Fun Fact: Here’s Why Google Pixel Wallpapers are Bird Feathers

Study findings have just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Besides curating popular sites to visit and things to do, the crux of Touring Bird is directly listing ticketing and reservation providers. This simplifies the purchasing experience for travelers, while also providing a potential source of monetization for Google. Many free sites and activities are listed, with locals often contributing popular destinations.

Touring Bird shutting down ultimately makes sense given how Google Trips was killed in favor of a unified Google Travel offering, as well as Maps. Hopefully, this rich corpus of data and refined implementation lives on in other first-party products. It first launched with a Paris guide in early 2018 before expanding to 20 cities later that year.

• In recent weeks, the third-party ecosystem of actions has grown to include a WikiHow action for thousands of DIY instructions and a Bible reader that can read scripture based on how you feel.
• EBird is a global citizen science database of bird observations managed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
• Touring Bird shutting down ultimately makes sense given how Google Trips was killed in favor of a unified Google Travel offering, as well as Maps.
• Surmising that people would probably search more often for birds they encountered frequently, the authors turned to eBird for the geographical piece of the puzzle.
• “Google Trends data describe how often people search for birds and provide a snapshot of public interest in different species,” says researcher Justin Schuetz, Cornell alum and lead author of the study.
• Touring Bird helps you explore and compare prices and options across providers and makes it easier to book tours, tickets and activities in top destinations around the world.

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If you own a Google Pixel device launched in 2022 onwards, then you will notice that its wallpapers are bird feathers. Google Assistant can tell you what a swan or hummingbird sounds like, but it has limits — it cannot tell you about a grey wagtail or a black browed albatross, for example. If you get especially good at recognizing the birds, you can try your hand at the Bird Song Skill’s song quiz. I can’t wait for an action like this to take my location into account so I can learn the sounds of birds in my immediate surroundings.

Touring Bird

“Google Trends data describe how often people search for birds and provide a snapshot of public interest in different species,” says researcher Justin Schuetz, Cornell alum and lead author of the study. Co-author and Cornell Lab of Ornithology researcher Alison Johnston notes that Google data cannot reveal the underlying motivations for searches but knowing which species capture public interest matters for conservation. “But we can start to understand why some species garner more attention than others. Then the challenge to conservationists is to raise awareness around lesser-known species.” 9To5Mac reported that the transition of Android wallpapers to bird feathers is a part of the relaunched Google Design.

Fun Fact: Here’s Why Google Pixel Wallpapers are Bird Feathers

Surmising that people would probably search more often for birds they encountered frequently, the authors turned to eBird for the geographical piece of the puzzle. EBird is a global citizen science database of bird observations managed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Mercedes and Hyundai recently launched actions to give owners of their vehicles control of their cars via Alexa or Google Assistant.

Google shutting down Area 120 project Touring Bird, integrated into other Travel efforts

Touring Bird helps you explore and compare prices and options across providers and makes it easier to book tours, tickets and activities in top destinations around the world. We also wanted to make travel more fun and memorable by making it easier to discover unique things to do. They think that bird feathers are a natural progression from the recent flower wallpapers, which Google introduced in its older Pixel devices. The Bird Song Skill from Thomptronics can play more than two hundred bird sounds — from a wild turkey to half a dozen swan species to the Veery, which is said to have one of the most beautiful bird songs in all of North America. About 25 new actions have landed on Google Home for Google Assistant, including an action that lets you listen to the sounds of hundreds of bird songs and one that mimics the person in your office who says innocuous, buzzword-laden things in meetings.

Google searches reveal popular bird species

Understanding people’s interest in different bird species can also help conservation organizations focus their efforts, says Schuetz. For example, “conservation groups might want to identify species in need of help that are regionally well-known but don’t have a reputation beyond that region. These species could be good candidates for stewardship programs that encourage a sense of regional pride.” Cross-referencing a decade of Google searches and citizen science observations, researchers have determined which of 621 North American bird species are currently the most popular and which characteristics of species drive human interest.

• “But we can start to understand why some species garner more attention than others. Then the challenge to conservationists is to raise awareness around lesser-known species.”
• According to Android Police’s latest report, Google’s design team decided to try something different for Google Pixel wallpapers.
• If you get especially good at recognizing the birds, you can try your hand at the Bird Song Skill’s song quiz.
• About 25 new actions have landed on Google Home for Google Assistant, including an action that lets you listen to the sounds of hundreds of bird songs and one that mimics the person in your office who says innocuous, buzzword-laden things in meetings.
• Co-author and Cornell Lab of Ornithology researcher Alison Johnston notes that Google data cannot reveal the underlying motivations for searches but knowing which species capture public interest matters for conservation.
• Though proximity to a species often plays a role in shaping public interest, the authors also found that some “celebrity” species, such as Common Raven, Barn Owl, and Whooping Crane, are popular even outside their range.

The Mercedes Me action can unlock the car door, start the car engine, or take navigation directions. Continuing a trend of actions made for public transit times in major cities, the Atlanta rail action was recently made available to tell Atlanta metro area residents about the arrival time of the next bus or train. Thanks to the efforts of Google’s design team, 12 wallpaper images of bird wings are included in the final result. According to Android Police’s latest report, Google’s design team decided to try something different for Google Pixel wallpapers.

More than 175 actions have been made available on the Google Home app since the launch of the Actions on Google platform last December. In recent weeks, the third-party ecosystem of actions has grown to include a WikiHow action for thousands of DIY instructions and a Bible reader that can read scripture based on how you feel. Though proximity to a species often plays a role in shaping public interest, the authors also found that some “celebrity” species, such as Common Raven, Barn Owl, and Whooping Crane, are popular even outside their range. They pooled the results into four categories which Schuetz and Johnston call “cultural niche space,” based on how frequently people searched for a species relative to how often they might encounter it in nature. Announced last September, Touring Bird is a simple website that curates things travelers can do on a city-by-city basis. The Area 120 project will be shutting down next month as the Touring Bird team joins Google’s unified Travel initiative.

Role of simulation in the digital twin for energy and process industries

Fallmann further explained DToCs are created by connecting scattered data from different silos, departments and data sources, which includes consolidating unstructured and structured information. The enhanced experiences driven by DToCs can extend across the physical and digital worlds. For example, DToCs can assist with the design and planning of retail stores and other physical spaces.

Physics-based simulation models, at varied length scales, allow engineers to capture this complexity and use it to explore design and operating spaces to find optimum conditions. Finally, in the long term, the Gartner report indicated brands should create the digital twin of a team of customer experience specialists that will be used to discuss the implications and merits of DToC on operational processes and the overall brand business model. Privacy regulations and laws should be discussed regularly, and the team should work on tracking dynamic personas and the stages of their relationships. “One key innovation making DToC possible is the availability of cloud-scale computing resources combined with modern AI and ML technologies,” Jones explained.

AI can help HR act on the massive amount of data it collects daily by planning and testing new processes and services in the virtual world long before they see actual daylight. Such a contextual model can drive key decisions which could have been missed, overlooked or not readily visible otherwise. Imagine a digital representation of a process or machine with all current operational parameters and predictions against future orders for material availability, tool life and maintenance schedules. A planner can see how many orders they can schedule with current on-hand inventory and machine supplies. A plant manager can visualize the production rate with potential bottlenecks, and a maintenance manager can determine the remaining tool life and plan the next maintenance. Data from MES is essential for creating a comprehensive digital twin throughout a manufactured product’s life cycle, especially in operational stages beyond engineering and design.

Digital Twins Of The Customer: The Future Of Data Collection

• It isn’t always easy to determine the nature of an issue based on a phone call or chat conversation alone, especially as products and services continue to become more and more complex.
• This includes simulating, and even anticipating a customer’s behaviour, wants, needs and preferences, as well as the ability to test these in different scenarios.
• Entire stores can be replicated via digital twins, and virtual customers walking on the shop floor can be analyzed based on their behavior and the interactions they have on the floor.
• This enables them to better understand what a specific customer purchases, how frequently they buy, how much money they spend and how often they frequent the brand’s website.
• By bridging the gap between the physical world and the digital world, digital twins can enable a brand’s customer service to provide this differentiated level of service through the data they provide.

DToCs can simulate how specific cohorts will respond before a customer journey is defined, saving time and money spent on testing underperforming journey interventions. Forty-one percent of respondents who’ve achieved full customer data integration indicated they were still unable to prove the value of marketing, according to Gartner’s 2022 Marketing Data & Analytics Survey. Developing a 360-degree view requires multiple tools and partners to collect a variety of data types, including behavioral and attribute data. Because of the added complexity and expense, only 14% of organizations have actually achieved a 360-degree view, according to our research. A 360-degree view of the customer is the output of a consolidated, integrated, exhaustive set of data relevant to a company’s relationship with its customers or prospects.

How Digital Twins In HR Can Help Predict Problems And Lead To Organizational Change

At the same time, enterprises have been busy finding ways to get the most value from their investment using various marketing analytics tools. Our sister community, Reworked, gathers the world’s leading employee experience and digital workplace professionals. And our newest community, VKTR, is home for AI practitioners and forward thinking leaders focused on the business of enterprise AI.

Subha Tatavarti, CTO, Wipro, told VentureBeat there have been several important milestones in using tools for simulating customers to improve experiences. The most notable have been the ability to define customer experience transformation objectives, including the capability to identify and assess data assets, personas and processes and tools for building and testing behavior models. New ModelOps approaches for integrating monitoring and enhancing the models are also advancing the field. An important consideration when employing a digital twin is that organizations are recording data and transferring it via cloud technology. This data may be sensitive and contain intellectual property, which puts the organization at risk of a breach. To avoid this, security should be considered a priority from the start for organizations integrating digital twin technology into their customer experience.

How Is a Digital Twin of a Customer Created?

The Infrastructure Cloud will also carry benefits beyond a single project, acting as a source of infrastructure schema and data that can be used on future projects. “Unlike traditional, reactive approaches such as basic customer segmentation or analytics, digital twins go beyond static profiles and actively simulate customer behaviour, wants, needs, and preferences,” he said. In today’s disruptive economy, taking a commodity area of the business, such as cleaning, back in-house is a challenging conversation for business leaders. However, as CIO Emiliano Sorrenti reveals, data enables the organization to believe in a change of course, take control of areas typically outsourced and show how it benefits the customer and ultimately the organization. As organizations continue to become data-driven, data could well be the key to another significant change in the world economy and the current ethos towards outsourcing. By including IoT technology and sensors into products that gather data, information can be sent back to the organization to provide on-the-ground insight into how products are being used, how well they’re performing and the status of the operating system.

When internal battery monitors indicate low levels in devices, you tailor offers to include extended battery-life models. If a customer typically adds an additional 30 seconds after microwaving their dinner, flag them as a target for a higher-wattage model, or offer them a service call to check the output of the appliance. Global beauty chain Sephora builds DToCs to predict products that customers would most likely be interested in, based on their purchase and browsing history.

Digital ways to improve CX.

Combined with other technologies, such as AR, digital twins can offer a truly immersive environment where anything can be turned into a digital experience. Whether the goal is to execute a new strategy, grow a more competitive workforce, improve organizational effectiveness or identify potential issues and obstacles, this is the technology that can be the linchpin between it all. As businesses connect more expansive twin networks and build out this virtual infrastructure, the prediction and automation capabilities will gradually grow. In turn, HR leaders will be able to expand real-time agility at scale and usher in new innovation processes, all the while working out the kinks beforehand. “Initially, it will be hard to convince customers they need a digital twin that your brand stores and that the customer should help create it to improve their experience,” said Jonathan Moran, head of MarTech solutions marketing at SAS.

How Will Digital Twins of Customers Impact CX?

These digital twins are more in the engineering and design domain and answer “what-if” questions to assess feasibility before significant investments in building or acquiring physical systems. With digital twins, your engineers can determine the ideal design before the unit goes into production. Operations engineers can react to real-time product disturbances based on the deep insights gained during R&D. In other words, when it comes to providing a better overall customer experience, physical objects paired with digital twin technology are a perfect match.

There will be more use cases beyond maintenance for productivity, quality, supply chain and more. There have been many definitions of digital twins, each correct in its own context, as the concept means different things to different people. With iTwin Capture, users can take drone imagery or point cloud scans of infrastructure assets and start building digital twins directly off of these reality captures. In iTwin IOT, data from sensors and other Internet of Things devices mounted on infrastructure assets or at jobsites can flow directly into the iTwin platform, granting the digital twin a more active role in safety and environmental monitoring. Using simulation to understand complexity creates opportunities to deploy the insights to your businesses’ advantage.

OpenAIs Fidji Simo: Key Life Pillars AI Can Benefit

Despite the huge surge of generative AI within online search, many people are still wary of the responses they’re receiving from AI. There’s the Rabbit R1, a small square gadget that costs $199 and uses an OpenAI model to answer questions, as well as the AI pin developed by Humane, which later sold to HP. While the agentic AI experiences are the exciting new capabilities, the AI-powered ease of use starts at the beginning, when users set up Intuit Enterprise Suite, migrating from QuickBooks or even just spreadsheets. The reality for many mid-market companies is that they want to utilize AI, but they don’t want to deal with the complexity.

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In June, Intuit announced the debut of a series of AI agents designed to help small businesses get paid faster and operate more efficiently. An expanded set of AI agents is now being introduced to the Intuit Enterprise Suite, which is designed to help meet the needs of mid-market organizations. In addition to sharing AI triumphs, businesses also need to show what AI misuse and failures look like in order to educate employees on positive and negative emergent patterns in AI adoption. In 2004, Google surpassed Yahoo in market cap—just two months after its $23 billion IPO. Almost two decades later, Google seems to be facing a similar scenario. “I’m sure there’s PTSD,” prominent Silicon Valley PR leader Brooke Hammerling told Forbes.

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By giving employees the context, time, and resources necessary to understand and effectively use this new technology, companies can close the AI knowledge gap and experience positive business outcomes. Compared to GPT-4o, the o1 models feel like one step forward and two steps back. OpenAI o1 excels at reasoning and answering complex questions, but the model is roughly four times more expensive to use than GPT-4o.

• The finance agent, for instance, can generate monthly performance summaries, potentially saving finance teams up to hours per month.
• Harrison says he’s in camp one and that camp two requires you to trust AI to make the right decision.
• Seek AI solutions that work within that complexity rather than demanding simplification.
• It reveals why mid-market AI requires fundamentally different technical approaches than those for either small businesses or enterprise solutions.
• When Google demoed it at I/O that year, the company had LaMDA speak from the perspective of the dwarf planet Pluto and a paper airplane.

In some ways, Strawberry was never going to live up to the hype. Reports about OpenAI’s reasoning models date back to November 2023, right around the time everyone was looking for an answer about why OpenAI’s board ousted Sam Altman. That spun up the rumor mill in the AI world, leaving some to speculate that Strawberry was a form of AGI, the enlightened version of AI that OpenAI aspires to ultimately create. But it broke down its thinking for me at each step of the way and explained how it considered all of these external factors, including costs, family time, and oven management. Fidji Simo, soon to be the new CEO of applications at OpenAI, laid out a memo on Tuesday explaining her perspective on the role of AI around the world. Coming to OpenAI after serving as Instacart’s CEO, she frames AI as a service for good, identifying six life pillars — knowledge, health, creative expression, economic freedom, time, and support — that can benefit from it.

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A supply chain that can’t course-correct midstream or personalize at the edge isn’t just inefficient—it’s invisible to the modern customer. Finally, AI—in this case, GenAI—can help supply chain leaders with simulations and strategic planning. Leaders can run multiple scenarios and see how different parts of the supply chain will react under certain conditions.

I mean, we already made one change to one of them to reflect what was happening in the environment. We really do feel like they will change and they will evolve over time. And that is part of our job, is to say, ‘Are these still right?

• In addition to sharing AI triumphs, businesses also need to show what AI misuse and failures look like in order to educate employees on positive and negative emergent patterns in AI adoption.
• Coming to OpenAI after serving as Instacart’s CEO, she frames AI as a service for good, identifying six life pillars — knowledge, health, creative expression, economic freedom, time, and support — that can benefit from it.
• But it broke down its thinking for me at each step of the way and explained how it considered all of these external factors, including costs, family time, and oven management.
• Gain insight from top innovators and thought leaders in the fields of IT, business, enterprise software, startups, and more.

That’s likely how most people in the industry are viewing o1, but not quite as the revolutionary step forward that GPT-4 represented for the industry. I also asked o1 to help me plan out a busy day at work, where I needed to travel between the airport, multiple in-person meetings in various locations, and my office. It gave me a very detailed plan, but maybe was a little bit much. Sometimes, all the added steps can be a little overwhelming.

Five years ago, Google had what could be considered a coming out party of sorts for the company’s artificial intelligence ambitions. That year at I/O, Pichai unveiled Duplex, a stunningly human-sounding AI service that could book restaurant reservations for users. The AI was programmed to sound like a person by mimicking verbal tics like “um” and “uh,” taking long pauses and modulating its voice.

Jeff Dean, head of Google Research, later admitted that the company’s AI unit took a “reputational hit” because of the episode. In the balance is Google’s famous search engine, with its sparse white homepage, one of the most iconic pieces of real estate on the internet. Altering it drastically could affect the advertising revenues (at least in the short term) that have made the company one of the most valuable of all time. But to take back its AI mantle, Google may have to change the very nature of what it means to ‘google’ something.