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Review: Bird Hub

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₹106,599, birdai.com

Most of us are still in a hybrid work environment, and remote collaborations have increasingly become part of our lives. There is now more than one way to collaborate, but at the enterprise level, you need a reliable and fixed solution that can be deployed within a short span of time and that offers scalability in a conference room environment. Bird Hub is such a collaboration hub that is complete in itself and yet can be deployed with minimum hassles.

The Bird Hub can be attached to any display, even the ones with the slimmest bezels. I used it with a Sony Bravia TV on review. There are foam paddings on both sides to keep the mount from causing any damage to the bezel or screen. A flexible arm with a Velcro-type hook-and-loop fastener tape on the flat end shifts most of the weight to the back of the TV. The device has two cameras — one facing you and one facing the screen. The screen doesn’t require a touch interface since the touch detection and interactive functions are handled by an EyeRIS 3-D Dual-band Optical sensor. At the back of the device are the I/O ports and slots — HDMI, USB 3.0, Micro SD, DC In, LAN, and USB Type-C. The device offers Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity. The supplied Air Mouse allows you to control the device wirelessly and point and click. The mouse also houses an alphanumeric keyboard. An infrared pen is also supplied with the device. Installation support is provided, but if you choose to install the device yourself, once connected, the device straightaway takes you to the calibration screen. The Bird Hub has to be mounted at the exact centre of the screen and you get a position indicator on the screen. Calibration is as simple as tapping on the sequentially appearing dots with the pen. You may need to do manual calibration if the pen is not recognised on the launcher screen. The device also supports BYOD mode to connect with any laptop via a single USB-C cable.  

The hub recognises faces automatically and the 4K UHD camera intelligently frames and zooms in to the presenter. The camera captures a wide area of the room with amazing clarity, which ensures that everyone is included in the frame. The far-field multi-microphone array offers noise cancellation. The system uses a four-microphone array that offers adaptive beamforming, full-duplex acoustic echo cancellation with barge-in support, de-reverberation, and automatic gain control. The mics are capable of capturing voice from a 5m radius and offer Voice Activity Detection and Direction of Arrival.

The Bird Hub uses an Android interface complete with a built-in collaborative whiteboard and PlayStore to download apps. The device uses a 3.2 GHz 64-bit Hexacore ARM processor along with 4GB RAM and 16 GB onboard storage. The storage can be expanded up to 128 GB. An AI NPU supports intelligent features. The hub offers multiple-screen–sharing with remote users and supports Airplay and Miracast. You can share the content wirelessly across up to four screens. The Bird Hub supports popular collaboration platforms including MS Teams, Skype, BlueJeans, Google Hangouts, Zoom, and Slack.

<strong>Rating</strong>

WE’RE IMPRESSED Works with any screen with HDMI input, clear visuals, hassle-free set-up, supports a wide range of platforms

WE’D IMPROVE Better documentation and troubleshooting guide

THE LAST WORD This collaboration hub makes every screen an intelligent interactive unit complete with a full suite of connectivity options.

How AI Has Transformed the Gaming Industry

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Ever since the emergence of AI in the gaming industry, game developers have been programming software in a manner so that it acts as if it’s human and helps in making the digital world from the scratch through non-playable characters. However, at present, even the most out-of-the-box game design doesn’t spin around modern AI. Rather, it revolves around making a bunch of mind-boggling frameworks that result in emergent gameplay, which refers to complex situations in video games that emerge from the interaction of relatively simple game mechanics. The majority of the developers are making efforts in the direction of creating a sense of realism instead of game-breaking outcomes. The objective, in the end, is not to attain human-like intelligence, rather, it is to generate an experience that draws in and stimulates in a manner that imitates reality. Several giant game developing studios are gradually trying to push the envelope with regards to building frameworks that achieve the complexity of reality.

Although it may seem like Artificial Intelligence is a recent innovation in video games, it has been a developing resource for decades. It was incepted in the 1950s, and ever since those early years, AI has been an integral part of the gaming industry that has inclined to an incredible level of growth and development. Let’s explore further how AI transformed the gaming sector.

Smarter non-player characters (NPCs)

AI game developers make the best use of the technology by controlling the conduct of NPCs today. Earlier when the games didn’t have the opportunity to leverage AI, they used to become exhausting after playing for some time as it kept getting easier to defeat because of their anticipated behaviour. The real excitement and thrill of playing video games come from rivalling NPCs that respond erratically and surprise the players. Envision an FPS game in which enemies are equipped for breaking down their surroundings so that they can track down what’s significant for their endurance or make moves that seize your intelligent moves to increase their odds of winning. Moreover, imagine a scenario where they can learn from their behaviour and can seek shelter, perceive sounds and patterns, speak with one another and move in a manner you never saw or expected. Having new encounters despite playing such games numerous times keeps gamers energized and captivated to continue to return. A pioneer in game development can assist you with building such games that gamers enjoy playing for extended periods. The advent of AI has provided opponents with the capacity to securely explore in a dynamic environment without colliding with different entities.  

Real-time customisation

AI has redesigned the general gaming experience by continuous customisation of situations. Besides, AI makes a game more interactive by enhancing the experience of playing. For example, in case your team is losing, it will urge the fans to support your team to lift the morale and cause your players to perform better. Such a tendency of AI has now taken the general gaming experience to an all-new level.  

The shift in difficulty levels

Another excellence of AI-planned video games is player-experience modelling, which implies giving tailor-made insight to players in real-time according to their level of mastery. For instance, if the gamer is inexperienced, the AI possesses the potential to change its level and turn on the easy mode so that s/he doesn’t get baffled or exasperated for not being sufficiently equipped to make further progress in the game. Conversely, if s/he is an expert-level player, the AI will make the game difficult so that the player doesn’t get exhausted or bored. It can also determine the intent of a player through gesture recognition which empowers players to convey and cooperate with video games normally with no mechanical gadgets. 

Generation of procedural content

The technology has allowed the developers to consequently produce creative content, similar to scenes, things, levels, rules and quests. The gamers can now create weapons and armour based on the character level if they utilise procedural content generation in quest-driven games.

Summing Up 

The inception of Artificial Intelligence has made video gaming a lot more exciting as it has the power to provide unprecedented situations by altering the flow and force of the games. It would be more than appropriate to say that there’s nothing preferable for a player over getting fantastic as well as challenging experience simultaneously. As the future unfurls, we are going to witness an ever-increasing number of games with AI regulators which will improve the experience of the end-users like never before. Furthermore, AI will prove to be a testing ground for the developers to work on their code and configuration for creating an avant-garde game. Certainly, AI solutions have transformed the Indian gaming industry for the better. 

About the Author

Stewart Neal is the Studio Director of Sumo India Studios, an award-winning network of game development studios. With over 22 years of experience in the gaming industry, Stewart leads Sumo India’s Pune and Bangalore studios.  

Bobble AI introduces a Marathi keyboard with their dedicated ‘Animated Bigmojis’

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Recognising the challenges faced by many across India, who converse primarily in their local languages, Bobble AI have announced the launch of a keyboard designed specifically for those who speak Marathi – making it easier to communicate and send messages during the extremely popular festival of Ganesh Chaturthi.

Dedicated to the 70-million-plus Marathi speaking community in India, the Marathi keyboard is also integrated with dedicated ‘Animated Bigmojis’, which enables users to send magnified emojis from the emoji panel by pressing on the emoji longer. Bobble AI also is the first to introduce this feature into keyboards and for the occasion of Ganesh Chaturthi which starts in 2 days, they have also featured special emojis of Ganapati Bappa/Lord Ganesh.

When it comes to functionality, Bobble’s Marathi keyboard is one of the newest Marathi input tools out there for phones running on Android. Users are able to text in Marathi, either by typing in Marathi or through the keyboard’s impressive English to Marathi translator. More so, Bobble’s Marathi keyboard also has the unique capability of autocorrecting, which understands the user’s intent.

Bobble AI have also mentioned that, ‘there is automated word prediction on local phrases like tumcha svāgat aso, tu kasā āhes, su-prabhāt pūnhā bhetū,lavakar barē vhā! Abhinandana, among many others’.

To make life easier, Bobble’s Marathi keyboard has an incredible speech recognition software that can recognise the authentic Marathi accent and convert it into well-versed text messages, thus, allowing users the luxury of not typing at all.

The users can create their personalised cartoon avatar through the ‘Cartoon Head and with merely a selfie can access to 1000’s of stickers and GIFs.

“Bobble AI empowers millions of Indians to communicate in 100+ languages and expressive content. The company is actively creating more stickers, gifs, and memes for regional consumption, as a result, the adoption of regional languages has been taking place in every millisecond. The Marathi keyboard is introduced because there was a need for such medium, after all, there is nothing more authentic and persuasive than what one friend says to another”, says Ankit Prasad, Founder and CEO, Bobble AI.

Bobble AI’s Marathi keyboard is available for Android users and can be downloaded through this link.

For more information, please visit the Marathi keyboard’s dedicated web page or this page.

Microsoft acquires SwiftKey for $250 million

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In a pivotal move from Microsoft, the tech giant purchased SwiftKey for a reported $250 million following their recent announcement to create an intelligent cloud platform. This directly relates to how SwiftKey improves and learns from user keystrokes stored in the cloud, which explains Microsoft’s interest in it.

The deal mutually benefits both parties as their interests align to create a better cloud and AI synergy.

Founders Jon Reynolds and Ben Medlock started developing SwiftKey in 2008 in an effort to create a time-efficient typing solution. SwiftKey works on the principle of the AI predicting the next word the user intends to write and bases this on context rather than relying fully on previous usage history.

SwiftKey launched in 2010 on Android and the iOS version followed suit four years later. The company estimates that it has spared its users of approximately 10 trillion keystrokes across 100 languages, saving more than 1,00,000 years in combined typing time.

[Via SwiftKey Blog]