CES, the annual trade show of all things tech, kicks off this week in Las Vegas.
Swaths of the latest gadgets and advances across industries like personal tech, transportation, health care, sustainability and more are set to be on display. And, like last year, artificial intelligence is everywhere you look.
The golden CES ticket
It seems like everyone at CES on Tuesday wanted to end up at the Sphere.
For a concert? Not exactly. It was for the Delta CEO’s keynote.Not everyone snagged a ticket.
Doors for the massive tech show had just opened Tuesday morning at the Venetian expo center and already hundreds — maybe more — were in line at Delta’s will-call booth for a ticket.
The situation wasn’t any better at the ticket booth at the Las Vegas Convention Center.
The keynote began at 5 p.m. Even if you weren’t one of the lucky ones who got a ticket, you knew it was about to start. The Sphere’s exterior displayed a Delta plane flying around the world.
People hurried to the Venetian expo center’s glass doors to record it on their phones. Inside at an information booth, a man asked why he wasn’t allowed into the event.
“Sorry, there were limited seats,” the man behind the booth said.
Delta CEO Ed Bastian announced the airline’s new AI personal travel assistant, a travel and wellness show hosted by Tom Brady, and partnerships with YouTube for in-flight entertainment and Uber for rides and food deliveries that will help customers earn Delta miles. Bastian was welcomed to the stage by actress Viola Davis.
A better translator?
I don’t speak Polish. But after using an AI-powered language translator, I had no problem understanding what the person standing next to me was saying when he told me that he wanted to see if the device in his hand could correctly interpret what he was saying despite the loud piano next to us. (It did, I think.)
The Q1 language translator, from translating brand Vasco, allows users to record their own voices across languages. Voice cloning tech then preserves your speaking style — cadence, tone — and translates it.
The company said that their tech can be used for companies that do business overseas, or in the medical field. Keeping a uniform voice across languages, they said, could be especially helpful for patients who have dementia and who may be confused or startled by a different voice speaking to them than what they are used to.
To test it, I spoke Persian into the device and had it speak back to me in English. It not only faithfully interpreted what I said, but also said it in a voice that sounded very much like my own.
Ever drive an EV? You can test it out at CES
Have you noticed the difference between driving an electric vehicle and one with a combustion engine?
Fast Effect, in partnership with American Axel and Manufacturing (AAM), designed a digital engagement simulator showing users the difference between driving an EV and a gas-powered car.
CES attendees can spend time driving through an imaginary terrain through hills and winding roads with the varying vehicle types.
Bonding with the Ropet
Walking around the Venetian expo, I found a fuzzy pink friend hidden among the construction and smart home booths dotting the hall: a cute AI robot meant to be pet.
Ropet uses sensors that help the furry companion interact with whoever’s holding it. It has customizable eye colors and can be outfitted with different types of accessories, like a little crown.
The pet is warm to the touch and vibrates when you pet it, letting you know it likes your attention. Just don’t forget to feed it! Mine liked bananas.
Part of the culture of CES this year?
People are waiting in long lines to see some of the biggest names in tech unveil their latest products. At the nvidia keynote Monday night, thousands lined up to catch CEO Jensen Huang discuss what’s next for the chipmaker. Michelob Ultra Arena was packed like a concert, and some attendees lined up two hours before the talk was scheduled to begin.
Delta’s Tuesday keynote at the massive Sphere venue spawned long lines hours before it began — and the wait wasn’t even to get inside. Hundreds of people were lined up hoping to snag a ticket to the event. One woman at the back of the line said she’d been waiting for 45 minutes, and hundreds were still ahead of her in the queue.
X CEO excited that Meta is scrapping fact checking
Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of Elon Musk’s X, told an audience at CES that it’s “really exciting” and validating that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is scrapping the company’s professional fact-checking program in favor of crowd-sourced “community notes.”
The program lets X users write fact checks on posts after the users are accepted as contributors. The checks are then rated by other users based on their accuracy, sources, how easily they are to understand, and whether they use neutral language. The crowd-sourced fact-checking program was launched in 2021 by the previous leadership of the site — then known as Twitter — and was called Birdwatch. Musk renamed it Community Notes after he took over the site in 2022. Yaccarino lauded the program, saying it “inspires great behavior,” and posts that have community notes are less likely to be shared.
Yaccarino also said that X is growing “everywhere we look” and advertisers are returning to the platform. While this may be the case, analyst firms including Emarketer have noted that those advertisers are not spending at the same levels as they did before Musk’s takeover.
Yaccarino also took the time to criticize traditional news outlets,
“When we look at the sad, challenged state of journalism today” — including “constant layoffs,” she said, the “future of news is not legacy media.”
“Legacy media news has become almost like a fan service to make sure you speak to a niche audience to make your budget,” she said, adding that X is a “great place” for journalists to “thrive and earn a great living.”
