Roli, the modular musical instrument business backed by Pharrell Williams and Grimes, has entered administration in the UK, the company has confirmed. It will now relaunch as Luminary, with an emphasis on beginning rather than professional musicians, the company said. 

Luminary will be led by Roli founder and CEO Roland Lamb. Roli had approximately 70 employees who will move to Luminary, which will also retain Roli's intellectual property and assets. However, Roli raised some $76 million from institutional investors, some of whom will lose their money, according to the report. 

The company launched with the Seaboard modular keyboard and Blocks modular system designed to let you play tunes, tap out beats and do loops while recording music with an iPhone or iPad. It followed up with Lumi Keys, an electric light-up piano designed to help novices learn to play. 

Luminary

However, Lamb said that the company's early focus on professional musicians and tinkerers limited its potential for growth. "Ultimately, what happened was the pro-focused products we initially developed, although successful within their marketplace, the marketplace wasn't big enough given our venture trajectory," he told Business Insider. In 18 months up to June 30th 2019, the company lost £34.1 million ($47.1 million) on revenue of just £11.4 million ($15.8 million). 

As such, Luminary will now focus on learning to read music and play piano with the aim of becoming "Peloton for piano." To that end, it will offer the $300 Lumi Keys keyboard and an $80 yearly app subscription, along with a basic free tier. It will also relaunch the Seaboard, which has been out of stock recently. "I've learned a lot about how to operate in new ways that are better... so I'm excited about this next stage," Lamb said. 

Spotify has announced that it's taking over the audio section of Delta's in-flight seatback entertainment by offering its most popular playlists along with 42 select podcast series starting on September 1st. While it doesn't mean that you'll get random access to all Spotify content, you'll get a decent selection of popular music and podcasts from the streaming service. 

The content is "licensed directly by Delta and free for all passengers," and includes podcasts like Crime Junkie, Science Vs, StartUp, The Dave Chang Show, The Hottest Take, The Journal and more. Not surprisingly, several of those are Spotify originals. For playlists, you'll get access to selections like Mood Booster, Are & Be, Hot Country, mint, Today’s Top Hits, Relax & Unwind, RapCaviar and Ultimate Indie. That should provide a pretty broad mix of popular music, though likely nothing too eclectic. 

The deal is an extension to Delta's arrangement with Spotify that started in 2019. At that point, however, Delta only offered a limited selection of Spotify podcasts like The Pitch,Homecoming and Dope Labs. Now, it appears that Delta's audio mix is all Spotify, albeit in a limited way — an interesting development in the relationship. 

Twitch streamers are planning to step away from the platform on September 1st for a day of protest, the Washington Post has reported. The #DayOffTwitch action aims to bring attention to a recent burst of harassment in the form of "hate raids" directed toward marginalized creators. 

The day long walkout was spearheaded by Twitch streamers including RekitRaven, ShineyPen and Lucia Everblack. Those creators, who came up with the #TwitchDoBetter hashtag, were protesting Twitch's slow reaction to sexist, racist, transphobic and other forms of harassing messages. The abuse was often generated by bots, and had the effect of overwhelming chats to the point that creators had to cut off streams.

Streamers were particularly upset by Twitch expanding its list to include around 350 tags classified by "gender, sexual orientation, race, nationality, ability, mental health, and more." While it may have helped creators better connect to fans, it made it easier for abusive users to harass creators. That often came in the form of "raids" that would flood a channel with racist slurs and abusive language. 

"I’m just tired of it," RekItRaven (who declined to share their full name) told the Washington Post. “I’m tired of feeling like I’m not allowed to exist based off of circumstances that are out of my control, and I know other people are too.”

Streamers are left to their own devices with only community-developed resources to combat the issues. That includes things like a "panic button" that takes chat into a limited mode and limits the ability of new users with abusive names to join. 

Twitch has promised to take action. "We support our streamers’ rights to express themselves and bring attention to important issues across our service. No one should have to experience malicious and hateful attacks based on who they are or what they stand for, and we are working hard on improved channel-level ban evasion detection and additional account improvements to help make Twitch a safer place for creators," the company told The Verge. 

Creators are also protesting Twitch's revenue-sharing scheme, which allows it to take half the platform's revenue — but not for all creators. "We’re all very loudly aware that there are many who are getting 70/30 cuts, but there’s no criteria, no conversation, no goals, nothing,” black streamer Vanessa (PleasantlyTwstd) told the Washington Post. 

The voices on Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant and other AI assistants are far ahead of old-school GPS devices, but they still lack the rhythms, intonation and other qualities that make speech sound, well, human. NVIDIA has unveiled new research and tools that can capture those natural speech qualities by letting you train the AI system with your own voice, the company announced at the Interspeech 2021 conference. 

To improve its AI voice synthesis, NVIDIA’s text-to-speech research team developed a model called RAD-TTS, a winning entry at an NAB broadcast convention competition to develop the most realistic avatar. The system allows an individual to train a text-to-speech model with their own voice, including the pacing, tonality, timbre and more. 

Another RAD-TTS feature is voice conversion, which lets a user deliver one speaker's words using another person's voice. That interface gives fine, frame-level control over a synthesized voice’s pitch, duration and energy. 

Using this technology, NVIDIA's researchers created more conversational-sounding voice narration for its own I Am AI video series using synthesized rather than human voices. The aim was to get the narration to match the tone and style of the videos, something that hasn't been done well in many AI narrated videos to date. The results are still a bit robotic, but better than any AI narration I've ever heard.

"With this interface, our video producer could record himself reading the video script, and then use the AI model to convert his speech into the female narrator’s voice. Using this baseline narration, the producer could then direct the AI like a voice actor — tweaking the synthesized speech to emphasize specific words, and modifying the pacing of the narration to better express the video’s tone," NVIDIA wrote. 

NVIDIA is distributing some of this research — optimized to run efficiently on NVIDIA GPUs, of course — to anyone who wants to try it via open source through the NVIDIA NeMo Python toolkit for GPU-accelerated conversational AI, available on the company's NGC hub of containers and other software. 

"Several of the models are trained with tens of thousands of hours of audio data on NVIDIA DGX systems. Developers can fine tune any model for their use cases, speeding up training using mixed-precision computing on NVIDIA Tensor Core GPUs," the company wrote. 

If you often need to tether to get internet, Netgear has a very interesting new product — if you can afford it. The Nighthawk M5 5G WiFi 6 Mobile Router (unlocked) takes a 5G SIM card that's compatible with AT&T and T-Mobile's networks. Once installed, it will distribute data over WiFi 6 to a maximum of 32 devices with greater range and speed than your smartphone could ever manage. 

Powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon X55 Mobile Platform, it delivers maximum theoretical speeds of up to 1.2Gbps over WiFi 11ax. While few if any devices can handle those speeds, the extra throughput will be handy if multiple devices are connected to it. The router also has a dedicated ethernet port that can deliver up to 1Gbps and connect to a device or mesh WiFi network, for instance. On top of 5GNR Sub 6 GHz, it supports LTE CAT 20, LTE Advanced, 4x4 MIMO and 256QAM. 

Much like AT&T and Netgear's original Nighthawk LTE router, the 5G model can display pertinent information like the WiFi password and how much mobile data you've used. Other features include VPN pass-through support and password protection, 13 hours on a battery charge (or remove the battery and plug into the wall for all-day use), and the ability to plug in wired internet to conserve data.

There is one pain point: the price. The Nighthawk M5 5G WiFi 6 Mobile Router costs $700, considerably more than other 5G MiFi routers on the market. The main benefits are the fast speeds, the fact that it's unlocked to any carrier (though Netgear recommends AT&T and T-Mobile) and the ethernet port. If those features are important for you, it's now available to buy at Netgear's website. 

Spectrum TV has made major streaming service additions to its digital cable service and live TV app with HBO Max and YouTube, parent Charter has announced. You'll be able to access both apps on channels 2004 for HBO Max and 2003 for YouTube, or on the platform's guide via the search or apps menu. You'll need, of course, a subscription to access HBO Max at $10 per month with ads or $15 ad-free. 

Along with Netflix, HBO Max and YouTube are the first streaming channels available directly through the Spectrum Guide. "As the video landscape continues to change, we are evolving our products and making it easier for our customers to watch what they want by providing access to streaming apps from convenient launch points within the Spectrum TV experience," said Spectrum VP Elena Ritchie.

As Spectrum notes, Warner's HBO Max offers 13,000 hours of premium content from brands HBO, DC, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim and Studio Ghibli. It also includes all 2021 Warner Bros. films (Dune, Godzilla vs. Kong and more) available the same day the films debut in theaters. That's a boon to movie fans not ready to go to theaters with the pandemic still raging, but a consternation to some of the filmmakers involved.

When the Xbox 360 arrived in 2005 with 1,280 x 720 resolution, 72x72 pixels probably seemed a perfectly reasonable gamerpic size. With the 4K Xbox Series X displaying eight times the number of pixels, however, anyone still using the ancient gamerpics will get a hilariously tiny view of their avatar. 

Video producer and editor Gabriel Roland (@Noukon) was complaining about that very issue on Twitter. "I bought this gamerpic for 80 Xbox Points in 2006," hetweeted. "And I’ll be fucked if it won’t remain the best dollar I’ve ever spent." An accompanying image shows his beloved, barely visible avatar floating in a massive circle of grey. 

Fortunately, the right person saw that tweet in the form of Xbox engineering lead Eden Marie. "Listen, I can't promise anything, but I'm going to make it my personal mission to fix this," she replied. Amazingly, she found that the same gamerpic Noukon purchased was still on sale, albeit at nearly two and half times the price, but she gladly splurged the $2.38 to buy it. 

Right off the bat, Marie noticed that Xbox 360 gamerpics display differently if you're looking at your own profile or someone else's. On your own, the avatar is displayed as above and looks truly wonky. On someone else's profile, it displays better against your background, but it's still tiny and the edges are cut off by the circular format of newer gamerpics. 

The grey border issue turned out to be a bug introduced at some point, so Marie was able to fix that first. Then, she took advantage of the Xbox UI's ability to handle transparency in images by overlaying the square gamerpic into a transparent circular image. After upsizing everything to a reasonable size, the avatar looks great and the problem has been solved. "What do you think, @noukon? Feel better about that dollar?," she tweeted. 

"I have never and will never feel better about a dollar in my entire life," replied Roland. "I'll also say this: I worked in game QA for over a decade and I've never seen a bug addressed this quickly." Replied Marie: "It really helps that your bug report tweet made me laugh." 

While this story on its own should warm the cockles of any gamer's heart, that's not the end of it. Marie noted that the fix will be introduced for all Xbox users still rocking those old gamerpics. "PS, since there have been questions, this will need to roll out with other console updates, Insiders first, and this will change how all 360 gamerpics show up on console, not just certain ones," she noted. The fix has now been added to the Alpha ring, so if all goes well, it should fix everybody's messed up Xbox 360 gamerpics in the coming months. 

Volkswagen has unveiled a new feature for its Car-Net connected vehicle service that lets you get 4G data from two major US telecoms. Called "Carrier of Choice," it offers the option of Verizon or T-Mobile, making it relatively easy to add your vehicle to an existing mobile plan.

Starting in September, VW owners in the US will be able to access the subscription plan options on VW's dedicated website or via its mobile app. From there, you can add an account to your existing mobile wireless provider (assuming it's Verizon or T-Mobile) and pair it with your existing Volkswagen Car-Net subscription. It will then appear as a new line-item on your existing bill. If you're not already with those carriers, you can get unlimited 4G data for $20 per month.  

Car-Net offers connected car features like remote start, locking and unlocking the vehicle, maintenance, status, teen driver alerts (curfew, boundary, speed) and more. Those features can be accessed remotely from both iPhone and Android smartphones using VW's updated mobile app. It also offers a WiFi hotspot with "unlimited" 4G connectivity for up to four devices. 

On top of those features, VW lets you access iHeart Radio and TIDAL media streaming apps with a paid subscription. It also offers the "Plus Nav" subscription with real-time traffice and route updates for $49 per year, a radio subscription with 30,000 global stations for $8 per year and a natural language speech option for $9 per year. Of course, VW models from 2019 and up come with CarPlay and Android Auto support, giving you many of those options for free. Car-Net comes standard on most 2020 model year and newer Volkswagen vehicles. .

Google's Pixel 5a famously has a headphone jack, but you'd better hope that the USB-C port never breaks. The fact that it's soldered directly to the motherboard rather than being a separate component is one contributing factor in its middling 5/10 repairability score, according to a new teardown from YouTube channel PBKreviews.

The Pixel 5a is Google's midrange 5G smartphone and a direct successor to the popular 5G Pixel 4a. Though a bit larger than the latter and now water-resistant, it's equipped with nearly the same internal components, including a Snapdragon 765G, 6GB of RAM and a 60Hz panel. It's a solid mid-range phone for $449, though essentially a stopgap device until Google unveils the Pixel 6 family that will use its all-new Tensor mobile chip. 

The good news is that the 6.34-inch OLED display is relatively easy to replace, as you can pull it off simply by heating it up and using a pry tool to pop it off. It's also fairly straightforward to get access to the battery and motherboard, once you remove the numerous screws and pry off the large metal cover.

From there, however, things get trickier. The battery is glued solidly to the case and the pry tab meant to help remove it is "pretty useless," according to PBKreviews. Instead, they had to use isopropyl alcohol to loosen the glue before they could pry the battery out. The other issue is that the USB-C port is attached directly to the motherboard, so making repairs to it would be "difficult," according to the video. 

All told, however, the Pixel 5a appears to be slightly easier to repair than its predecessor. While you might not try to fix it yourself, that means it could be a bit easier to find local service if you'd rather not send it away to Google. The teardown also shows a solid-looking device with water resistance as a big new benefit — so hopefully, all that will add up to a reliable device that won't need repairs in the first place. 

It can be hard for a single host to manage large unruly video meetings, particularly given the complexity and features available in video conferencing apps these days. Now, Google has a solution for its Meet app with a new feature that allows you to have up to 25 co-hosts in a meeting, as 9to5Google has reported. That way, they can split chore like muting participants, launching polls, managing Q&As and more, while you focus on the business at hand. 

Until now, the feature was only available to Google Workspace for Education customers. Now, it's on all of Google's Meet apps across desktop and mobile, including users with personal Google accounts.

On top of that, Google introduced new controls for meeting hosts, which can be extended to co-hosts. All hosts will be able to limit who can share their screen, limit who can send chat messages, mute all with one click, end the meeting for all and control who can join the meeting and how they can join with the "quick access" setting. The latter allows participants in the same domain to enter automatically. 

“Quick access” allows automatic video call entry for users in the same domain. If disabled, hosts must join first, and those that are not invited will have to request permission to enter. Otherwise, the host must join first and give permission to anyone who isn't invited. 

The last feature, the "People" panel, adds search to let hosts quickly find participants if moderation actions are needed. The new features will begin rolling out next week on the web and Meet for Android, and the iOS version will arrive at the end of the month.