Frog — a character...

14h

The secret to powering web apps with full speech recognition

A few months ago, I wrote an article on web speech recognition using TensorflowJS. Even though it was super interesting to implement, it was cumbersome for many of you to extend. The reason was pretty simple: it required a deep learning model to be trained if you wanted to detect more words than the model I provided, which was pretty basic. For those...

15h