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tv   Click  BBC News  April 1, 2023 12:30pm-1:01pm BST

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this is bbc news, with me, shaun ley. the headlines: pope francis has left hospital in rome. he was admitted on wednesday, after complaining of breathing issues. the pope says he will take part
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in the mass celebrating palm sunday. the death toll from a series of tornadoes that have ripped through parts of the united states is rising. at least four people have now been killed in the states of arkansas and illinois. lawyers for donald trump say he will surrender to a court in new york on tuesday, after becoming the first former us president to face criminal charges. his legal team say he's "angry, but not worried" about the case. in the uk, the port of dover has declared a critical incident, with up to 70 coaches delayed overnight, as they tried to cross to france. port authorities cited french border controls and bad weather for the hold—ups. lewis vaughan jones will lewis vaughanjones will be with you at the top of the hour. you're watching bbc news. now it's time for click.
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plenty on the menu this week! yeah, paul's with the robots that help blind people to pack and stack. and ai helps jamie oliver cook up some spanish. spanish dubbing meanwhile, would you let lara cook you dinner? oh, the stench! that is absolutely overwhelming! it's leftovers again. i think i'll go for take—out. it seems that the whole world has been talking about artificial intelligence recently. it's "chatgpt" this and "ai art" that. you can have conversations with it, you can be creative with it, and the recent release of gpt—ii seems to be displaying levels of understanding of questions and images that are astounding the experts. this is the uk's national centre for data science
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and artificial intelligence, the alan turing institute, named after the mathematician considered to be the father of computer science. artificial intelligence is the idea of notjust us programming computers, but them being able to learn for themselves and alter their own code. yeah. and, in fact, it was the big guy himself who came up with the idea of the turing test, suggesting a computer could be regarded as truly intelligent if it could chat to a human and fool that human into thinking they were talking to another human. now, you and i have both tried chatgpt and all the latest ai chatbots. do you think that test has been passed now? to some extent, yes. i do think they can seem human, but there are some caveats to that. yeah, i think you're right, but i do think that they are convincing enough these days. the problem is, that version of the test turned out to be too easy to solve and not really a sign of human—level intelligence after all. and, of course, it's important to remember that al isn'tjust about chat, it's about
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bringing in loads of data and learning from that. and it can be used to solve all sorts of problems — possibly even this one. a third of all the food produced globally for human consumption is wasted — that's about 1.3 billion tonnes a year. then, when that food breaks down in landfill, it releases harmful greenhouse gases whilst, at the same time, there's a struggle to feed an ever—growing global population. so, i visited one company in cambridge that thinks it can provide some help. the set—up here consists of a series of containers, which means that it can be recreated anywhere. this is the brains of the whole thing, inside this cupboard. it's a lot of leads — so many leads. and through these pipes comes the food waste. in there is a mix of old vegetables, old fruit, bakery goods. it comes down into this big container, where it's all blended and effectively
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turned into a big soup. it checks that the temperature�*s right and the ph is balanced, and then, it comes out through this pipe and goes through into the next room, ready for the insects. yep, food for the insects — black soldier fly larvae, to be specific. oh, the stench! that is absolutely overwhelming! but it's not surprising because, in here, you've got the fodder and the creatures consuming it. look at that! look at how they're squirming around! i've been allowed to give them lunch. and wherever these containers are set up, sensors, tracking and an a! system goes, too. the role of ai is that we've built a platform that we can remotely operate every system we have. so that, let's say, that we're here in cambridge and one of our systems is out in wales. we can, from our central here, know exactly what is going on, and we can also optimise
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for yields, fit conversion ratios and generally, the growth of the insects. the al's monitoring the temperature, atmosphere, their growth rate and what the larvae eat. once they're perfectly fattened up, they move on to the next stage of the process. the larvae and that food they've been consuming all comes down these pipes. it'll then be separated in this device. then it's not long before they rather quickly reach the end of their days. and, once they have, they get separated into the useful bits of fat and protein before they get packaged up, ready to be used in products. right now, the insects are being used as animalfeed — a replacement for soya bean. the insect alternative is nutritious and has a much lower carbon footprint. so, when we started to commercialise the technology, we decided to focus on one specific sector, and that was the poultry sector. so, we converted food waste from the supply chain
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into carbon—negative animal feed — that was larvae that got fed to chickens — and they produced carbon—neutral eggs. and the next step is to move the product up the food chain. so here, we've got some feed for dogs, both dry and wet, and something for humans. and i happen to know that suhail, my cameraman here, loves a bit of cake, don't you? you can't say i never give you anything. these are madeleines. they're 30% protein. mm. take a bite. how is it? mm! they're really good. i would've never guessed there's insects in this. 0k. so it tastes like cake, moist in the middle? it's very moist. it's a great texture. definitely couldn't tell it's made of insects, 100%. there's your lunch. laughter i might have a second one, actually — they're quite good! well, suhail seemed happy, but he's always very easy—going. how ready is everyone else? insects are very nutritious.
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they're very sustainable to produce. you require 99% less land, 99% less water. and, of course, the emissions is significantly lower and also they taste great. so, if you have those three pillars ready, the foundation is there. but i think it's a matter of marketing and people getting more familiar with it before we introduce it to the wider public. insects are widely eaten in many parts of the world, but whether everyone can switch their mindsets to expecting them for dinner is another question. bellissimo! perfect. hmm, that seemed rather pungent! suhail seemed to enjoy it, though, didn't he? did he take a doggy bag home, ora...larvae bag? he actually told me that the cakes were a bit dry afterwards, but he did kind of enjoy them. if you don't fancy insects for dinner, though, alasdair keane has been finding out how jamie oliver's team has been using al to help show the world what's on the menu. millions of hours of video content is watched online each
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week, with platforms full of everything from the bizarre... ..to cooking. the internet loves carbonara. pasta, cream, bacon... cream? it's fact. and there are the wrong ways and the right ways to do it. a classic italian dish. what's not to love, right? but it's really controversial. so much of that content is in english, costing too much time and money for companies to translate and re—voice with actors. now, the jamie oliver team are turning to ai and a company called papercup to take the chef to new audiences. it's about numbers game in this world, so the more content you can put out, the more people can engage with it, the more they might — vegetarian, they might only like pasta recipes, they might not, so there's lots of different sort of subsections in our content, so being able to do the volume is really useful for us. and this is where everything happens. this one's about chocolate brownies, and it says chocolate all the way through it.
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the programme not only translates the video automatically, but also overlays a dubbed computer—generated voice in the new language. a team of translators then quality—check it and adjust the voice to make it sound more natural. we pay attention to detail when it comes to the characters we're dubbing. spanish dubbing we use all the tools we have in hand to make it sound as accurate as possible. in this case, i chose number 10 because it's the most suitable one forjamie oliver in this case. and then, here, you can play with speed, you can play with the mood. actually, i need it to sound a little bit more expressive, so i'm going to change it to happy. more spanish dubbing all of these subtle changes in the style of delivery to the odd word or sentence are combined to make one coherent voice, improving the watch experience for the viewer. german dubbing
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synthetic voices maybe are quite usable when it comes to home assistants and article readers and chatbots, and i think that's where you see a quite a big application, but we've spent literally five years trying to craft voices that are specifically suited for video. now what we're producing is literally indistinguishable from human speech. german dubbing spanish dubbing german dubbing how long does it take to go through a video? well, that's hard to say. it really depends on the video we're working on. but so much faster than traditional? oh, yeah, definitely. you represent a huge brand, injamie oliver. it must be hard to trust the ai. you know, sometimes, it might not be fully accurate or it might not be... the intonation might not be as good as it could be, but this is better than not
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having the solution. the positives that come out of it far outweigh any negatives that you might have about that. cheering and applause this tech is also being applied to more complex videos like tv talent shows. dubbed speech but with creating something so human—sounding, is there a danger that this tech, in the wrong hands, could be used to trick people or provide harmful information? onus is on companies like us. it's ourjob to help also create these watermarks or these characteristics that we embed in the output that we produce that we know will almost identify the fingerprint that says, "this was produced by papercup". and that way, we can always trace back what is something that we've produced versus what is something we think is actually authentic and real. we're starting off with really good quality dark chocolate. for now, papercup is focusing on video that wouldn't normally be translated and re—voiced but perhaps in the future, similar techniques could be applied to blockbuster movies and tv shows. until next time, take care. bye, guys!
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in three, two, one... next up, the final instalment of our awards season behind—the—scenes look at visual effects. the hell kind of mission is this?! this time, we're talking to the team behind the bafta and oscar—nominated top gun: maverick. bogey in the air! the role of visual effects is very much, how do we make it so we are never noticed? and that's when we knew we did ourjob the best. when we're putting a bunch of cg jets right along real photographed jets, you have a bar that is set that is so incredibly high that there is no compromise. my standpoint, as the visual effects supervisor, - what i was trying to do is make sure that we were giving our. team the best beginnings of that shot design. - so, it was a real camera i operator filming a realjet in the sky. and even though in the story, i
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we might be changing those jets to a tomcat or a su—57, which is the enemyjet,| or dark star, which is- the hypersonic prototype aircraft at the beginning - of the film, even though those jets would ultimately be| what the audiences saw, i still wanted the team to be able to start with something j that was real. worked really closely - with our advisers in the navy to figure out, you know, how to sort of take - what was on the script - to the screen, in the sense of what specific manoeuvres pilots, real pilots, _ would be doing in those combat situations. - for us to kind of look at just the glancing angle of the edge of an aircraft and understand, how does the light actually interact and bounce and wrap around it? it's aspects of cg that are often considered very basic because it goes to very early rendering techniques, but dialling and actually getting the precise nature of those shaders to accurately create what the surfaces of these jets look like is something that is very, very uniquely challenging, especially when you consider that most of the materials
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on these jets are top secret. you know, we really- were attached to this group of men and women who do this for a living and theyjust had i so much, a wealth of knowledge that they gave us, and i think. that their contributions are a huge part of whyl we were able to do what we did. we're going into combat on a level no living pilot's ever seen. not even him. don't know about you, but i loved that film. right, time for a look at this week's tech news now. us regulators have accused binance, the world's largest crypto trading platform, of operating in the country illegally. their lawsuit says the firm fostered us business while not registering properly with authorities, but binance said it's made significant investments to keep us users off the platform. twitter will only allow verified users, mostly formed of paying subscribers, to vote in polls or have their posts recommended to other users
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from the 15th of april. chief exec elon musk says it's part of efforts to tackle bots on the platform. we're all quite aware that normally, social media — a bit like the nhs — is kind of like free at the point of consumption, so to speak. it's user—generated content. so, it's a bit of a — it's a huge cultural change, actually. artificial intelligence could replace the equivalent of 300 million full—time jobs, according to research by goldman sachs. the investment bank's report says a! could replace a quarter of work tasks in the us and europe, but may also lead to newjobs and a productivity boom. and apple has started to roll out its own buy now, pay later service in the us. pay later will let apple pay users on iphones and ipads split purchases into four payments over six weeks. sweet! the candy crush franchise is something of a cultural
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phenomenon. downloaded over 3 billion times, it's one of the most successful games ever. king, the company behind it, is part of activision blizzard, currently the target of a takeover by microsoft. i sat down for a chat with king's president, tjodolf sommestad. what is the secret of candy crush? it's an amazing game. and we launched the game when there was a big appetite for content on mobile phones, and that's a bit more than ten years ago. so actually, last year, candy celebrated its ten—year anniversary and we continue to develop the game, add more content, add more innovation, add more excitement for the players now for more than a decade. and we have more to come as well, but i think that continued innovation and, like, making the game better every week, every day, every month, our players have really responded to that. there's some criticism, isn't there, of the freemium business model, where you play for free, but you pay for extra features or added experiences? what are your thoughts
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about that model? would you consider a subscription model instead? i think the model that we have is great for candy crush. it's a game that, like, the majority of the players are playing for free. it makes it very accessible across the world. and players can choose if they want to, like, invest some of their money into the game to have an even richer experience. that's a model that's worked really well for us. we have complemented that with other business models. now it's possible to also watch ads in the game and get some rewards in return for that. what level are you on? i'm at 4,061. and how are you finding it? it's awesome. like, it's really fun. right now, we have an all—stars tournament going on that i'm engaging deeply in. how does the mobile games market compare to the console games market? the mobile games market is now just as big as the console games and the pc games combined. actually, a bit bigger. so it is the dominating kind of platform to play on. you're certainly in
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demand, aren't you? microsoft is looking to buy activision blizzard, which king is a part of, and microsoft says it wants access to the mobile gaming market, which you have. how does that feel? we are excited about the merger. i mean, microsoft has said, like you said, that they are interested in expanding more in mobile, and at king, that's where our home is. and, like, we have 233 million players in oh, monthly players in 04 in mobile. so it would be interesting to partner with them and see what we can do together. where does artificial intelligence fit with king? it's something that we looked at for years, and the acquisition of the swedish company peltarion is strengthening that with talent and experience and some of the technology that they also can bring. and they're now integrated with our team, and we're looking to build, like, an ai hub, like a centre of excellence inside king. do you think a! will be creating games for us? not in the near—term, forsure, but, like, it is a very useful tool. there's a lot of lay—offs going on, aren't there, in big tech in the us?
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are you finding more people are knocking on the door? we're seeing a change and, of course, we notice a bit of that. but my perspective is that it's not necessarily going to be much easier because we have a very high bar also on, like, finding talent that has the experience or have the energy and the drive to come in and really add value to our amazing teams. now, in the united states, disabled people are three times more likely to be out of work than non—disabled people, and you'll find similar figures in many developed countries around the world. but at one company in austin, texas, 250 of its employees — that's over half of its workforce — are either blind or visually impaired. and paul carter has been to find out about the assistive technology that they've been using. this is austin lighthouse, and it's a workplace with a difference.
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lighthouse is a non—profit organisation in texas dedicated to improving the lives of blind and visually—impaired people in the area. and it's turning to technology to help them achieve that. so the box comes out, we have to glue it. and then this is the label that comes out that goes to the box. its main areas of work are in manufacturing, warehousing and distribution, primarily for the us department of defense. it has over 900,000 square feet of space and processes over 1,300 orders every day. so, efficiency is key. a range of tech solutions have been deployed here for a variety of purposes, from enabling people to carry out work—specific tasks to navigating the environment and more. one such solution is called vocollect, a wearable tech incorporating voice recognition.
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because it's auditory, blind or visually—impaired people can use it to manage inventory. what it does is, it allows us to go pick the orders. you can do it as a totally blind person because it talks to you and you talk to it. it's all voice recognition. each of us have our own profiles. it's wi—fi, bluetooth, and so we have what is called orders, and there's a barcode on the order. we scan that barcode, and it speaks to us where we have to go, how many we have to pick and what the product is. we have a few other things that have really helped integrate a lot of stuff and help make morejobs for a blind or visually—impaired person. also buzzing about the vast warehouse are a range of robots, part of a partnership with robotics company zebra. these help minimise the amount of navigating that disabled workers need to do among the pallets. so the robots themselves make noise and they have radar
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technology, lidar technology, so you don't end up having an accidental interaction between an employee and a robot. and then we are also able, through the system that zebra has, to have somebody who has visual impairment actually be able to programme the robots in the warehouse, but it is otherwise automated. so you don't have to worry about constant interaction with it. but it's important to note that segregated, siloed employment is not the target here. what's amazing about a place like this is that the technology being deployed here is being used in a really inclusive way, and that's because it's enabling disabled people to do exactly the same jobs as the non—disabled people working right alongside them. a big element of the work done by lighthouse is to help its disabled employees learn skills and progress into other, more mainstream workforces. our objective is to allow - people to be on the career path that they want, and to do that, some of them are going -
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to stay here. many people want to learn skills here and then movel on to something else. if you're going to move - on to a different company, you have to have the skills, or you have to be in - the environment that would be needed to be competitive - on the outside. so we've incorporated l more technology, some of the technology that - you would find out in town. some of the technology is a leveller. _ it's the technology that allows people to do. i with that technology, - we now have 20 or 30 blind people picking orders. and processing orders. this device is called the onyx. it is a closed—circuit tv that's very portable. one way they achieve this is by teaching blind people both within the organisation and outside about the range of assistive technologies that exist for people with visual impairments. the assistive technology room has a large range of screen readers, magnifiers and optical character recognition equipment for people to use. essentially, it serves as a hub for people to be exposed to or introduced to assistive technology. people who are blind typically
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are blind later in life, which means that they undergo a very lengthy and a lot of times arduous and difficult transition into blindness. automated voice: bbc-homepage. ourjob is to introduce people to that technology that can help them reintegrate themselves into society, but with a focus on the workforce. so people who come here to the austin lighthouse inevitably leave with the skills they need to go back to work. technology continues to have a positive impact on the employment landscape for disabled people. while inclusive employment will always be the ultimate goal, for now, organisations like lighthouse are helping to show the way. that was paul. and that's it for this week. yeah, and from me, from lara and the big guy himself, thanks for watching. we'll see you soon. bye— bye.
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hello. many of us will have been waiting patiently and crossing ourfingers for some drier weather because march has certainly been a very wet month across much of the uk, particularly for parts of england, where it's been the wettest march since 1981 — over a0 years ago. some places have had three times the expected march rainfall, but now we turn the calendar over to april and actually, through the weekend, things are going to be becoming drier and gradually brighter as well. not dry everywhere today, we've still got low pressure close to the south—east and we've got a weather frontjust draped across western areas as well. so that's going to bring some outbreaks of rain in parts of northern ireland, south—west england, south wales as well. and from the east, with the breeze coming in from the north sea, that's going to import a lot of cloud and a few splashes of fairly light rain. some sunshine here and there,
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particularly parts of northern scotland, perhaps a bit down towards wales, into the midlands as well. where you do see the breeze coming in, though, for north—east england and eastern scotland, only about seven to nine degrees. the rest of us, typically, around 11 to 13. by the afternoon. a few glimpses of sunshine here and there, but most places are fairly cloudy. into the evening and overnight, we keep a fair amount of cloud and some spots of fairly light rain. that weather front in the west graduallyjust easing away, fading out through the night. some clear spells developing for eastern areas. and there could just be a touch of frost for prone parts of eastern scotland, for instance. that's how we start sunday. now, sunday will be an improving sort of day because high pressure is eventually starting to build in, and that's going to clear the weather fronts away and mean lighter winds, a drier and a brighter day ahead for many of us. still a little breezy for east anglia and the south—east, but certainly more sunshine than we've seen of late. a little bit more cloud drifting across scotland, at times, northern ireland into wales and the south—west of england, too.
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still rather cool around the east, nine or ten degrees, but most of us, about 11 to 13. and of course, the sun is starting to feel a little bit stronger this time of year. so monday, then, high pressure still very much with us. we've got a couple of weather fronts sitting out here in the atlantic and, through the week, they'll try and nudge in from the west, but they'll bump into that area of high pressure. so largely dry and settled, with lighter winds on monday. it is looking like a much improved day. could be some overnight frost, though. so a bit of a chilly start to things. by the afternoon, though, temperatures between about 10 to 13 degrees for most of us on monday. and then looking ahead through the rest of this coming week, a lot of dry, unsettled weather, perhaps a little bit of rain through the middle of the week. but at the moment, it looks a little warmer and drier towards easter. bye— bye.
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this is bbc news — welcome if you're watching here in the uk or around the globe. i'm lewis vaughan jones. our top stories. pope francis leaves hospital after receiving treatment for bronchitis, and promises to lead the mass celebrating palm sunday. a critical incident has been declared in dover as passengers are delayed for hours at the start of the easter getaway. devastating tornadoes tear through america's midwest, leaving four dead. arkansas and the state government stand ready to offer whatever assistance is needed. despite months of protests , wearing headscarfs in iran will be �*enforced rigorously�* according to authorities there, who are giving women just days to act. the bbc launches a new education programme in afghanistan for children banned
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