Every July 10 marks Nikola Tesla Day, celebrating the birthday of the inventor who helped electrify Western society. It should not be confused with Tesla Day, celebrated every day a runaway Cybertruck doesn’t kill anyone.
In today’s email:
Sounds cool: Meta’s new voice tech picks up on your vibes.
Koala Kare: How it rose to changing-table dominance.
Background check: The unlikely beginnings of Google Images.
Around the web: A handy metronome, a lip balm fail, and more.
👇 Listen: Why “quiet vacationing” is so popular with younger members of the workforce.
The Big Idea
Listening is so last year — Meta’s new tech wants to feel your voice
Meta wants to patent tech that uses vocal vibrations to authenticate users.
2024-07-10T00:00:00Z
Sara Friedman
Great news for the vocal fry community: Your vocal cord vibrations could soon be put to good use protecting your data.
Seriously. Meta filed a patent application for user authentication using a “combination of vocalization and skin vibration,” perPatent Drop.
That title is a mouthful, so let’s break it down:
Meta wants to replace the need for passwords or fingerprint scanning with voice authentication for accessing systems like its AR headset or smart glasses.
But AI has made impersonating someone’s voice really easy, with convincing voice cloning and deep fakes already swirling.
So Meta is taking voice authentication one step further by scanning the “vibration of tissue” during speech in addition to one’s voice.
When a user says a wake word, a “vibration measurement assembly” picks up the vibrations of their skin and the acoustic waves of their voice to authenticate them.
The combined dataset would create a unique audio fingerprint and, when built into headsets and glasses, would let users access their systems with a single word.
And while no one likes their password getting hacked, the stakes are getting a hell of a lot higher, with new tech poised to start harvesting data directly from our brains.
Sounds interesting
This patent is just the latest of Meta’s voice authentication tech. A separate “user identification with voice prints” patent application would see voice prints integrated into the two-factor authentication process for the company’s social media apps.
And Meta is far from the only company thinking about voice biometrics — the market is projected to hit 11.1B by 2032.
It will only become more important as AI companies crank out new voice generation tools, like OpenAI’s Voice Engine, which can clone someone’s voice using only a 15-second clip of them speaking, or ElevenLabs’ Reader App, which can clone celebrity voices.
Free Resource
How to stay current on emerging tech
You think you need less thought leadership on your news feed — but we think you just need a new mixture.
Stay on top of what’s making waves in tech, marketing, AI, entrepreneurship, and more. Here’s our list of 100 trusted sources.
This list covers a boatload of bona fide experts, from powerhouses like a16z and Fast Company to top voices across our media network.
A driverless Apollo Go car, operated by Baidu, struck a pedestrian in China. In the car’s defense, the pedestrian — who had no external injuries — was crossing the street during a green light.
SNIPPETS
Fed Chair Jerome Powellsays the central bank has started to discuss lowering interest rates, but gave few clues on the timeline. Such a tease, that Powell.
Have a Google account? Google will start traversing the dark web for you later this month, generating “Dark Web reports” that’ll flag if your personal data has been leaked online.
Etsy is cracking down on AI-generated products with new “Creativity Standards” that require sellers to label whether there was “human involvement” in making a product.
Spotify will start letting listeners leave comments on podcasts. Creators can approve the comments they want to appear, limit comments to specific episodes, or opt out entirely.
Ouch: Boeing sold just 14 new jets last month, and most were freighters. Only three were passenger planes and one barely counts — it was a replacement 737 for Alaska Airlines, which returned its famous January door-blowout plane.
McDonald’sUKrebranded Happy Meals to “The Meal” for its Mental Health Awareness Week. Now excuse us as we get our emotional support fries dipped in vanilla soft serve.
The Wall Street Journal is facing a lawsuit from a former reporter who alleges the paper, which “self-insures,” made up performance issues to lay off staff with high medical expenses.
Athletic Brewing, which commands 19%+ of the US nonalcoholic beer market, raised $50m as demand for booze alternatives surges.
The Boston Celtics are going for another title: Weeks after winning yet another NBA title, owner Wyc Grousbeck is selling the team with the lofty goal of setting a new record-high sale price for a sports franchise (the current record is $6.05B for the NFL’s Washington Commanders).
Don't miss this...
Doctors on retainer, scans on demand? Trends found two health care niches the semi-wealthy are ready to pay for, plus three opportunities to build a business around them.
ICYMI
The monopoly found in most public bathrooms
Back in 1986, there was a particularly shitty problem in need of a solution: There wasn’t anywhere good to change a diaper out in public.
Medical device salesman Jeff Hilger and some friends patented a fold-out station that could be mounted to a wall, birthing the ubiquitous Koala Kare changing table.
Today, Koala Kare’s estimated share of the US market is a monopolistic 85%.
But no monopoly is created equal. Some, like Koala Kare, grow organically, riding a cultural tide to decades of success. Others, like Google and Apple, face lawsuits from the FTC for anticompetitive practices.
So why are some monopolies able to flourish while others are scrutinized?
There are thousands of companies valued at $1B+. How many clues do you need to identify today’s billion-dollar brand?
Clue 1: This company came about in the early 1900s, started by German colonists who weren’t happy with their drink options while living in China.
Clue 2: Beer knows no borders — in 1993, this company became the first Chinese company to sell shares offshore with its IPO on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
Clue 3: Currently the world’s sixth-largest brewer, you can find its famed product — a crisp lager in a green bottle — in 100+ countries.
👇 Scroll to the bottom for the answer 👇
Background Check
How Jennifer Lopez inspired a Google product
Jennifer Lopez wore an iconic dress. Google noticed.
2024-07-10T00:00:00Z
Juliet Bennett Rylah
Google Images is great for a variety of tasks, from looking at cool birds to trying to determine which allergic reaction you’re having now. But did you know the catalyst for this tool was Jennifer Lopez?
The actress/musician famously wore a revealing green Versace dress to the 2000 Grammys, resulting in the “most popular search query we had ever seen,” ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt said.
Google, then two years old, was a text-based search engine with plans to add an image component, but the demand to see images of JLo showed the company what a priority that feature was.
Google enlisted engineer Huican Zhu and project manager Susan Wojcicki (now-former CEO of YouTube) to build it, and had it launched by July 2001. In its first year, Google Images managed to index ~250m images.
AROUND THE WEB
📅 On this day: In 2018, the last four members of a Thai soccer team and their coach were rescued from a cave network after being trapped for 17 days due to flooding at the cave’s entrance.
😱 That’s cool: Frodo the cat is the real star of A Quiet Place: Day One, but you can generate your own scary story set in the franchise.
🎧 Another Bite: Remembering a cringeworthy “Shark Tank” episode featuring chemical-heavy lip balms. (The product demonstration did not go well.)
Before the long weekend, we wrote about a no-tip influencer. And while he most definitely has tipping etiquette all wrong, there is a conversation to be had on a culture that might be a little out of control.
