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Facebook to invest in audio with short-form Soundbites feature, podcast support and a Clubhouse clone

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Facebook today officially reported a suite of new audio products — a sign that it’s taking the threat from Clubhouse and other audio platforms all the more genuinely. The organization is accomplishing something other than building its own take on Clubhouse, notwithstanding, it’s likewise announcing tools that permit podcast creators to share long-form audio, a new Spotify integration for music and a brand-new short-form experience called Soundbites.

The Clubhouse clone was presumably the most-examined of the new products in front of the present declaration, given the expanded interest in the audio networking market.

Like Clubhouse, the Facebook experience will likewise involve live audio rooms, where clients can participate in effective conversations.

“I think the areas where I’m most excited about it on Facebook are basically in the large number of communities and groups that exist. I think that you already have these communities that are organized around interests, and allowing people to come together and have rooms where they can talk is — I think it’d be a very useful thing,” said Zuckerberg, in a friendly interview with Platformer, timed alongside the official announcement. “When we launched video rooms earlier last year, groups and communities were one of the bigger areas where that took off. So, I think around audio, just given how much more accessible it is, that’ll be a pretty exciting area as well.”

The Live Audio Rooms will be accessible across both Facebook and Messenger, Facebook says in an authority blog entry.

The organization will first test Live Audio Rooms in Quite a while, arriving at Groups’ 1.8 billion month to month clients. They’ll likewise be made accessible to public figures and experts. Early adopters of the component will include American football quarterback Russell Wilson, Grammy-assigned electronic music craftsman TOKiMONSTA, craftsman and chief Elle Moxley and five-time Olympic medalist and business person Nastia Liukin, Facebook says.

Live Audio Rooms will be accessible to everyone on Facebook this summer. Likewise this mid year, Live Audio Rooms will be made accessible on Messenger, for an experience that permits companions to hang out, as well.

In addition to products that rehash audio functionality available in tech products from different organizations, Zuckerberg likewise uncovered that the organization was working on an audio-only version of its TikTok competitor Instagram Reels that permits clients to rapidly travel through algorithmically arranged short brief snippets, a venture being called Soundbites. In its blog entry, Facebook nitty gritty that they will test Soundbites throughout the following not many months with a little gathering of makers prior to making it widely available.

“The idea here is it’s short-form audio clips, whether it’s people sharing things that they find funny… or kind of pithy things that people want to share that cover a bunch of different genres and topics,” Zuckerberg said.

For podcast creators, Zuckerberg said the organization will work out instruments for the individuals who finish web recordings and makers Facebook Pages, yet don’t presently have an approach to get to podcast content through the social network. He noticed that there are presently 170 million Facebook clients who are associated with a Page for a digital broadcast, which is the reason it needs to guarantee they have an approach to get to this audio content more easily.

For these clients, they’ll have the option to find the audio and start playing it, even behind the background. Or then again they could decide to launch a second app to continue to play it, Zuckerberg said. We comprehend that the experience will really permit clients to straightforwardly open Spotify, on the off chance that they would like to tune in to the music or audio there, all things considered.

The feature will likewise assist users with new podcast discovery dependent on your inclinations, and clients will actually want to remark on digital broadcasts and prescribe them to companions.

Identified with these audio efforts, Zuckerberg referenced Facebook’s partnership with Spotify, which is currently being extended with something it has inside alluded to as “Project Boombox” — a combination that would permit individuals to share content from their favorite artists, playlists and other types of audio in their feed. That substance would then show up in a little, in-line player for others to snap and play.

We comprehend from sources acquainted with the Spotify integration that this player will uphold both music and webcasts. It has effectively been tried in non-U.S. markets, including Mexico and Thailand. It’s required to show up in about seven days.

“Facebook’s interest in audio is further validation of the category and reinforces what we’ve known all along — the power and potential for audio is limitless,” a spokesperson for Spotify told TechCrunch. “Our ambition has always been to make Spotify ubiquitous across platforms and devices — bringing music and podcasts to more people — and our new integration with Facebook is another step in these efforts. We look forward to a continued partnership with Facebook, fueling audio discovery around the world,” they added.

Zuckerberg additionally referred to the need to serve the growing creator economy with its new products.

With Live Audio Rooms, fans will actually want to support creators through Stars, Facebook’s existing in-app tipping feature, or give to causes. Facebook says it will later offer other monetization tools like access to Live Audio Rooms on memberships. There’s additionally an Audio Creator Fund being made accessible to commence the dispatch of Soundbites.

The executive likewise talked about Facebook’s plans for a pamphlet item, all under the umbrella of serving the maker local area with a suite of tools — something Twitter is currently doing, as well, with its plans for Super Follow.

“I think a product where a journalist or a creator can basically create a subscription for people who want to follow them, that spans both a newsletter and a podcast, is going to be a really powerful thing,” said Zuckerberg. “So that’s a big part of what we’re going to enable with some of the monetization tools around podcasts. That dovetails with the work that we’re planning to do…our work on our newsletters and giving tools for for independent journalists. I think enabling both of those things to come together on extremely favorable terms to journalists and creators, will be a pretty powerful thing,” he noted.

The item launches, which Vox scooped on Sunday, demonstrate how genuinely Facebook considers the disruption to its dominance that could be attributed to the developing number of where fans connect with creators. The danger for Facebook today isn’t only another application like Clubhouse or Substack’s pamphlets or even Patreon, however the way that the creator economy, by and large, isn’t being centralized and owned by Facebook itself.

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OpenAI Launches SearchGPT, a Search Engine Driven by AI

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The highly anticipated launch of SearchGPT, an AI-powered search engine that provides real-time access to information on the internet, by OpenAI is being made public.

“What are you looking for?” appears in a huge text box at the top of the search engine. However, SearchGPT attempts to arrange and make sense of the links rather than just providing a bare list of them. In one instance from OpenAI, the search engine provides a synopsis of its discoveries regarding music festivals, accompanied by succinct summaries of the events and an attribution link.

Another example describes when to plant tomatoes before decomposing them into their individual types. You can click the sidebar to access more pertinent resources or pose follow-up questions once the results are displayed.

At present, SearchGPT is merely a “prototype.” According to OpenAI spokesman Kayla Wood, the service, which is powered by the GPT-4 family of models, will initially only be available to 10,000 test users. According to Wood, OpenAI uses direct content feeds and collaborates with outside partners to provide its search results. Eventually, the search functions should be integrated right into ChatGPT.

It’s the beginning of what may grow to be a significant challenge to Google, which has hurriedly integrated AI capabilities into its search engine out of concern that customers might swarm to rival firms that provide the tools first. Additionally, it places OpenAI more squarely against Perplexity, a business that markets itself as an AI “answer” engine. Publishers have recently accused Perplexity of outright copying their work through an AI summary tool.

OpenAI claims to be adopting a notably different strategy, suggesting that it has noticed the backlash. The business highlighted in a blog post that SearchGPT was created in cooperation with a number of news partners, including businesses such as Vox Media, the parent company of The Verge, and the owners of The Wall Street Journal and The Associated Press. “News partners gave valuable feedback, and we continue to seek their input,” says Wood.

According to the business, publishers would be able to “manage how they appear in OpenAI search features.” They still appear in search results, even if they choose not to have their content utilized to train OpenAI’s algorithms.

According to OpenAI’s blog post, “SearchGPT is designed to help users connect with publishers by prominently citing and linking to them in searches.” “Responses have clear, in-line, named attribution and links so users know where information is coming from and can quickly engage with even more results in a sidebar with source links.”

OpenAI gains from releasing its search engine in prototype form in several ways. Additionally, it’s possible to miscredit sources or even plagiarize entire articles, as Perplexity was said to have done.

There have been rumblings about this new product for several months now; in February, The Information reported on its development, and in May, Bloomberg reported even more. A new website that OpenAI has been developing that made reference to the transfer was also seen by certain X users.

ChatGPT has been gradually getting closer to the real-time web, thanks to OpenAI. The AI model was months old when GPT-3.5 was released. OpenAI introduced Browse with Bing, a method of internet browsing for ChatGPT, last September; yet, it seems far less sophisticated than SearchGPT.

OpenAI’s quick progress has brought millions of users to ChatGPT, but the company’s expenses are mounting. According to a story published in The Information this week, OpenAI’s expenses for AI training and inference might total $7 billion this year. Compute costs will also increase due to the millions of people using ChatGPT’s free edition. When SearchGPT first launches, it will be available for free. However, as of right now, it doesn’t seem to have any advertisements, so the company will need to find a way to make money soon.

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Google Revokes its Intentions to stop Accepting Cookies from Marketers

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Following years of delay, Google has announced that it will no longer allow advertisers to remove and replace third-party cookies from its Chrome web browser.

Cookies are text files that websites upload to a user’s browser so they can follow them around when they visit other websites. A large portion of the digital advertising ecosystem has been powered by this practice, which makes it possible to track people across many websites in order to target ads.

Google stated in 2020 that it would stop supporting certain cookies by the beginning of 2022 after determining how to meet the demands of users, publishers, and advertisers and developing solutions to make workarounds easier.

In order to do this, Google started the “Privacy Sandbox” project in an effort to find a way to safeguard user privacy while allowing material to be freely accessible on the public internet.

In January, Google declared that it was “extremely confident” in the advancement of its plans to replace cookies. One such proposal was “Federated Learning of Cohorts,” which would essentially group individuals based on similar browsing habits; thus, only “cohort IDs”—rather than individual user IDs—would be used to target them.

However, Google extended the deadline in June 2021 to allow the digital advertising sector more time to finalize strategies for better targeted ads that respect user privacy. Then, in 2022, the firm stated that feedback had indicated that advertisers required further time to make the switch to Google’s cookie replacement because some had resisted, arguing that it would have a major negative influence on their companies.

The business announced in a blog post on Monday that it has received input from regulators and advertisers, which has influenced its most recent decision to abandon its intention to remove third-party cookies from its browser.

According to the firm, testing revealed that the change would affect publishers, advertisers, and pretty much everyone involved in internet advertising and would require “significant work by many participants.”

Anthony Chavez, vice president of Privacy Sandbox, commented, “Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they’d be able to adjust that choice at any time.” “We’re discussing this new path with regulators and will engage with the industry as we roll it out.”

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 Samsung Galaxy Buds 3 Pro Launch Postponed Because of Problems with Quality Control

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At its Unpacked presentation on July 10, Samsung also debuted its newest flagship buds, the Galaxy Buds 3 Pro, with the Galaxy Z Fold 6, Flip 6, and the Galaxy Watch 7. Similar to its other products, the firm immediately began taking preorders for the earphones following the event, and on July 26th, they will go on sale at retail. But the Korean behemoth was forced to postpone the release of the Galaxy Buds 3 Pro and delay preorder delivery due to quality control concerns.

The Galaxy Buds 3 Pro went on sale earlier this week in South Korea, Samsung’s home market, in contrast to the rest of the world. However, allegations of problems with quality control quickly surfaced. These included loose case hinges, earbud joints that did not sit flush, blue dye blotches, scratches or scuffs on the case cover, and so on. It appears that the issues are exclusive to the white Buds 3 Pro; the silver devices are working fine.

Samsung reportedly sent out an email to stop selling Galaxy Buds 3 Pros, according to a Reddit user. These problems appear to be a result of Samsung’s inadequate quality control inspections. Numerous user complaints can also be found on its Korean community forum, where one consumer claims that the firm would enhance quality control and reintroduce the earphones on July 24.

 A Samsung official stated. “There have been reports relating to a limited number of early production Galaxy Buds 3 Pro devices. We are taking this matter very seriously and remain committed to meeting the highest quality standards of our products. We are urgently assessing and enhancing our quality control processes.”

“To ensure all products meet our quality standards, we have temporarily suspended deliveries of Galaxy Buds 3 Pro devices to distribution channels to conduct a full quality control evaluation before shipments to consumers take place. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.”

Should Korean customers encounter problems with their Buds 3 Pro devices after they have already received them, they should bring them to the closest service center for a replacement.

Possible postponement of the US debut of the Galaxy Buds 3 Pro

Samsung seems to have rescheduled the launch date and (some) presale deliveries of the Galaxy Buds 3 Pro in the US and other markets by one month. Inspect your earbuds carefully upon delivery to make sure there are no issues with quality control, especially if your order is still scheduled for July.

The Buds 3 Pro is currently scheduled for delivery in late August, one month after its launch date, on the company’s US store. Additionally, Best Buy no longer takes preorders for the earphones, and Amazon no longer lists them for sale.

There are no quality control difficulties affecting the Buds 3, and they are still scheduled for delivery by July 24, the day of launch. Customers of the original Galaxy Buds 3 Pro have reported that taking them out is easy to tear the ear tips. Samsung’s delay, though, doesn’t seem to be related to that issue.

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