The professor became a flashpoint in debates over diversity efforts in higher education.

Google has synthesized "expressive face-to-face experiences" for its speech agent Gemini 3.8 Live. They're now offering a Live Avatar "with precise lip-syncing, natural expressions, and fluid turn-taking" for Google Enterprise accounts wanting "engaging customer service" or for offering interactive walkthroughs. (Check out the not-creepy-at-all video in Google's announcement.) "Though Google will offer a library of preset avatars for customers to choose from, it will also allow organizations to create their own," notes The Verge. (See some examples from the YouTube channel "AI with Surya".) But even without the visualization of the avatar, "I was never able to shake the feeling that these conversations with computers never feel like a real conversation," argues the blog Android Police. Conversing with just the Ai-generated audio, "At best, they feel like talking to a phone representative or someone from tech support. We turn to them when we have a problem, and they help us through it..." GPT-Live, and Gemini Live right behind it, skip that whole relay race. Instead of translating your voice to text and back to voice, the model works with raw audio the entire way through (what it hears and what it says) inside the same system, with nothing translated in between. That sounds like a small plumbing detail, but it's the whole story. Cutting out the text step lets these models respond in a fraction of a second instead of the pause we've learned to expect, and it lets them hear things text can never carry: tone, hesitation, whether you're annoyed or joking... I was hoping to be surprised by how natural the conversation felt. Instead, I came out with a deeper appreciation for every human I've ever talked to. Even the boring ones... I spoke, it spoke back. I spoke faster, it answered faster. Then I switched to a different language, and it switched along with me. Even switching between languages several times during the same sentence didn't stump it. The most impressive moment happened when I asked it what "T-O-P-G-3-3-K" spelled out, and it immediately came back with, "You are spelling the word Top Geek, but using a 3 to represent a reversed E...." Although it felt fast and responsive, at no point did it feel like talking to another human being... What Gemini couldn't replicate, because it was never built to replicate it, is human connection.... I'm sure I'm not telling you something you don't already know, but somehow talking naturally to an LLM amplifies the feeling that there is no one on the other side of the line. It might flow like a phone call, but it doesn't feel like one. MrBrklyn (Slashdot reader #4,775) says he discussed "why mainstream media avoids reporting on screen dependency" with Gemini, and eventually convinced Gemini to respond that it's just "another tool built by the same tech giants to make sure you rely on their system to tell you what to think, how to talk, and what is real."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After touring Africa, Pope Leo’s four-day visit to France shows how he is seeking to appeal to Roman Catholicism’s original heartlands as well as to the church’s newest strongholds.

Under the offer, the Strait of Hormuz would reopen and nuclear talks would be revived.

President Trump pressed his personal brand of diplomacy as President Xi Jinping of China made his first trip to the White House in more than a decade.

Though likely to avoid a direct hit, parts of the state could receive nearly three feet of rain, forecasters warned.

Critics said the changes, mostly in the South, moved the nation “back toward the Jim Crow era.” Justice Department officials said the decrees were outdated.

Attacks on Saudi cities on the Red Sea by the Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen have added to pressure on global oil supplies.

Investigators found that New Jersey’s lieutenant governor, Dale Caldwell, sought a promotion for his girlfriend and made a sexually charged comment to a staff member.

Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, who was the country’s most visible Roman Catholic clergyman of the 20th century, is one step closer to sainthood after a ceremony in St. Louis.

The Israeli prime minister accused Mayor Zohran Mamdani, an outspoken critic of Israel, of antisemitism. The mayor has become a political foil for the prime minister.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also reserved some of his ire for the mayor of the city hosting him, Zohran Mamdani.

The showdown over President Trump’s partial media ban played out as he welcomed President Xi Jinping, whose government is ranked among the most repressive in the world.

Large groups gathered in Midtown Manhattan to demonstrate as the Israeli prime minister spoke to the General Assembly.

404 Media reports "multiple contractors hired to improve OpenAI's models have been fired for using AI to train the AI: That's not great for the models themselves, but there is also obviously a great irony in AI training companies working for OpenAI firing people for using AI when OpenAI's whole thing is to make people use AI at work... OpenAI declined to comment on its contractors being fired for using AI. Their article cites internal documents and three contractors working on OpenAI-related projects which can include more than ten thousand contractors: One contractor said they see people using AI "all the time and people are let go for it all the time, it's pretty much the one thing that will get you kicked off ASAP." The person said, "in a group of thousands there are tons that have been caught...." Two of the sources said people have been fired or offboarded for using AI... One contractor said they used AI while helping to train OpenAI's models and shared what they presented as their termination letter. It said their employer had identified issues with the "authenticity" of their work.... 404 Media spoke to a fourth contractor who has worked on training models for various AI companies. They said they sometimes purposefully chose the worst responses because they wanted to actively sabotage the models' training. "I did feel guilty about doing this kind of work at the start," they said. "I either pay zero attention to the results and choose randomly or purposely choose the [worst] output. I'm not sure how much of a difference it actually makes since there are hundreds of other people also rating prompt results, but it does feel like I'm getting paid to make AI worse." Two of the contractors worked for Mercor, the article reports, a company which last month Nvidia reportedly discussed funding at a $20 billion valuation. Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the article.

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A prolific scorer and rebounder, in 1958 he delivered one of the most remarkable performances in playoff history.

Most cases involved noncitizens who registered to vote, attesting that they were U.S. citizens, state officials said.

Our national political correspondent, Shane Goldmacher, explains how a growing number of Republican candidates in key battleground states are making calculated decisions to distance themselves from President Trump and his policies.

Revelations about the conduct of former Representative Mary Peltola may not faze voters who have long elected abrasive and sometimes violent figures to represent them.

The vote came as a growing number of Republicans have broken from President Trump on the conflict, reflecting voters’ concerns ahead of midterm elections.