Apple TV is heading into what looks like a strong year, with a lineup that includes returning series and a handful of new titles. But according to the report, the most consequential release may be the return of Ted Lasso, a show that once felt finished after its third season and is now back with a fourth season that works partly as a reset.

The season 3 ending in 2023 left several major characters in new places. Ted was set to return to the United States to spend more time with his son, Roy had taken over as head coach of AFC Richmond, Beard had married at Stonehenge, and Rebecca, Keeley, and Higgins were considering the idea of starting a women’s team. That setup gave the series the feel of a classic sitcom finale, and the last episode was even titled “So Long, Farewell.”

That women’s team is what brings the show back. In the season 4 premiere, Ted is working part-time at a grocery store so he can spend more time parenting, while Rebecca, Keeley, and Higgins travel to Kansas City to ask him to coach the new squad. The episode plays like a reunion, showing where everyone has landed and stretching Ted’s eventual decision across the full hour before the action shifts back to England.

From there, the series settles into a more familiar rhythm, even as it changes shape in important ways. Ted and much of the coaching and leadership group return, but the team itself is made up of new players. Familiar names like Jamie Tartt, Sam Obisanya, and Dani Rojas are absent from the episodes Apple shared with press, aside from brief references. In their place is a younger, scrappier roster, along with assistant coach Alice, who offers a sharper contrast to Ted’s upbeat style. It is a gamble to move away from popular characters, but early episodes reportedly preserve much of the charm that made the show such a hit.

Source: theverge.com

The post Ted Lasso’s return could give Apple TV a timely boost appeared first on toppoptoday.com.

Wispr Flow, best known for its dictation app, has rolled out a meeting notetaker for Mac that works in a Granola-like way, according to the report. Rather than joining a call as a participant, the tool uses system audio to capture what is being said and turn it into a transcript.

The new feature is designed to do more than just record conversation. Wispr Flow says it can clean up transcripts, generate action items, and surface insights from meetings. Users can also view a live transcript during the meeting and ask AI to catch them up, while the app lets them query across their meeting history.

The launch puts Wispr Flow in a crowded category alongside products such as Granola, Fireflies, Read AI, Otter, and Fathom. The company’s updated Terms of Service and privacy policy had already hinted at the feature, describing the kinds of meeting data it may process, including audio, participant information, metadata, speaker labels, and transcripts. The terms also say the output can include AI-generated summaries, action items, speaker attribution, and other meeting-related content.

According to the report, the move could give Wispr Flow more context about how people use its software and open the door to broader AI assistant features beyond dictation cleanup. It is still unclear whether the company intends to stick with a system-audio approach that avoids storing a recording, or whether it may eventually offer a fuller meeting recording product. Wispr Flow has raised more than $81 million so far and was last valued at $700 million, while Bloomberg reported in May that it was in talks for a new round at a $2 billion valuation.

Source: techcrunch.com

The post Wispr Flow adds a meeting notetaker that works from system audio appeared first on toppoptoday.com.

Maingear has unveiled a fresh wave of Zero pre-built PCs for shoppers who want a high-performance desktop with a cleaner, cable-free appearance without building one themselves. The company’s hidden-connection approach routes motherboard wiring to the rear of the system, keeping the inside of the case visually uncluttered. Maingear says the design uses its patented Rear Connector technology, which works with compatible motherboards and cases to move power and data connections out of sight.

With that layout, the visible interior is reduced to the CPU area, memory, cooling hardware, PCIe slots, and any lighting or decorative touches the owner wants to show off. Maingear says the new Zero systems push that idea further than any gaming PC it has made before. The Zero Launch Edition even adds space for figurines or brick collectibles inside the chassis, while an optional curved panoramic OLED screen on the AIO cooler can play looping video or be themed to match the rest of the setup.

The updated lineup also brings newer hardware. Top-tier configurations can be ordered with Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus or AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D processors and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 graphics. Those versions are priced at $6,199 and $6,499. For buyers looking lower in the range, the Zero Emerald and Zero Platinum models use Intel Core Ultra 5 250K or AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D chips with GeForce RTX 5070 graphics, starting at $2,799 and $2,999. Mid-range Zero Sapphire and Zero Elite systems pair Intel Core Ultra 7 270K or AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D processors with RTX 5080 GPUs, with starting prices of $3,799 and $4,099.

According to the report, all of the new Zero desktops are available now, including the limited-run Launch Edition.

Source: engadget.com

The post Maingear’s new Zero pre-built PCs hide the cables and add NVIDIA’s latest GPUs appeared first on toppoptoday.com.

For readers who have drifted away from ebooks, Amazon’s Kindle still has one major advantage: its growing library of short story collections. According to the report, Amazon’s Original Stories imprint has quietly built a large catalog of themed anthologies that often feature well-known authors, with a particular appeal for fans of genre fiction.

The newest release, called Magic and Mystery, arrived this week and brings together fantasy writers who each take on puzzle-box mystery stories, many involving murder. The collection follows earlier themed sets that have ranged from outer space to horror, and the stories are described as highly varied in how they interpret the central idea. Among the standouts mentioned are Travis Baldree’s Miss Gentle and the Case of the Very Flat Monk, which centers on an armored elderly detective, and Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Lion’s Tusk, which unfolds around a brutal killing at a royal wedding and a strikingly unusual murder weapon.

Other stories in the collection are highlighted for packing substantial worldbuilding into a short format. Heather Fawcett’s A Labyrinth of Honeybees introduces a fantasy setting shaped by ancient gods and competing religions, while Scott Lynch’s The Wizard Who Kept Himself Suspicious presents a long-established circle of magic users who have known one another for centuries and reunite every 13 years. The report says the appeal of these collections is twofold: they offer strong stories on their own while also giving readers a way to discover new authors and see established ones experiment with form and tone.

Past collections have featured writers including Min Jin Lee, Lauren Beukes, N. K. Jemisin, and Jeff VanderMeer, and one original six-part story from Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan is reportedly being adapted by Netflix. In that sense, Amazon’s short fiction line is presented as more than a side project for Kindle owners — it is one of the clearest reasons the device still matters for readers who want quick, inventive, genre-focused books.

Source: theverge.com

The post Why Amazon’s Kindle short story collections still stand out for readers appeared first on toppoptoday.com.

Some movies become beloved not because they work, but because they fail so spectacularly that they turn into something unforgettable. According to the report, Champagne and Bullets fits squarely into that category, joining the ranks of notorious cult curiosities like The Room, Troll 2, and Fateful Findings. Also known as GetEven and Road to Revenge, the film is described as a singularly strange creation built almost entirely around one man: John De Hart, who wrote, directed, and stars in it.

De Hart plays Rick Bode, a character who is introduced in a film that quickly veers into absurd territory. Early on, he performs a song called “Shimmy Slide,” and the report notes that the scene is awkward enough on its own. But the movie keeps escalating. Bode and his partner Huck Finney lose their badges almost immediately, setting off Finney’s rapid breakdown amid a divorce and a series of increasingly bizarre choices, including firing a handgun through his bills and drinking bleach to avoid prison. The story also brings in Bode’s former girlfriend Cindy, who is said to be running from a satanic coven that sacrificed a human baby.

Although it is framed as an action movie, the report says the fight scenes are sparse and staged with little realism. Instead, the film appears far more interested in lingering on sex scenes and musical numbers performed by De Hart. Three lengthy scenes with Pamela Bryant, who plays Cindy, reportedly account for 12 minutes of the 90-minute runtime. One jacuzzi sequence even reportedly contributed to a breakup between De Hart and his girlfriend at the time. The report also includes a warning that one scene not involving De Hart and Bryant depicts sexual assault.

For viewers drawn to notorious failures, cult oddities, or shows and podcasts that celebrate disastrously made films, Champagne and Bullets is presented as essential viewing. According to the report, it is available on Hoopla, Amazon Prime, and Tubi.

Source: theverge.com

The post Why Champagne and Bullets has earned a place among the worst cult movies ever made appeared first on toppoptoday.com.

In a warehouse in San Leandro, California, Encord is experimenting with a new twist on robot training data: a headset that tracks a human pilot’s brain waves while he completes a simple Jenga-like task. The company, which already helps robotics firms annotate and evaluate data, is now trying to produce the kind of physical-world training material that many AI systems still lack.

That headset comes from Zander Labs, a German neuroscience startup that believes brain activity can reveal useful signals such as intent, error and surprise. Encord is currently treating the project as a trial. The plan is to build a small brain wave-tagged dataset, test whether it improves customer robotics models, and only then decide whether it is worth expanding. According to Zander neuroscientist Lucas Gehrke, the amount of brain activity seen during a task may also help model builders determine when to reserve their most capable systems for the hardest moments.

For Encord, the bigger story is the data bottleneck facing robotics. Vineeth Velmurugan, who leads robot learning at the company, says the challenge is no longer just model design but the lack of enough real-world examples to train them. He says many customers have shifted toward end-to-end learning for manipulation tasks, which means companies increasingly need to create their own datasets instead of simply organizing existing ones. In his view, the needed scale is enormous — roughly five times the size of YouTube’s video corpus — which is one reason data generation has become a business of its own.

Encord is collecting that data in several ways. One stream comes from “egocentric” video captured by workers wearing cameras, often paired with other sensors. Another comes from remote-controlled robots. At the San Leandro site, pilots were using leader-follower robotic arms to record tasks such as pouring coffee, stacking poker chips and handling ethernet cables in a server rack. The facility also stores props like fake flowers, books, plastic vegetables, kitty litter trays and bundles of wires to simulate household manipulation jobs. Velmurugan says many humanoid robotics teams have asked for these kinds of datasets.

The company is also testing forearm sensors that measure electrical signals in muscles, with the goal of reconstructing hand position more accurately than video alone can. Encord then adds detailed physical labels to its datasets, such as describing a motion as “right hand tightens bolt.” Velmurugan says that level of dense annotation can be far more valuable than basic ego video when training robots for specific tasks.

Source: techcrunch.com

The post Why brain waves could become the next big ingredient in physical AI training appeared first on toppoptoday.com.

Synthesia is taking its AI training business in a new direction. The British startup, best known for helping companies quickly produce training videos with AI avatars, has introduced a more interactive product aimed at live practice rather than passive viewing.

Called Roleplay Sessions, the new offering lets employees rehearse situations such as sales pitches, performance reviews, and customer complaints with an AI avatar that responds in real time, challenges their answers, and then evaluates them using a rubric. According to the report, Roleplay is the first product in a larger Sessions platform, which Synthesia plans to extend to other areas such as job interviews and candidate screening.

The launch reflects a broader shift in enterprise AI, where companies are increasingly focused on whether tools actually improve performance. Synthesia says its view is that training works best when people actively practice a skill and receive feedback, rather than simply watching a video or reading material. The company argues that its new format is designed to capture that behavior change and provide measurable results.

That measurement angle also gives Synthesia a more strategic position in the market. While its avatar and voice technology are proprietary, the reasoning layer behind the system comes from OpenAI. By adding rubrics, performance data, and analytics on top, Synthesia is presenting the product less as a video generator and more as a platform for tracking and improving employee performance. The company says early customers already include major enterprises, and the most common uses are sales training and leadership development, especially around soft skills.

For now, Roleplay is being sold to enterprise customers, but Synthesia expects to broaden access in the coming months to smaller businesses, prosumers, and possibly educational institutions as inference costs decline. The company’s pitch is that the next phase of AI adoption will be judged less by flashy demonstrations and more by whether the software delivers measurable business outcomes.

Source: techcrunch.com

The post Synthesia’s training tools are adding live AI coaching to the mix appeared first on toppoptoday.com.

According to the report, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds returns for a fourth season with the same willingness to experiment that has defined the series from the start. The show keeps shifting between genres and tones, and this new run reportedly leans even more heavily into parody-style episodes than into straightforward Star Trek storytelling. One of the season’s most publicized ideas is a puppet episode created with Jim Henson Studios, but the rest of the season also appears to be built around bold, offbeat concepts.

That said, the review argues that the show does not always trust those ideas enough to let them breathe. Several episodes reportedly spend so much time explaining or justifying their own premise that they lose some of the energy that makes the format fun in the first place. The season also continues to include the heavier gore and body-horror elements associated with Alex Kurtzman’s Trek projects, which the report says can feel out of place in a series that many viewers may see as the main Star Trek title of the moment.

Another recurring complaint is the amount of attention given to Paul Wesley’s Jim Kirk, which the review says has grown more tiring over time. Even so, the season is not without major highs. The sixth episode is described as a standout and, in the reviewer’s view, one of the strongest entries in the franchise’s long history. It is praised as a tense, effective thriller that still works despite the fact that it is set in a prequel timeline where the characters’ survival is already known.

Overall, the fourth season is presented as a familiar Strange New Worlds experience: uneven, occasionally excessive, but still charming and ambitious. According to the report, even when the series misses, it remains one of the most distinctive live-action Star Trek shows of the streaming era, and its strongest episodes make the risks feel worthwhile.

Source: engadget.com

The post ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ season 4 keeps taking risks, for better and worse appeared first on toppoptoday.com.

France is taking another step to limit access to Polymarket. The country’s gambling watchdog, the Autorité Nationale Des Jeux (ANJ), said this week that it has instructed internet service providers to block the prediction market site for users in France.

The move builds on an earlier action from November 2024, when the ANJ put a financial geoblock in place to stop residents from making transactions on the platform. Even with that restriction, the agency said Polymarket continued to attract traffic from France because some users found ways around the block. According to the ANJ, French residents logged 578,751 visits to the site in June, including 205,057 unique visits.

In its latest statement, the regulator again described Polymarket as an illegal gambling site and signaled that enforcement may intensify. The ANJ also noted that people who advertise unauthorized betting or gambling services can face fines of up to 100,000 euros, or about $114,000.

France’s action comes as other governments are also moving against prediction markets. Spain has ordered access blocked to both Polymarket and Kalshi while it reviews whether they violate gambling laws, while Minnesota has passed a bill banning prediction markets from operating in the state. Other states in the US are also pursuing legal action against Polymarket and Kalshi, according to the report.

Source: engadget.com

The post France tightens its block on Polymarket access appeared first on toppoptoday.com.

Author Dave Eggers reportedly turned a speaking invitation from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman into a sharp critique of the company’s flagship chatbot. According to the Financial Times, Eggers addressed about 200 OpenAI employees last year and argued that ChatGPT is harming education in a major way.

In the remarks quoted by the report, Eggers said the tool has made teachers’ lives “infinitely more difficult” and called its effect on educators “catastrophic.” He also warned that if students rely on it to write for them, they may never develop writing skills of their own. In his view, that would leave young people without the ability to express their own truth or tell their own stories, which he described as “silencing an entire generation or two.”

The report notes that Altman likely knew Eggers would not be a soft touch. Eggers’ novel The Circle is widely seen as a critique of the tech world, and he has previously dismissed AI-generated writing as “pastiche nonsense.”

Source: theverge.com

The post Dave Eggers reportedly used an OpenAI talk to blast ChatGPT’s impact on writing appeared first on toppoptoday.com.

Apple TV is heading into what looks like a strong year, with a lineup that includes returning series and a handful of new titles. But according to the report, the most consequential release may be the return of Ted Lasso, a show that once felt finished after its third season and is now back with a fourth season that works partly as a reset.

The season 3 ending in 2023 left several major characters in new places. Ted was set to return to the United States to spend more time with his son, Roy had taken over as head coach of AFC Richmond, Beard had married at Stonehenge, and Rebecca, Keeley, and Higgins were considering the idea of starting a women’s team. That setup gave the series the feel of a classic sitcom finale, and the last episode was even titled “So Long, Farewell.”

That women’s team is what brings the show back. In the season 4 premiere, Ted is working part-time at a grocery store so he can spend more time parenting, while Rebecca, Keeley, and Higgins travel to Kansas City to ask him to coach the new squad. The episode plays like a reunion, showing where everyone has landed and stretching Ted’s eventual decision across the full hour before the action shifts back to England.

From there, the series settles into a more familiar rhythm, even as it changes shape in important ways. Ted and much of the coaching and leadership group return, but the team itself is made up of new players. Familiar names like Jamie Tartt, Sam Obisanya, and Dani Rojas are absent from the episodes Apple shared with press, aside from brief references. In their place is a younger, scrappier roster, along with assistant coach Alice, who offers a sharper contrast to Ted’s upbeat style. It is a gamble to move away from popular characters, but early episodes reportedly preserve much of the charm that made the show such a hit.

Source: theverge.com

The post Ted Lasso’s return could give Apple TV a timely boost appeared first on toppoptoday.com.

Wispr Flow, best known for its dictation app, has rolled out a meeting notetaker for Mac that works in a Granola-like way, according to the report. Rather than joining a call as a participant, the tool uses system audio to capture what is being said and turn it into a transcript.

The new feature is designed to do more than just record conversation. Wispr Flow says it can clean up transcripts, generate action items, and surface insights from meetings. Users can also view a live transcript during the meeting and ask AI to catch them up, while the app lets them query across their meeting history.

The launch puts Wispr Flow in a crowded category alongside products such as Granola, Fireflies, Read AI, Otter, and Fathom. The company’s updated Terms of Service and privacy policy had already hinted at the feature, describing the kinds of meeting data it may process, including audio, participant information, metadata, speaker labels, and transcripts. The terms also say the output can include AI-generated summaries, action items, speaker attribution, and other meeting-related content.

According to the report, the move could give Wispr Flow more context about how people use its software and open the door to broader AI assistant features beyond dictation cleanup. It is still unclear whether the company intends to stick with a system-audio approach that avoids storing a recording, or whether it may eventually offer a fuller meeting recording product. Wispr Flow has raised more than $81 million so far and was last valued at $700 million, while Bloomberg reported in May that it was in talks for a new round at a $2 billion valuation.

Source: techcrunch.com

The post Wispr Flow adds a meeting notetaker that works from system audio appeared first on toppoptoday.com.

Maingear has unveiled a fresh wave of Zero pre-built PCs for shoppers who want a high-performance desktop with a cleaner, cable-free appearance without building one themselves. The company’s hidden-connection approach routes motherboard wiring to the rear of the system, keeping the inside of the case visually uncluttered. Maingear says the design uses its patented Rear Connector technology, which works with compatible motherboards and cases to move power and data connections out of sight.

With that layout, the visible interior is reduced to the CPU area, memory, cooling hardware, PCIe slots, and any lighting or decorative touches the owner wants to show off. Maingear says the new Zero systems push that idea further than any gaming PC it has made before. The Zero Launch Edition even adds space for figurines or brick collectibles inside the chassis, while an optional curved panoramic OLED screen on the AIO cooler can play looping video or be themed to match the rest of the setup.

The updated lineup also brings newer hardware. Top-tier configurations can be ordered with Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus or AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D processors and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 graphics. Those versions are priced at $6,199 and $6,499. For buyers looking lower in the range, the Zero Emerald and Zero Platinum models use Intel Core Ultra 5 250K or AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D chips with GeForce RTX 5070 graphics, starting at $2,799 and $2,999. Mid-range Zero Sapphire and Zero Elite systems pair Intel Core Ultra 7 270K or AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D processors with RTX 5080 GPUs, with starting prices of $3,799 and $4,099.

According to the report, all of the new Zero desktops are available now, including the limited-run Launch Edition.

Source: engadget.com

The post Maingear’s new Zero pre-built PCs hide the cables and add NVIDIA’s latest GPUs appeared first on toppoptoday.com.

For readers who have drifted away from ebooks, Amazon’s Kindle still has one major advantage: its growing library of short story collections. According to the report, Amazon’s Original Stories imprint has quietly built a large catalog of themed anthologies that often feature well-known authors, with a particular appeal for fans of genre fiction.

The newest release, called Magic and Mystery, arrived this week and brings together fantasy writers who each take on puzzle-box mystery stories, many involving murder. The collection follows earlier themed sets that have ranged from outer space to horror, and the stories are described as highly varied in how they interpret the central idea. Among the standouts mentioned are Travis Baldree’s Miss Gentle and the Case of the Very Flat Monk, which centers on an armored elderly detective, and Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Lion’s Tusk, which unfolds around a brutal killing at a royal wedding and a strikingly unusual murder weapon.

Other stories in the collection are highlighted for packing substantial worldbuilding into a short format. Heather Fawcett’s A Labyrinth of Honeybees introduces a fantasy setting shaped by ancient gods and competing religions, while Scott Lynch’s The Wizard Who Kept Himself Suspicious presents a long-established circle of magic users who have known one another for centuries and reunite every 13 years. The report says the appeal of these collections is twofold: they offer strong stories on their own while also giving readers a way to discover new authors and see established ones experiment with form and tone.

Past collections have featured writers including Min Jin Lee, Lauren Beukes, N. K. Jemisin, and Jeff VanderMeer, and one original six-part story from Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan is reportedly being adapted by Netflix. In that sense, Amazon’s short fiction line is presented as more than a side project for Kindle owners — it is one of the clearest reasons the device still matters for readers who want quick, inventive, genre-focused books.

Source: theverge.com

The post Why Amazon’s Kindle short story collections still stand out for readers appeared first on toppoptoday.com.

Some movies become beloved not because they work, but because they fail so spectacularly that they turn into something unforgettable. According to the report, Champagne and Bullets fits squarely into that category, joining the ranks of notorious cult curiosities like The Room, Troll 2, and Fateful Findings. Also known as GetEven and Road to Revenge, the film is described as a singularly strange creation built almost entirely around one man: John De Hart, who wrote, directed, and stars in it.

De Hart plays Rick Bode, a character who is introduced in a film that quickly veers into absurd territory. Early on, he performs a song called “Shimmy Slide,” and the report notes that the scene is awkward enough on its own. But the movie keeps escalating. Bode and his partner Huck Finney lose their badges almost immediately, setting off Finney’s rapid breakdown amid a divorce and a series of increasingly bizarre choices, including firing a handgun through his bills and drinking bleach to avoid prison. The story also brings in Bode’s former girlfriend Cindy, who is said to be running from a satanic coven that sacrificed a human baby.

Although it is framed as an action movie, the report says the fight scenes are sparse and staged with little realism. Instead, the film appears far more interested in lingering on sex scenes and musical numbers performed by De Hart. Three lengthy scenes with Pamela Bryant, who plays Cindy, reportedly account for 12 minutes of the 90-minute runtime. One jacuzzi sequence even reportedly contributed to a breakup between De Hart and his girlfriend at the time. The report also includes a warning that one scene not involving De Hart and Bryant depicts sexual assault.

For viewers drawn to notorious failures, cult oddities, or shows and podcasts that celebrate disastrously made films, Champagne and Bullets is presented as essential viewing. According to the report, it is available on Hoopla, Amazon Prime, and Tubi.

Source: theverge.com

The post Why Champagne and Bullets has earned a place among the worst cult movies ever made appeared first on toppoptoday.com.

In a warehouse in San Leandro, California, Encord is experimenting with a new twist on robot training data: a headset that tracks a human pilot’s brain waves while he completes a simple Jenga-like task. The company, which already helps robotics firms annotate and evaluate data, is now trying to produce the kind of physical-world training material that many AI systems still lack.

That headset comes from Zander Labs, a German neuroscience startup that believes brain activity can reveal useful signals such as intent, error and surprise. Encord is currently treating the project as a trial. The plan is to build a small brain wave-tagged dataset, test whether it improves customer robotics models, and only then decide whether it is worth expanding. According to Zander neuroscientist Lucas Gehrke, the amount of brain activity seen during a task may also help model builders determine when to reserve their most capable systems for the hardest moments.

For Encord, the bigger story is the data bottleneck facing robotics. Vineeth Velmurugan, who leads robot learning at the company, says the challenge is no longer just model design but the lack of enough real-world examples to train them. He says many customers have shifted toward end-to-end learning for manipulation tasks, which means companies increasingly need to create their own datasets instead of simply organizing existing ones. In his view, the needed scale is enormous — roughly five times the size of YouTube’s video corpus — which is one reason data generation has become a business of its own.

Encord is collecting that data in several ways. One stream comes from “egocentric” video captured by workers wearing cameras, often paired with other sensors. Another comes from remote-controlled robots. At the San Leandro site, pilots were using leader-follower robotic arms to record tasks such as pouring coffee, stacking poker chips and handling ethernet cables in a server rack. The facility also stores props like fake flowers, books, plastic vegetables, kitty litter trays and bundles of wires to simulate household manipulation jobs. Velmurugan says many humanoid robotics teams have asked for these kinds of datasets.

The company is also testing forearm sensors that measure electrical signals in muscles, with the goal of reconstructing hand position more accurately than video alone can. Encord then adds detailed physical labels to its datasets, such as describing a motion as “right hand tightens bolt.” Velmurugan says that level of dense annotation can be far more valuable than basic ego video when training robots for specific tasks.

Source: techcrunch.com

The post Why brain waves could become the next big ingredient in physical AI training appeared first on toppoptoday.com.

Synthesia is taking its AI training business in a new direction. The British startup, best known for helping companies quickly produce training videos with AI avatars, has introduced a more interactive product aimed at live practice rather than passive viewing.

Called Roleplay Sessions, the new offering lets employees rehearse situations such as sales pitches, performance reviews, and customer complaints with an AI avatar that responds in real time, challenges their answers, and then evaluates them using a rubric. According to the report, Roleplay is the first product in a larger Sessions platform, which Synthesia plans to extend to other areas such as job interviews and candidate screening.

The launch reflects a broader shift in enterprise AI, where companies are increasingly focused on whether tools actually improve performance. Synthesia says its view is that training works best when people actively practice a skill and receive feedback, rather than simply watching a video or reading material. The company argues that its new format is designed to capture that behavior change and provide measurable results.

That measurement angle also gives Synthesia a more strategic position in the market. While its avatar and voice technology are proprietary, the reasoning layer behind the system comes from OpenAI. By adding rubrics, performance data, and analytics on top, Synthesia is presenting the product less as a video generator and more as a platform for tracking and improving employee performance. The company says early customers already include major enterprises, and the most common uses are sales training and leadership development, especially around soft skills.

For now, Roleplay is being sold to enterprise customers, but Synthesia expects to broaden access in the coming months to smaller businesses, prosumers, and possibly educational institutions as inference costs decline. The company’s pitch is that the next phase of AI adoption will be judged less by flashy demonstrations and more by whether the software delivers measurable business outcomes.

Source: techcrunch.com

The post Synthesia’s training tools are adding live AI coaching to the mix appeared first on toppoptoday.com.

According to the report, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds returns for a fourth season with the same willingness to experiment that has defined the series from the start. The show keeps shifting between genres and tones, and this new run reportedly leans even more heavily into parody-style episodes than into straightforward Star Trek storytelling. One of the season’s most publicized ideas is a puppet episode created with Jim Henson Studios, but the rest of the season also appears to be built around bold, offbeat concepts.

That said, the review argues that the show does not always trust those ideas enough to let them breathe. Several episodes reportedly spend so much time explaining or justifying their own premise that they lose some of the energy that makes the format fun in the first place. The season also continues to include the heavier gore and body-horror elements associated with Alex Kurtzman’s Trek projects, which the report says can feel out of place in a series that many viewers may see as the main Star Trek title of the moment.

Another recurring complaint is the amount of attention given to Paul Wesley’s Jim Kirk, which the review says has grown more tiring over time. Even so, the season is not without major highs. The sixth episode is described as a standout and, in the reviewer’s view, one of the strongest entries in the franchise’s long history. It is praised as a tense, effective thriller that still works despite the fact that it is set in a prequel timeline where the characters’ survival is already known.

Overall, the fourth season is presented as a familiar Strange New Worlds experience: uneven, occasionally excessive, but still charming and ambitious. According to the report, even when the series misses, it remains one of the most distinctive live-action Star Trek shows of the streaming era, and its strongest episodes make the risks feel worthwhile.

Source: engadget.com

The post ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ season 4 keeps taking risks, for better and worse appeared first on toppoptoday.com.

France is taking another step to limit access to Polymarket. The country’s gambling watchdog, the Autorité Nationale Des Jeux (ANJ), said this week that it has instructed internet service providers to block the prediction market site for users in France.

The move builds on an earlier action from November 2024, when the ANJ put a financial geoblock in place to stop residents from making transactions on the platform. Even with that restriction, the agency said Polymarket continued to attract traffic from France because some users found ways around the block. According to the ANJ, French residents logged 578,751 visits to the site in June, including 205,057 unique visits.

In its latest statement, the regulator again described Polymarket as an illegal gambling site and signaled that enforcement may intensify. The ANJ also noted that people who advertise unauthorized betting or gambling services can face fines of up to 100,000 euros, or about $114,000.

France’s action comes as other governments are also moving against prediction markets. Spain has ordered access blocked to both Polymarket and Kalshi while it reviews whether they violate gambling laws, while Minnesota has passed a bill banning prediction markets from operating in the state. Other states in the US are also pursuing legal action against Polymarket and Kalshi, according to the report.

Source: engadget.com

The post France tightens its block on Polymarket access appeared first on toppoptoday.com.

Author Dave Eggers reportedly turned a speaking invitation from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman into a sharp critique of the company’s flagship chatbot. According to the Financial Times, Eggers addressed about 200 OpenAI employees last year and argued that ChatGPT is harming education in a major way.

In the remarks quoted by the report, Eggers said the tool has made teachers’ lives “infinitely more difficult” and called its effect on educators “catastrophic.” He also warned that if students rely on it to write for them, they may never develop writing skills of their own. In his view, that would leave young people without the ability to express their own truth or tell their own stories, which he described as “silencing an entire generation or two.”

The report notes that Altman likely knew Eggers would not be a soft touch. Eggers’ novel The Circle is widely seen as a critique of the tech world, and he has previously dismissed AI-generated writing as “pastiche nonsense.”

Source: theverge.com

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