What to expect from tech’s historic antitrust showdown with Congress

Chief executives from four of the world’s most powerful companies will defend the vast empires they’ve built in testimony before Congress on Wednesday.

In a hearing held by the House’s Antitrust Subcommittee, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg will all face questions about how their business practices propelled them into the market-dominant giants they are today. Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook make up four of top six most valuable public companies in existence and are widely regarded as reshaping the consumer world, both within the tech industry and beyond.

The event will begin at 12 PM ET and may run all day, given the breadth of relevant topics and the four very different, deeply influential tech companies that we’ll be hearing from. Here’s what to expect from the big day.

Tech’s top CEOs will face Congress in antitrust hearing now set for Wednesday

What’s the big deal?

There have been quite a few Congressional hearings examining tech companies in recent years, but usually those companies send their lead counsel — not their CEOs.

When a tech CEO appears before Congress it’s a sign that whatever they’re testifying about poses a real enough threat to their business that it’s better to place nice with lawmakers rather than blowing them off.

While Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg have all testified before Congress before — Pichai in 2018, Zuckerberg in 2018 and 2019 and Tim Cook way back in 2013 — this will be the first time Jeff Bezos has agreed to come before Congress. Given the amount of concerns lawmakers have expressed over Amazon in recent years, that’s a big deal.

Who’s running the show?

The hearing is being coordinated by the House Judiciary’s Antitrust Subcommittee, a subsection of the broader House committee that focuses on antitrust issues, among other topics. Because it’s in the House, the subcommittee is controlled by Democrats and is helmed by David Cicilline, a prominent and serious critic of big tech companies. It’s worth noting that Val Demings, who is currently being considered as Joe Biden’s running mate, is among the Democratic members.

On the Republican side, Jim Sensenbrenner is the ranking member. The outspoken Trump supporter Matt Gaetz also serves on the subcommittee and we can expect to hear a lot from him for reasons we’ll get into it a little bit.

What is this all about?

The title of the hearing is “Online Platforms and Market Power, Part 6: Examining the Dominance of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google.” Five previous hearings were also part of the subcommittee’s year-long antitrust investigation into digital markets, touching on issues like data privacy, innovation, the free press and competition. Expect all of those angles to come up at Wednesday’s hearing.

What the hearing is about and what will end up being the focus could be two different things, depending on how well Cicilline is able to rein things in as the subcommittee’s chair. As we mentioned previously, Florida Republican Matt Gaetz has signaled his interest in steering the four tech CEOs to the less substantive but more politically expedient topic of anti-conservative bias in tech.

Earlier this week, Gaetz made a criminal referral to the Justice Department that accused Mark Zuckerberg of lying in his 2018 testimony to Congress when he said Facebook does not have a bias against conservatives. The issue of anti-conservative bias is a favorite among Trump-friendly Republicans, and Gaetz is likely to veer away from very real concerns over anti-competitive behavior among tech companies toward unproven bias claims.

Will they really say anything useful?

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler and Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline stressed the importance that the tech CEOs are “forthcoming” on Wednesday, emphasizing the “central role these corporations play in the lives of the American people.” While it would serve these companies to appear transparent and not evasive, the testimony is likely to be a careful combination of the two.

In past appearances, tech CEOs have been criticized for being tight-lipped, offering only robotic answers and promising to “get back” to members of Congress every other question. We can expect more of this Wednesday, though the tone and efficacy of the hearing will really depending on who’s asking the questions and how well lawmakers coordinate their lines of inquiry.

Where is Twitter? Microsoft?

Last week, House Republicans led by Jim Jordan called on Twitter to appear at tech’s big antitrust hearing, claiming that the day would be “incomplete” without an appearance from Jack Dorsey. Dorsey has made appearances before Congress before, but the new request was rightfully ignored.

While often elevated to the status of peer companies like Facebook and YouTube, Twitter is a relatively small company with an outsized impact on society — and one not suspected of market-shaping practices that could box competitors out. To put it in perspective: Twitter’s market capitalization is $29 billion; Facebook’s is $667 billion.

Compared to Twitter, Microsoft is massive and a more natural fit for the hearing but the company has a much more storied history of government scrutiny. Cicilline himself said that regulatory enforcement against Microsoft two decades ago “made space for an enormous amount of additional innovation and competition.”

Depending on who you ask, U.S. regulatory efforts against Microsoft either presaged an era of regulatory overreach or failed to be little more than a slap on the wrist. Sound familiar?

How do I watch it?

We’ll be watching the hearing and reporting on it, so check back for our coverage and analysis throughout the day. If you’re keen to sit through it yourself, we’ve embedded a YouTube link below that should work when the livestream begins on Wednesday, July 29 at 12 PM ET.

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Priti Youssef Choksi explains how to get your startup acquired — not sold

Today, Priti Youssef Choksi is a partner with venture firm Norwest Venture Partners. But she previously spent five-and-a-half years at Google, where she worked on strategic partnerships, and nearly nine years at Facebook, where she began in corporate development and later focused on M&A.

Because Choksi knows firsthand how some of the biggest companies on the planet think about potential acquisition targets and how deals ultimately come together, we asked if she would share some of those insights with us during our recent founder-centric Early Stage event. The idea was to help attendees better how understand how — and why — certain acquisitions come together; her advice was so helpful that we wanted to share it more widely here.

So where to start? Choksi suggested people first understand the “build, partner, or buy” mentality of big acquirers. Indeed, while deals can look very much alike to outsiders (a deal is a deal is a deal), they are not. First, big companies will build internally if they are bolstering a strategic asset or what they need involves sensitive information or technology. A good example of something that Google would never buy, for example, is search tech, because search is the company’s crown jewel, she noted. Companies will meanwhile partner in order to fill a product or service gap or when they’re looking to stand up a new platform, she said, pointing to the early days of Google’s Android ecosystem.

As for when they finally go shopping, companies are driven by three things, said Choksi: talent, technology and traction. With talent, as you might imagine, companies may conduct an acqui-hire with the goal of filling a talent or leadership gap internally or to acquire niche skills that their current employees don’t already have, she said.

Companies meanwhile shop for technology when they need outside tech to boost their organic efforts. Choksi pointed to Luma.io by way of example. Back in 2013, the young company, which created a video-capture, stabilization and sharing app, was acquired by Instagram (which was itself already owned by Facebook); a week after it closed the Luma deal, Facebook launched video on Instagram largely based on Luma’s platform.

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Announcing ScaNN: Efficient Vector Similarity Search

Posted by Philip Sun, Software Engineer, Google Research

Suppose one wants to search through a large dataset of literary works using queries that require an exact match of title, author, or other easily machine-indexable criteria. Such a task would be well suited for a relational database using a language such as SQL. However, if one wants to support more abstract queries, such as “Civil War poem,” it is no longer possible to rely on naive similarity metrics such as the number of words in common between two phrases. For example, the query “science fiction” is more related to “future” than it is to “earth science” despite the former having zero, and the latter having one, word in common with the query.

Machine learning (ML) has greatly improved computers’ abilities to understand language semantics and therefore answer these abstract queries. Modern ML models can transform inputs such as text and images into embeddings, high dimensional vectors trained such that more similar inputs cluster closer together. For a given query, we can therefore compute its embedding, and find the literary works whose embeddings are closest to the query’s. In this manner, ML has transformed an abstract and previously difficult-to-specify task into a rigorous mathematical one. However, a computational challenge remains: for a given query embedding, how does one quickly find the nearest dataset embeddings? The set of embeddings is often too large for exhaustive search and its high dimensionality makes pruning difficult.

In our ICML 2020 paper, “Accelerating Large-Scale Inference with Anisotropic Vector Quantization,” we address this problem by focusing on how to compress the dataset vectors to enable fast approximate distance computations, and propose a new compression technique that significantly boosts accuracy compared to prior works. This technique is utilized in our recently open-sourced vector similarity search library (ScaNN), and enables us to outperform other vector similarity search libraries by a factor of two, as measured on ann-benchmarks.com.

The Importance of Vector Similarity Search
Embedding-based search is a technique that is effective at answering queries that rely on semantic understanding rather than simple indexable properties. In this technique, machine learning models are trained to map the queries and database items to a common vector embedding space, such that the distance between embeddings carries semantic meaning, i.e., similar items are closer together.

The two-tower neural network model, illustrated above, is a specific type of embedding-based search where queries and database items are mapped to the embedding space by two respective neural networks. In this example the model responds to natural-language queries for a hypothetical literary database.

To answer a query with this approach, the system must first map the query to the embedding space. It then must find, among all database embeddings, the ones closest to the query; this is the nearest neighbor search problem. One of the most common ways to define the query-database embedding similarity is by their inner product; this type of nearest neighbor search is known as maximum inner-product search (MIPS).

Because the database size can easily be in the millions or even billions, MIPS is often the computational bottleneck to inference speed, and exhaustive search is impractical. This necessitates the use of approximate MIPS algorithms that exchange some accuracy for a significant speedup over brute-force search.

A New Quantization Approach for MIPS
Several state-of-the-art solutions for MIPS are based on compressing the database items so that an approximation of their inner product can be computed in a fraction of the time taken by brute-force. This compression is commonly done with learned quantization, where a codebook of vectors is trained from the database and is used to approximately represent the database elements.

Previous vector quantization schemes quantized database elements with the aim of minimizing the average distance between each vector x and its quantized form x̃. While this is a useful metric, optimizing for this is not equivalent to optimizing nearest-neighbor search accuracy. The key idea behind our paper is that encodings with higher average distance may actually result in superior MIPS accuracy.

The intuition for our result is illustrated below. Suppose we have two database embeddings x₁ and x₂, and must quantize each to one of two centers: c₁ or c₂. Our goal is to quantize each x_i to x̃_i such that the inner product <q, x̃_i> is as similar to the original inner product <q, x_i> as possible. This can be visualized as making the magnitude of the projection of x̃_i onto q as similar as possible to the projection of x_i onto q. In the traditional approach to quantization (left), we would pick the closest center for each x_i, which leads to an incorrect relative ranking of the two points: <q, x̃₁> is greater than <q, x̃₂>, even though <q, x₁> is less than <q, x₂>! If we instead assign x₁ to c₁ and x₂ to c₂, we get the correct ranking. This is illustrated in the figure below.

The goal is to quantize each x_i to x̃_i = c₁ or x̃_i = c₂. Traditional quantization (left) results in the incorrect ordering of x₁ and x₂ for this query. Even though our approach (right) chooses centers farther away from the data points, this in fact leads to lower inner product error and higher accuracy.

It turns out that direction matters as well as magnitude--even though c₁ is farther from x₁ than c₂, c₁ is offset from x₁ in a direction almost entirely orthogonal to x₁, while c₂’s offset is parallel (for x₂, the same situation applies but flipped). Error in the parallel direction is much more harmful in the MIPS problem because it disproportionately impacts high inner products, which by definition are the ones that MIPS is trying to estimate accurately.

Based on this intuition, we more heavily penalize quantization error that is parallel to the original vector. We refer to our novel quantization technique as anisotropic vector quantization due to the directional dependence of its loss function. The ability of this technique to trade increased quantization error of lower inner products in exchange for superior accuracy for high inner products is the key innovation and the source of its performance gains.

In the above diagrams, ellipses denote contours of equal loss. In anisotropic vector quantization, error parallel to the original data point x is penalized more.

Anisotropic Vector Quantization in ScaNN
Anisotropic vector quantization allows ScaNN to better estimate inner products that are likely to be in the top-k MIPS results and therefore achieve higher accuracy. On the glove-100-angular benchmark from ann-benchmarks.com, ScaNN outperformed eleven other carefully tuned vector similarity search libraries, handling roughly twice as many queries per second for a given accuracy as the next-fastest library.^*

Recall@k is a commonly used metric for nearest neighbor search accuracy, which measures the proportion of the true nearest k neighbors that are present in an algorithm’s returned k neighbors. ScaNN (upper purple line) consistently achieves superior performance across various points of the speed-accuracy trade-off.

ScaNN is open-source software and you can try it yourself at GitHub. The library can be directly installed via Pip and has interfaces for both TensorFlow and Numpy inputs. Please see the GitHub repository for further instructions on installing and configuring ScaNN.

Conclusion
By modifying the vector quantization objective to align with the goals of MIPS, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on nearest neighbor search benchmarks, a key indicator of embedding-based search performance. Although anisotropic vector quantization is an important technique, we believe it is just one example of the performance gains achievable by optimizing algorithms for the end goal of improving search accuracy rather than an intermediate goal such as compression distortion.

Acknowledgements
This post reflects the work of the entire ScaNN team: David Simcha, Erik Lindgren, Felix Chern, Nathan Cordeiro, Ruiqi Guo, Sanjiv Kumar, and Zonglin Li. We’d also like to thank Dan Holtmann-Rice, Dave Dopson, and Felix Yu.

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* ScaNN performs similarly well on the other datasets of ann-benchmarks.com, but the website currently shows outdated, lower numbers. See this pull request for more representative performance figures on other datasets. ↩

Facetune maker Lightricks brings its popular selfie retouching features to video

Lightricks, the startup behind a suite of photo and video editing apps — including most notably, selfie editor Facetune 2 — is taking its retouching capabilities to video. Today, the company is launching Facetune Video, a selfie video editing app, that allows users to retouch and edit their selfie and portrait videos using a set of A.I.-powered tools.

While there are other selfie video editors on the market, most today are generally focused on edits involving filters and presets, virtually adding makeup, or using AR or stickers to decorate your video in some way. Facetune Video, meanwhile, is focused on creating a photorealistic video by offering a set of features similar to those found in Lightricks’ flagship app, Facetune.

That means users are able to retouch their face with tools for skin smoothing, teeth whitening, and face reshaping, plus eye color, makeup, conceal, glow, and matte features. In addition, users can tweak tools for general video edits, like adjusting the brightness, contrast, color, and more, like other video editing apps allow for. And these edits can be applied in real-time to see how they look as the video plays, instead of after the fact.

In addition, users can apply the effect to one frame only and Facetune Video’s post-processing technology and neural networks will simultaneously apply an effect to the same area of every frame throughout the entire video, making it easier to quickly retouch a problem area without having to go frame-by-frame to do so.

“In Facetune Video, the 3D face model plays a significant role; users edit only one video frame, but it’s on us, behind-the-scenes, to automatically project the location of their edits to 2D face mesh coordinates derived from the 3D face model, and then apply them consistently on all other frames in the video,” explains Lightricks co-founder and CEO Zeev Farbam. “A Lightricks app needs to be not only powerful, but fun to use, so it’s critical to us that this all happens quickly and seamlessly,” he says.

Users can also save their favorite editing functions as “presets” allowing them to quickly apply their preferred settings to any video automatically.

In a future version of the app, the company plans to introduce a “heal” function which, like Facetune, will allow users to easily remove blemishes.

Image Credits: Lightricks

The technology that makes these selfie video edits work involves Lightricks’ deep neural networks that utilize facial feature detection and geometry analysis for the app’s retouching capabilities. These processes work in real-time without having to transmit data to the cloud first. There’s also no lag or delay while files are rendering.

In addition, Facetune Video uses the facial feature detection along with 3D face modeling A.I. to ensure that every part of the user’s face is captured for editing and retouching, the company says.

“What we’re also doing is taking advantage of lightweight neural networks. Before the user has even begun to retouch their selfie video, A.I.-powered algorithms are already working so that the user experience is quick and interactive,” says Fabram.

The app also does automated segmentation of more complex parts of the face like the interior of the eye, hair, or the lips, which helps it achieve a more accurate end result.

“It’s finding a balance between accuracy in the strength of the face modeling we use, and speed,” Fabram adds.

One challenge here was overcoming the issue of jittering effects, which is when the applied effect shakes as the video plays. The company didn’t want its resulting videos to have this problem, which makes the end result look gimmicky, so it worked to eliminate any shake-like effects and other face tracking issues so videos would look more polished and professional in the end.

The app builds off the company’s existing success and brand recognition with Facetune. With the new app, for example, the retouch algorithms mimic the original Facetune 2 experience, so users familiar with Facetune 2 will be able to quickly get the hang of the retouch tools.

Image Credits: Lightricks

The launch of the new app expands Lightricks further in the direction of video, which has become a more popular way of expressing yourself across social media, thanks to the growing use of apps like TikTok and features like Instagram Stories, for example.

Before, Lightricks’ flagship video product, however, was Videoleap, which focused on more traditional video editing, and not selfie videos where face retouching could be used.

Facetune has become so widely used, its name has become a verb — as in, “she facetunes her photos.” But it has also been criticized at times for its unrealistic results. (Of course, that’s more on the app’s users sliding the smoothing bar all the way to end.)

Across its suite of apps, which includes the original Facetune app (Facetune Classic), Facetune 2, Seen (for Stories), Photofox, Video Leap, Enlight Quickshot, Pixaloop, Boosted, and others, including a newly launched artistic editor, Quickart, the company has generated over 350 million downloads.

Its apps also now reach nearly 200 million users worldwide. And through its subscription model, Lightricks is now seeing what Farbam describes as revenues that are “increasing exponentially year-over-year,” but that are being continually reinvested into new products.

Like its other apps, Facetune Video will monetize by way of subscriptions. The app is free to use by will offer a VIP subscription for more features, at a price point of $8 per month, $36 per year, or a one-time purchase of $70.

Facetune 2 subscribers will get a discount on annual subscriptions, as well. The company will also sell the app in its Social Media Kit bundle on the App Store, which includes Facetune Video, Facetune 2, Seen and soon, an undisclosed fourth app. However, the company isn’t yet offering a single subscription that provides access to all bundled apps.

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5+ Free Online Tests, Guides, and Resources to Overcome Burnout at Work

Are you feeling too tired to work, or are you suffering from burnout? Take these free tests to find out if you have burnout, and guides to learn how to deal with it.

In 2019, WHO officially recognized burnout as an occupational phenomenon, so it’s not just “in your mind” anymore. There are signs of burnout to watch out for, and techniques to overcome burnout in your professional life.

To begin, there are a few online tests you can take, free ebooks you can pick up, and videos you can watch.

1. Take a Quiz to Test Your Burnout Level

The most popular, thorough, and medically accepted burnout test is the Maslach Burnout Inventory. Unfortunately, it is only available as a paid test. Before you pony up big bucks for that, you might want to try out some of the well-reviewed free burnout tests on the internet.

Please note that these aren’t scientifically validated, and you can’t consider them as a diagnosis of your condition. Use them as a platform to know whether you need a more clinical test like the Maslach Burnout Inventory.

Mind Tools Burnout Self-Test: Mind Tools hosts a free burnout self-test kit of 15 questions. You have to answer how deeply each statement applies to you, with choices being not at all, rarely, sometimes, often, and very often. At the end of it, you’ll get a points score, which you can then check against the score interpretation chart.

Foundation of Nursing Leadership’s Stress Level and Burnout Test: Nursing staff in hospitals are a high-risk group for burnout. The Foundation of Nursing Leadership created a free multiple-choice burnout test that takes 5-10 minutes to finish. The 35 questions apply to any profession, not just nursing, making it an effective tool to test your stress and burnout levels.

The Fried Quiz: Biologist Joan Borysenko, author of Fried: Why You Burn Out and How to Revive, created a free questionnaire, available on Oprah.com. The Fried Quiz is a set of 14 multiple-choice questions, which attempts to figure out if you have burnt out.

Fried: Why You Burn Out and How to Revive Fried: Why You Burn Out and How to Revive Buy Now On Amazon $9.99

2. Extinguish Burnout (Web): Free Burnout Course and Toolkit

Robert and Terri Bogue wrote a book on identifying and dealing with burnout and turned it into a successful online course. The Extinguish Burnout course is available for free for a year during COVID-19 to help stressed workers deal with extenuating circumstances.

The Extinguish Burnout: Prevention and Recovery course has over 25 modules, each taught as a video under 13 minutes, for a total of about six hours. You can do these at your own time. It’ll take you through all the steps of identifying burnout, strategies to deal with it, and how to prevent it from happening.

The website also has other helpful resources. The Bogues made two burnout tests you can take online for free, based on the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory and the Oldenburg Burnout Inventory. They also provide a burnout toolkit full of free resources, as stop-gap aid in case you don’t want to take the full course.

3. The Burnout Shield Assessment (Web): 5 Areas to Test Your Stress Level

The Burnout Shield is a more involved questionnaire to test your burnout level. It assesses five areas of your mental make-up and life: self-care, reflection and recognition, capacity, community, coping.

You answer a series of questions about work, life, mental health, and more, to identify the factors that protect you from burnout and how vulnerable you are to it. In the final step, you’ll have to fill out a standard Holmes & Rahe Life Stress Inventory sheet. Each question has a clear description, so take your time reading it and then answer truthfully. No one is judging you, this is an indicator for your eyes only.

The whole Burnout Shield takes about half an hour, so make sure you carve out time for it. At the end of it, you’ll find your vulnerability risk for all five areas, to know where you have to step it up. Grab the free Burnout First Aid Handbook and use it as a guide to overcoming the hump. Beth Genly, the maker of Burnout Solutions, also offers a free first consultation.

You should also familiarize yourself with the four-step science-backed method to defeat stress.

4. Overcoming Burnout in 30 Days (PDF): Free Guide by Burnout Psychotherapist

Dr. Carien Karsten is a psychotherapist and coach specializing in burnout cases, with a career spanning over 20 years and multiple books. One of these is available as a free ebook on her website, Overcoming Burnout in 30 Days.

It’s a great book that dives into why you are burning out, and what you can do about it. As the title suggests, it charts a day-by-day path with small tasks to conquer burnout in a month. It teaches you a six-step method called ACCESS: Analysis, Condition, Concepts, Effective, Social, and Stabilizing. Through the book’s chapters, you’ll slowly learn to deal with burnout and how to beat it.

Dr. Karsten says that in studies, her method showed that 80% of participants got back to work. Importantly, they also had a better understanding of burnout factors and triggers, and were more mindful of them.

Download: Overcoming Burnout in 30 Days (PDF)

5. TED Talks for Burnout (Web): Watch the Best Videos on Burnout

Who better to talk about burnout than some of the biggest achievers and successful people in professional spheres? TED compiled a playlist of the best TED Talks for burnout, touching on a variety of topics. It includes mindfulness experts, psychologists, journalists, designers, musicians, and more. The playlist is great for both creative and non-creative professionals dealing with workout.

You should also check out a TEDx talk by productivity expert Allan Ting. Ting himself was waylaid by burnout before turning it around. And in this talk, he shares three simple steps to bounce back from burnout.

Finally, therapist Kati Morton has a special Burnout Playlist on her YouTube channel for the A-Z on it. In successive videos, she discusses the science of burnout, who is more likely to get burned out, and other related topics. It’s a nice distillation of the ideas you’ll read in most other articles and guides about the subject.

Meditate Your Way to Calmness

As you’ll see from the recommendations, every expert says meditation helps. It’s a common practice to bring some calmness to your life when going through burnout, anxiety, stress, or other forms of mental fatigue. Start with these free meditation apps to beat stress and anxiety, it’s a must-have tool in fighting burnout.

Read the full article: 5+ Free Online Tests, Guides, and Resources to Overcome Burnout at Work

Get Lifetime Access to Great Nonfiction Reads for $39 With the 12min Micro Book Library

Reading is a powerful tool for self-education. Most of us understand this, but the modern world was not made for focus and quiet contemplation. Just getting a few minutes of peace is a victory. If you would like to squeeze the benefits of reading into your hectic existence, the 12min Micro Book Library can help. This app gives you access to a huge library of condensed nonfiction from thought leaders. You can get a lifetime subscription now for just $39 at MakeUseOf Deals.

Learn More in Less Time

For even the fastest reader, it’s only possible to get through so many pages in a lunch break. If you are reading for knowledge, this pace can be very frustrating.

The solution? By condensing the ideas of great literature into shorter summaries, the 12min library helps you learn faster. Available on iOS and Android, this app offers wisdom from entrepreneurs, scientists, philosophers, Nobel Prize winners, and many more brilliant minds.

As the name suggests, each summary takes about 12 minutes to read. You can download these micro books for offline reading, or enjoy an audio version on the way to work. The library is already impressive, and it grows with 30 new titles added each month.

Lifetime Access for $39

The 12min app is rated at 4.6 on the App Store and 4.4 on Google Play. Unlimited lifetime access is worth $346, but you can get your membership now for just $39.

Read the full article: Get Lifetime Access to Great Nonfiction Reads for $39 With the 12min Micro Book Library

Read Full Article

5+ Free Online Tests, Guides, and Resources to Overcome Burnout at Work

Are you feeling too tired to work, or are you suffering from burnout? Take these free tests to find out if you have burnout, and guides to learn how to deal with it.

In 2019, WHO officially recognized burnout as an occupational phenomenon, so it’s not just “in your mind” anymore. There are signs of burnout to watch out for, and techniques to overcome burnout in your professional life.

To begin, there are a few online tests you can take, free ebooks you can pick up, and videos you can watch.

1. Take a Quiz to Test Your Burnout Level

The most popular, thorough, and medically accepted burnout test is the Maslach Burnout Inventory. Unfortunately, it is only available as a paid test. Before you pony up big bucks for that, you might want to try out some of the well-reviewed free burnout tests on the internet.

Please note that these aren’t scientifically validated, and you can’t consider them as a diagnosis of your condition. Use them as a platform to know whether you need a more clinical test like the Maslach Burnout Inventory.

Mind Tools Burnout Self-Test: Mind Tools hosts a free burnout self-test kit of 15 questions. You have to answer how deeply each statement applies to you, with choices being not at all, rarely, sometimes, often, and very often. At the end of it, you’ll get a points score, which you can then check against the score interpretation chart.

Foundation of Nursing Leadership’s Stress Level and Burnout Test: Nursing staff in hospitals are a high-risk group for burnout. The Foundation of Nursing Leadership created a free multiple-choice burnout test that takes 5-10 minutes to finish. The 35 questions apply to any profession, not just nursing, making it an effective tool to test your stress and burnout levels.

The Fried Quiz: Biologist Joan Borysenko, author of Fried: Why You Burn Out and How to Revive, created a free questionnaire, available on Oprah.com. The Fried Quiz is a set of 14 multiple-choice questions, which attempts to figure out if you have burnt out.

Fried: Why You Burn Out and How to Revive Fried: Why You Burn Out and How to Revive Buy Now On Amazon $9.99

2. Extinguish Burnout (Web): Free Burnout Course and Toolkit

Robert and Terri Bogue wrote a book on identifying and dealing with burnout and turned it into a successful online course. The Extinguish Burnout course is available for free for a year during COVID-19 to help stressed workers deal with extenuating circumstances.

The Extinguish Burnout: Prevention and Recovery course has over 25 modules, each taught as a video under 13 minutes, for a total of about six hours. You can do these at your own time. It’ll take you through all the steps of identifying burnout, strategies to deal with it, and how to prevent it from happening.

The website also has other helpful resources. The Bogues made two burnout tests you can take online for free, based on the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory and the Oldenburg Burnout Inventory. They also provide a burnout toolkit full of free resources, as stop-gap aid in case you don’t want to take the full course.

3. The Burnout Shield Assessment (Web): 5 Areas to Test Your Stress Level

The Burnout Shield is a more involved questionnaire to test your burnout level. It assesses five areas of your mental make-up and life: self-care, reflection and recognition, capacity, community, coping.

You answer a series of questions about work, life, mental health, and more, to identify the factors that protect you from burnout and how vulnerable you are to it. In the final step, you’ll have to fill out a standard Holmes & Rahe Life Stress Inventory sheet. Each question has a clear description, so take your time reading it and then answer truthfully. No one is judging you, this is an indicator for your eyes only.

The whole Burnout Shield takes about half an hour, so make sure you carve out time for it. At the end of it, you’ll find your vulnerability risk for all five areas, to know where you have to step it up. Grab the free Burnout First Aid Handbook and use it as a guide to overcoming the hump. Beth Genly, the maker of Burnout Solutions, also offers a free first consultation.

You should also familiarize yourself with the four-step science-backed method to defeat stress.

4. Overcoming Burnout in 30 Days (PDF): Free Guide by Burnout Psychotherapist

Dr. Carien Karsten is a psychotherapist and coach specializing in burnout cases, with a career spanning over 20 years and multiple books. One of these is available as a free ebook on her website, Overcoming Burnout in 30 Days.

It’s a great book that dives into why you are burning out, and what you can do about it. As the title suggests, it charts a day-by-day path with small tasks to conquer burnout in a month. It teaches you a six-step method called ACCESS: Analysis, Condition, Concepts, Effective, Social, and Stabilizing. Through the book’s chapters, you’ll slowly learn to deal with burnout and how to beat it.

Dr. Karsten says that in studies, her method showed that 80% of participants got back to work. Importantly, they also had a better understanding of burnout factors and triggers, and were more mindful of them.

Download: Overcoming Burnout in 30 Days (PDF)

5. TED Talks for Burnout (Web): Watch the Best Videos on Burnout

Who better to talk about burnout than some of the biggest achievers and successful people in professional spheres? TED compiled a playlist of the best TED Talks for burnout, touching on a variety of topics. It includes mindfulness experts, psychologists, journalists, designers, musicians, and more. The playlist is great for both creative and non-creative professionals dealing with workout.

You should also check out a TEDx talk by productivity expert Allan Ting. Ting himself was waylaid by burnout before turning it around. And in this talk, he shares three simple steps to bounce back from burnout.

Finally, therapist Kati Morton has a special Burnout Playlist on her YouTube channel for the A-Z on it. In successive videos, she discusses the science of burnout, who is more likely to get burned out, and other related topics. It’s a nice distillation of the ideas you’ll read in most other articles and guides about the subject.

Meditate Your Way to Calmness

As you’ll see from the recommendations, every expert says meditation helps. It’s a common practice to bring some calmness to your life when going through burnout, anxiety, stress, or other forms of mental fatigue. Start with these free meditation apps to beat stress and anxiety, it’s a must-have tool in fighting burnout.

Read the full article: 5+ Free Online Tests, Guides, and Resources to Overcome Burnout at Work

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As remote work booms, Everphone grabs ~$40M for its ‘device as a service’ offer

The latest startup to see an uplift in inbound interest flowing from the remote work boom triggered by the coronavirus pandemic is Berlin-based Everphone, which sells a ‘mobile as a service’ device rental package that caters to businesses needing to kit staff out with mobile hardware plus associated support.

Everphone is announcing a €34 million Series B funding round today, led by new investor signals Venture Capital. Other new investors joining the round include German carrier Deutsche Telekom — investing via its strategic investment fund, Telekom Innovation Pool — US-based early stage VC AlleyCorp and Dutch bank NIBC.

The Series B financing will go on expanding to meet rising demand, with the startup telling TechCrunch it’s expecting to see a 70-100% increase in sales volume vs the pre-crisis period, thanks to a doubling of inbound leads during the pandemic.

“The global pandemic has been a catalyst for growth in the field of digitization,” said CEO and co-founder, Jan Dzulko, in a statement. “We are currently experiencing a significant increase in demand at home and abroad, which is why we are aiming for European expansion with the funding.”

Everphone describes its offer as a one-stop-shop, with the service covering not just the rental of (new or refurbished) smartphones and tablets but an administration and management wrapper that covers support needs, including handling repairs/replacements — with the promise of replacements within 24 hours if needed and less client risk from not having to wrangle traditional rental insurance fine print.

Other touted pluses of its “device as a service” approach include flexibility (users get to choose from a range of iOS and Android devices); lower cost (pricing depends on customer size, device choice and rental term but starts at €7,99 a month for a refurbished budget device, rising up to €49,99 a month for high end kit with a 12-month upgrade); and rental bundles which can include standard mobile device management software (such as Cortado and AirWatch) so customers can plug the rental hardware into their existing IT policies and processes.

Everphone reckons this service wrapper — which can also extend to including paid apps (such as Babbel for language learning) as an employee on-device perk/benefit in the bundle — differentiates its offer vs incumbent leasing providers, such as CHG-Meridian or De Lage Landen, and from wholesale distributors.

It also touts its global rollout capability as a customer draw, checking the scalability box.

While its investors (including German carrier, DK) are being fired up by the conviction that the COVID-19 induced shift away from the office to home working will create a boom in demand for well managed and secured work phones to mitigate the risk of personal devices and personal data mingling improperly with work stuff. (On that front Everphone’s website is replete with references to Europe’s data protection framework, GDPR, repurposed as scare marketing.)

“Everphone envisions that every employee will one day work via their smartphone,” added Marcus Polke, partner at signals Venture Capital, in a supporting statement. “With this employee-centric approach and integrated platform, everphone goes far beyond the mere outsourcing of a smartphone IT infrastructure.”

The 2016-founded startup has more than 400 customers signed up at this point, both SMEs and multinationals such as Ernst & Young. It caters to both ends of the market with an off-the-shelf package and self-service device management portal that’s intended for SMEs of between 100 and 1,500 employees — plus custom integrations for larger entities of up to 30,000 employees.

It says it’s able to offer “highly competitive” prices for renting new devices because it gives returned kit a second life, refurbishing and reselling devices on the consumer market. “Thanks to this profitable secondary lifespan, we are able to offer highly competitive prices and extensive service levels on our rental devices,” Everphone writes on its website.

The second hand smartphone market has also been seeing regional growth. Swappie, a European ecommerce startup that sells refurbished iPhones, aligning with EU lawmakers’ push for a ‘right to repair’ for electronics, raised its own ~$40M Series B only last month, for example. Its secondhand marketplace is one potential outlet for Everphone’s rented and returned iPhones.

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Google is building a new private subsea cable between Europe and the U.S.

Google today announced its plans to build a new subsea cable with landing points in New York in the U.S. and Bude, UK and Bilbao, Spain in Europe. The new cable, named after the pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper, will join Google’s various other private subsea cables like Curie between the U.S. and South America, Dunant between the U.S. and France, and Equiano between Europe and Africa.

The new cable is scheduled to go online in 2022 and will be built by SubCom, which Google also contracted for work on its Dunant and Curie cables.

Image Credits: Google

Google plans to launch a new Google Cloud region in Madrid in the near future, so it’s maybe no surprise that it is also looking at how it can best connect the region to its global network. The new cable marks Google’s first cable to Spain and its first private subsea cable route to the UK.

The cable will feature 16 fiber pairs, which is a pretty standard number, but as the Google team stresses, it will be the first to use a new switching architecture the company developed in cooperation with SubCom. This new system is meant to provide increased reliability and to enable the company to better move traffic around outages.

Grace Hopper will be Google’s fourth wholly-owned cable. In addition to these private cables, the company is also a member of a number of consortiums that jointly operate cables around the world. In total, Google has now announced investments in 15 subsea cables, though it is also reportedly part of the upcoming Blue-Raman Cable that will run between India and Italy via Israel. The company has yet to confirm its participation in this project, though.

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What is Discord App? How to Login, Download, Status, Emojis, Music, Etc.Questions Answered

All Your Discord-Related Questions Answered What is Discord? Video game players often face two issues: How to talk to other players (teammates)? How to organize players for long enough to get a game going? Discord is the newest application that is solely designed to solve both of the issues mentioned above. It is a free […]

The post What is Discord App? How to Login, Download, Status, Emojis, Music, Etc.Questions Answered appeared first on ALL TECH BUZZ.

6 Free Online Tools to Download Text-to-Speech as MP3 Audio

Text to speech tools help you turn the written word into the spoken word. Text to speech technology has come a long way over the years, with male and female voices, different accents, and the ability to control volume, pitch, rate, and more.

If you need a service to convert text to speech and then download it as an MP3 file, we’ve rounded up the best free websites to do that. The emphasis here is on tools that give you a file at the end of it, rather than just playing the conversion.

Here are the best text to speech converters with free download.

1. ttsMP3

ttsMP3 is a brilliant text to speech tool. First, you can select from loads of different languages across a variety of accents like American and Welsh. Input your text, choose your voice from the dropdown, then click Read to hear it. If you’re happy, click Download as MP3 to grab the recording.

The standout feature here though is the ability to use syntax to change the voice. You can emphasize words, change the pitch, create conversations, and much more. That’s because the service is powered by Amazon Polly. You can view some example syntax on the ttsMP3 site, or check out the full list on Amazon’s Supported SSML Tags page.

You can convert up to 375 words or 3000 characters a day for free. If you need more, you can either wait for it to reset or pay for a membership—curiously, you can only get either a 24-hour plan or an annual plan.

2. Text 2 Voice

Text 2 Voice does what it says on the tin. Input up to 2000 characters into the text box—a counter beneath the box shows how much you’ve used and if you need more from a single conversion then you’ll have to pay.

Beneath, use the Language and Regions dropdown, and then select from the Voices list alongside. Once done, click the yellow Convert to speech button. This might take a short while if you’ve written a lot. When it’s ready, the audio will automatically play.

You can also expand the options for Additional Audio Settings (change between MP3 and OGG and change the sample rate) and Additional Voice Settings (voice speed and voice effect). If you do alter these, click Convert to speech again to process the change before clicking Download MP3/OGG.

3. Text 2 Speech

Text 2 Speech is a simple service, but it does the job well. Input your text (up to 4000 characters) select from a small range of voices, choose the talking speed, and give the resulting audio file a name. When ready, click Start.

You’ll then be taken to a new results page where you can play the audio. If you’re not happy, click Back to start to begin again and make any necessary changes.

If all is good, you can then download the file in either MP3 or WAV format. The site shows you the file size of each. Both should be relatively small, but if you want the smallest then go for MP3.

4. Festvox

Festvox is part of a project at Carnegie Mellon University’s speech group. Their text to speech tool is a bit outdated now, especially as the voices sound a bit robotic, but it still does a quick and simple job if that’s what you need.

There are some limitations. While there’s no specified character limit, it doesn’t convert anything if you input a huge amount of text. Also, though there is a dropdown to choose audio format, whatever you select will output as a WAV—but that’s fine since it’s a common and lightweight file format.

Once you’ve popped your text in, and chosen your voice, click Synthesize to download the file. If your file shows as 0 KB and/or doesn’t play any audio, it means you’ve used too many characters. Go back and reduce the amount of text.

5. Kukarella

Kukarella requires you to sign up before you can use the service, but that’s okay since it’s free (for up to 2000 characters), quick, and ultimately worthwhile. Once signed up and logged in, click the Convert Text to Voice button on the homepage.

Since Kukarella is powered by Amazon, Google, IBM, and Microsoft, that means you can choose from a good number of different voices in many languages. Some are only available on a paid membership, but the free service has a large enough choice.

Above where you input your text, note that you can switch to the Voices with Effects tab. Here you can highlight your text and apply effects (like emphasis or whisper) to specific parts. Once done, click Convert to process everything, and you can then play the clip and click the Download icon to grab the MP3.

6. Hearling

Hearling is the second version of a text to speech tool called Sound of Text (which is still a good choice, but very basic). You need to sign up for a free account which grants you 5000 characters per month of standard voices and 1250 characters per month of the more advanced WaveNet voices.

Once logged in, head to the Clips page and click New Clip. Choose your language, the dialect, and the voice, then click Next. On the right-hand panel, input the text that you wish to convert. When ready, click Synthesize Clips.

You’ll be taken to a Download Clips page, where you can choose to Play and Download your clip as an MP3 file. If you’re not happy with the output, click Start Over to try again. You can return to this page whenever you like to view all your previously created clips, though you will need to pay if you want to download them all at once in a ZIP.

The Best Free Speech to Text Software

Whichever of these services you choose, you’re in good hands. Here’s a little tip: even if you exhaust your free limit on one of them, you can simply move to the next.

There are some excellent text to speech apps for your Android phone too. And if you’re also looking for speech to text, here’s our best free speech to text programs for Windows.

Read the full article: 6 Free Online Tools to Download Text-to-Speech as MP3 Audio

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Faraday Tour

Quick Charge 5 Can Charge Phones 50% in 5 Minutes

Qualcomm has announced Quick Charge 5, a new version of its widely-used charging technology that features speeds so fast it’ll blow your mind.

Qualcomm’s Quick Charge is one of the most underappreciated pieces of technology. We get excited about new processors, cameras, and screens, but you don’t hear people screaming from the rooftops about their phone’s charger. But they should, especially with the speed offered by the upcoming Quick Charge 5.

Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 5 Features

Qualcomm published a post on Qualcomm.com breaking down what its new technology can do. Quick Charge 5 features support for 100W of power and above. It also has backwards compatibility for older Quick Charge versions and USB Power Delivery.

As far as speed is concerned, that’s where things get exciting. Quick Charge 5 promises to charge a 4,500mAh battery to 50 percent power in just five minutes. It can also charge the same battery to full in less than 15 minutes. Which means that the days of waiting hours for a phone to charge are well and truly over.

When compared to the previous version of Quick Charge, Qualcomm claims that this one runs 10°C (50° F) cooler, with 70 percent more efficiency, and up to 4x the speed.

Not all devices will get the full speed offered by the upcoming technology. Quick Charge 5 supports different voltages ranging from 3.3V to 20V. Only time will tell which devices can push the full speed provided by Quick Charge 5, but we’d expect to see some pushing the limit.

What Quick Charge 5 Means for You

Qualcomm’s Quick Charge and Power Delivery are the two most used technologies in smartphone charging. Which means you should expect to see plenty of devices with this exciting technology arrive down the road.

Qualcomm has hinted that Xiaomi will be the first company to implement its new technology, but we’d expect quite a few other devices to launch with it before the end of the year.

If you want to learn more, check out this handy guide that explains how power delivery works.

Read the full article: Quick Charge 5 Can Charge Phones 50% in 5 Minutes

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Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked Trailer Teases New Devices

Samsung has put out a trailer that reveals precisely what the company plans to show off at its upcoming Galaxy Unpacked event.

The company teased a total of five devices, including phones, earbuds, a tablet, and a watch. Fans of Samsung devices are definitely in for a treat when the company takes to the stage on August 5 to announce its latest gadgets.

Samsung Teases Galaxy Unpacked Devices

The short video ends with the silhouettes of five different Samsung devices. Based on the leaks leading up to the event, it’s pretty safe to assume that we’re looking at the Galaxy Note 20, Galaxy Z Fold 2, Galaxy Watch 3, Galaxy Buds Live, and Galaxy Tab S7. However, we can’t know for sure until Samsung announces the devices to the masses.

On the far-right is a large phone with an S Pen, which is likely the Samsung Galaxy Note 20. While the leaks have been minimal on this device, we expect it to feature a faster processor (speculation points to the high-end Snapdragon 865+). Rumors also point to a 6.9-inch 120Hz display, but we’ll have to wait until the official announcement to find out.

Next to it is a phone that appears to be folded down the middle. We expect this to be the follow-up to the original Samsung Galaxy Fold. The Galaxy Z Fold 2 should feature bumps to processing power and cameras. The most exciting aspect of the device is definitely the rumored 7.7-inch foldable display.

You can clearly see the outline of a smartwatch, which is probably the Samsung Galaxy Watch 3. Rumors on the Samsung Galaxy Watch 3 features have been pretty sparse. However, some reports indicate that it’ll feature an IP68 rating, 1GB of RAM, a heart rate monitor, and other high-end features.

Hanging out next to the watch is what looks like a pair of earbuds. We’d expect these to be the Galaxy Buds Live, which is surely Samsung’s worst-kept secret.

Finally, Samsung appears to be rounding out its lineup with a tablet. This should be the Galaxy Tab S7. The prevailing rumor is that the tablet will come with an 11-inch standard LCD model and a 12.4-inch AMOLED model.

How to Watch Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked Event

Now that we know (pretty much) what Samsung is launching at its next Galaxy Unpacked event, we just need to wait for the event itself. If you want to check it out, you can do so on the Samsung website at 10 AM ET on August 5, 2020.

In the meantime, be sure to check out our list of the best budget smartphones. That way, you can compare the upcoming high-end Samsung devices to more affordable phones.

Read the full article: Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked Trailer Teases New Devices

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Adobe Updates Photoshop on iPad With Two New Features

Adobe has updated Photoshop on iPad, adding two new features. Now, anyone who uses Photoshop on their iPad can use the Refine Edge Brush and rotate the canvas with a two-finger gesture.

The first is a feature from the desktop version of Photoshop, while the latter makes use of the touch interface offered by the iPad. Both new features make Photoshop on iPad a more compelling product.

What’s New in Photoshop on iPad?

In a post on The Adobe Blog, Pam Clark details the two new features coming to Photoshop on iPad.

First up is the Refine Edge Brush, which has been available on Photoshop on the desktop for years. As its name suggests, the Refine Edge Brush lets you refine the edges of subjects in a photo.

While other tools can deal with big objects with clearly defined edges, the Refine Edge Brush makes it easier when dealing with hair, fur, or anything with a particularly detailed outline.

Adobe states that the Refine Edge Brush means you can “precisely refine the border area of tricky selections.” The company also claims that the Refine Edge Brush means Photoshop can provide “results well beyond anything else available on the iPad today.”

Precise image selection capability and control, on any device. Now available on Photoshop on iPad: The Refine Edge Brush and Rotate Canvas features.

Wanna learn more? Follow along with @paultrani to get the full scoop, or read all about it here: https://t.co/RkmO8TRnAV pic.twitter.com/Em1bibZqgR

— Adobe Photoshop (@Photoshop) July 27, 2020

The second new feature available on Photoshop on iPad is the ability to rotate the canvas. In a nutshell, this means you can now rotate the canvas using a two-finger rotation gesture. You can also zoom in and out at the same time.

The rotation can snap at 0-, 90-, 180-, and 270-degrees. You can also reset it by zooming out. Rotation is not sticky, which means the canvas will return to zero degrees when you reopen a file. You can also toggle the feature on and off in the Settings > Touch menu.

Download: Photoshop on iPad (Free, with in-app purchases available)

Photoshop on iPad Is Getting Better

When Adobe first launched Photoshop on iPad, many users were frustrated by some of the missing features. However, as the company promised at the time, Adobe has updated Photoshop on iPad regularly, adding new features to achieve parity with the desktop version. And while it isn’t quite there yet, it’s getting better all the time.

Read the full article: Adobe Updates Photoshop on iPad With Two New Features

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6 Free Online Tools to Download Text-to-Speech as MP3 Audio

Text to speech tools help you turn the written word into the spoken word. Text to speech technology has come a long way over the years, with male and female voices, different accents, and the ability to control volume, pitch, rate, and more.

If you need a service to convert text to speech and then download it as an MP3 file, we’ve rounded up the best free websites to do that. The emphasis here is on tools that give you a file at the end of it, rather than just playing the conversion.

Here are the best text to speech converters with free download.

1. ttsMP3

ttsMP3 is a brilliant text to speech tool. First, you can select from loads of different languages across a variety of accents like American and Welsh. Input your text, choose your voice from the dropdown, then click Read to hear it. If you’re happy, click Download as MP3 to grab the recording.

The standout feature here though is the ability to use syntax to change the voice. You can emphasize words, change the pitch, create conversations, and much more. That’s because the service is powered by Amazon Polly. You can view some example syntax on the ttsMP3 site, or check out the full list on Amazon’s Supported SSML Tags page.

You can convert up to 375 words or 3000 characters a day for free. If you need more, you can either wait for it to reset or pay for a membership—curiously, you can only get either a 24-hour plan or an annual plan.

2. Text 2 Voice

Text 2 Voice does what it says on the tin. Input up to 2000 characters into the text box—a counter beneath the box shows how much you’ve used and if you need more from a single conversion then you’ll have to pay.

Beneath, use the Language and Regions dropdown, and then select from the Voices list alongside. Once done, click the yellow Convert to speech button. This might take a short while if you’ve written a lot. When it’s ready, the audio will automatically play.

You can also expand the options for Additional Audio Settings (change between MP3 and OGG and change the sample rate) and Additional Voice Settings (voice speed and voice effect). If you do alter these, click Convert to speech again to process the change before clicking Download MP3/OGG.

3. Text 2 Speech

Text 2 Speech is a simple service, but it does the job well. Input your text (up to 4000 characters) select from a small range of voices, choose the talking speed, and give the resulting audio file a name. When ready, click Start.

You’ll then be taken to a new results page where you can play the audio. If you’re not happy, click Back to start to begin again and make any necessary changes.

If all is good, you can then download the file in either MP3 or WAV format. The site shows you the file size of each. Both should be relatively small, but if you want the smallest then go for MP3.

4. Festvox

Festvox is part of a project at Carnegie Mellon University’s speech group. Their text to speech tool is a bit outdated now, especially as the voices sound a bit robotic, but it still does a quick and simple job if that’s what you need.

There are some limitations. While there’s no specified character limit, it doesn’t convert anything if you input a huge amount of text. Also, though there is a dropdown to choose audio format, whatever you select will output as a WAV—but that’s fine since it’s a common and lightweight file format.

Once you’ve popped your text in, and chosen your voice, click Synthesize to download the file. If your file shows as 0 KB and/or doesn’t play any audio, it means you’ve used too many characters. Go back and reduce the amount of text.

5. Kukarella

Kukarella requires you to sign up before you can use the service, but that’s okay since it’s free (for up to 2000 characters), quick, and ultimately worthwhile. Once signed up and logged in, click the Convert Text to Voice button on the homepage.

Since Kukarella is powered by Amazon, Google, IBM, and Microsoft, that means you can choose from a good number of different voices in many languages. Some are only available on a paid membership, but the free service has a large enough choice.

Above where you input your text, note that you can switch to the Voices with Effects tab. Here you can highlight your text and apply effects (like emphasis or whisper) to specific parts. Once done, click Convert to process everything, and you can then play the clip and click the Download icon to grab the MP3.

6. Hearling

Hearling is the second version of a text to speech tool called Sound of Text (which is still a good choice, but very basic). You need to sign up for a free account which grants you 5000 characters per month of standard voices and 1250 characters per month of the more advanced WaveNet voices.

Once logged in, head to the Clips page and click New Clip. Choose your language, the dialect, and the voice, then click Next. On the right-hand panel, input the text that you wish to convert. When ready, click Synthesize Clips.

You’ll be taken to a Download Clips page, where you can choose to Play and Download your clip as an MP3 file. If you’re not happy with the output, click Start Over to try again. You can return to this page whenever you like to view all your previously created clips, though you will need to pay if you want to download them all at once in a ZIP.

The Best Free Speech to Text Software

Whichever of these services you choose, you’re in good hands. Here’s a little tip: even if you exhaust your free limit on one of them, you can simply move to the next.

There are some excellent text to speech apps for your Android phone too. And if you’re also looking for speech to text, here’s our best free speech to text programs for Windows.

Read the full article: 6 Free Online Tools to Download Text-to-Speech as MP3 Audio

Read Full Article