Summary Bullets:

• Enterprises and organizations have long ignored business continuity / disaster recovery (BC/DR)

• BC/DR is a fundamental business duty like insurance, not an optional expense

Yesterday, French cloud provider OVH suffered a fire in one of its data center complexes in Strasbourg, France. It entirely destroyed one unit, damaged another and caused the shutdown of the rest of the units on site. Thankfully, no one was hurt and OVH is working on restoring service. But an entire data center is gone, along with parts of another. Not down, burned. Gone. Fried. No realistic chance of recovery, not anytime soon if at all. The fire was so hot the metal walls of the building deformed. Continue reading “After a Fire Isn’t the Time to Buy Extinguishers” →

Summary Bullets:

• Custom Neural Voice can be trained to generate natural language that sounds like a specific person.

• Microsoft has considered the implications of Custom Neural Voice and prioritizes responsible use of the technology but the solution underscores the urgency for discussions related to Responsible AI.

Microsoft recently announced general availability, in limited access (use cases subject to Microsoft approval) of Custom Neural Voice, a service that uses artificial intelligence to generate natural language (enabling computers to ‘speak’). The achievement is quite impressive because of the level of customization it offers. Enabling computers to talk isn’t new, but what does raise eyebrows is that Custom Neural Voice can be trained to generate natural sounding speech that mimics a person. And not just a fictional person – but a specific individual. Continue reading “Microsoft’s Voice Mimicking Achievement Takes Natural Language Generation to New Levels, Albeit Controversial” →