January 2023 business blogspot

Staff Wanted - Back at the Office
The ongoing tug of war between remote employees (who are feeling more productive and less burnt out) and their employers (who are unhappy about paying for an office building) could experience a shift of balance this year. Major companies, aware of fears about a potential recession, are issuing directives to staff to come into the office for more days. This month, Disney CEO Bob Iger told hybrid home/office workers that, starting on March 1, they must return to the office four days a week. Two days later, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announced a similar three-day RTO requirement, expressing irritation at office badge swipe data that revealed employees were not “meeting their minimum promise” regarding hybrid work. Employees at Vanguard, Paycom, and News Corp have also received recent orders to phase out remote work in the new year. A survey from Resume Builder found that 90 per cent of companies will require a return to the office this year, signalling a shift away from the more gently enforced hybrid policies that became popular during the pandemic. But according to a recent Gallup poll, more than a third of currently remote workers want to work from home permanently and only 3 per cent want to work in the office full time. Only Twitter CEO Elon Musk has bucked the employer trend, recently ordering Seattle employees to work entirely from home as a cost-cutting measure.
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Instagram Sidelines Shopping
Instagram is to remove the Shop tab from its main page navigation bar next month, in what will likely form part of a wider shake-up that will see the social media platform re-focus its business model more directly on driving ad revenue. Retailers will still be able to sell products through the platform, but Instagram says it wants to invest in "shopping experiences that provide the most value for people". The in-app shopping feature isn't disappearing. Sellers will still be able to set up and run a virtual store, and users can continue ordering products in Feed, Stories, Reels, and via ads. The site will also move its content creation shortcut to "front and centre" at the bottom of the screen. All the changes, according to Instagram head Adam Mosseri, are intended to simplify the platform, making it easier to access the most-used features:  "We are trying to bring people together by inspiring creativity, discovering new things, and sparking connections". But Sue Azari, Ecommerce Industry Lead, at AppsFlyer.com, thinks that Instagram’s decision is based upon the Shop tab getting less engagement than other product features and adds that small brands and individual sellers relying on Instagram will be hurt by the changes, whereas the majority of the bigger retail brands will focus on pushing their social following elsewhere.
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Apple Mini Upgrades
As well as announcing its new MacBook line, Apple has unveiled updates to its Mac mini range: machines kitted out with its newly introduced M2 and M2 Pro chips. These give the mini desktop computers a notable boost in speed and power over previous models. Slotted in between its premium iMac and the portable MacBook, Apple’s Mac mini range consists of versatile computers squeezed into small cases that take up minimum space on the desktop. It has been over two years since the last update, so the models were due for some refreshment. The main change in each case is the processor – the new Mac minis are running either Apple’s M2 or M2 Pro chips. The base model runs on an 8-core CPU, which claims four “performance” cores and four “efficiency” cores, as well as a 10-core GPU and 16-core Neural Engine. The M2 Pro adds two extra performance cores to its CPU, six more to its GPU and doublers its previous memory bandwidth. Apple says that the new M2 Mac mini can perform image editing tasks in Adobe Photoshop up to 50 per cent faster than the previous M1 model and video editing tasks in Final Cut Pro at more than twice the speed of last year's models. The M2 Pro claims improvements of 2.5 times faster image editing alongside 4.2 times faster video editing.
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AI Voice Impersonator
Microsoft researchers have presented an impressive new text-to-speech AI model, called Vall-E, which can listen to a voice for just a few seconds, then mimic that voice - including its emotional tone - and have it say whatever the user wants. It is the latest of many AI algorithms that can harness a recording of a person's voice and have it say words and sentences that the person never spoke - and it's nothing less than amazing just how small a scrap of audio it needs in order to extrapolate an entire human voice. Vall-E can work successfully with as little as three-seconds of an audio snippet. The AI has been trained on some 60,000 hours of English speech - mainly, it seems, by audiobook narrators. Researchers have a host of samples to show off, in which Vall-E attempts to impersonate a range of human voices speaking newly created sentences generated from scraps of audio. Vall-E also does a good job of recreating the audio environment of the original sample. If the sample sounds like it was recorded over the telephone, so does the synthesis. It's also pretty good with accents. The Microsoft Vall-E team tacks a short ethics statement on the end of its demonstration page: "The experiments in this work were carried out under the assumption that the user of the model is the target speaker and has been approved by the speaker". The rise of creative AIs like DALL-E, ChatGPT, various deepfake algorithms and others could reach a tipping point sometime soon, ready to break out of laboratories and into the real world. 
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Other Voice Generators Are Available
In its "Best Of" collection covering AI voice generators up and running before Microsoft's recent offering, Unite.AI gathers its top ten recommendations (as of this month) with names like Synthesis, Listnr, Respeecher and Sonantic. There is also a link to Resemble.ai that helps users create speech from text for such things as advertisements and assistants to populate virtual call centres.
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Search Engine of the Month
Microsoft is reportedly "going all in" on ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) technology that could power a new search engine that holds out the possibility of disrupting the dominance of Google in search. According to industry insiders, the software giant has been in talks to invest $10 billion into the owner of ChatGPT, the super popular app that has excited casual users and artificial-intelligence experts alike since its latest version was released recently. The funding, which would also include other venture firms, would value OpenAI, the firm behind ChatGPT, at $29 billion. Beyond the financial risks and rewards for Microsoft, the bigger prize is that it would get to work alongside OpenAI in developing the technology on Microsoft Cloud, which instantly puts Microsoft at the forefront of what could be the most important consumer technology over the next decade. Web3 for enterprise expert Filippo Chisari told Yahoo Finance UK: "My experience with Microsoft has been that if they invest in something that is not a regional effort, it is usually a game changer".
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