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Tech News Today for April 24, 2017

Tech News for Monday April 24, 2017

Sling Media is adding to its Sling arsenal with a new piece of video production hardware called SlingStudio that’s aimed at video producers who are looking to spruce up their Facebook Live and YouTube Live streams. The SlingStudio hub can accept up to 10 video feeds from wired and wireless cameras and smartphones. Those are fed into the software interface running on an iPad that enables an operator to live switch between those feeds as well as play back pre-recorded video. The kit and accessories will hit shelves sometime in May for $999. Read more at techcrunch.com.

Thanks to viewer Jerome who sent us this next story with the subject line, "No more need for live podcasters." Jerome pointed us to the PC Magazine piece on Lyrebird, software that claims to be able to recreate anyone's voice with just one minute of audio tape. You can also design your own voice and Lyrebirds GPU clusters generate 1000 sentences in less than half a second for real-time voice generation. You can also synthesize the emotion to create a voice that sounds angry or stressed or even sympathetic. So, if you have a hard time showing compassion toward someone and you want to fake it, this is the software for you. Lyrebird addresses the ethical issues the software brings up and says that by releasing the technology publicly and making it available to anyone they hope to mitigate risks the software creates. Read more at pcmag.com

Google’s Jump system, its cloud production suite for stitching together stereoscopic 360 degree videos, is getting a hardware upgrade. Google showed off the new Yi Halo VR camera rig at NAB that is built with 16 Yi Technology action cameras mounted spherically as well as an additional upward facing camera. The Yi Halo includes an LCD screen for managing the battery and onboard sensors. The camera rig will release this Summer for $17,000. Read more at variety.com.

Congratulations to Astronaut Peggy Whitson who has set a new NASA record. As of 1:27 a.m. eastern on Monday, Whitson has spent 534 days in space. She's currently living at the International Space Station where she was greeted by phone this morning by President Donald Trump, his daughter Ivanka and NASA astronaut Kate Rubins. According to CNN, Whitson is the first woman to command the space station and she's commanded it twice. Among other questions, Trump asked Whitson for a timeline to getting to Mars and she gave a timeline of the 2030s. Read more at npr.org.

DJI launched its new First Person video goggles that they call, well, Goggles, that look strikingly similar to any number of traditional VR goggles on the market today. Goggle are of course meant to work in tandem with DJI’s drones, allowing the pilot to get first person video streamed back while they fly their crafts in real time. Goggles will begin shipping on May 20th for $499. Read more at techcrunch.com.

Megan Morrone and Jason Howell will be joined today by Iain Thomson from The Register to talk about the service Unroll.me which sold user information to Uber. Tech News Today streams live weekdays at 4PM Pacific, 7PM Eastern at twit.tv/live. You can subscribe to the show and get it on-demand at twit.tv/tnt.

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