Office 365 users are now in cybercriminals' crosshairs in a new phishing campaign, according to a warning the Microsoft Security Intelligence (MSI) team issued via Twitter. Malicious actors are using email addresses that appear to be legitimate, with display names that mimic bona fide services to dodge email filters.
Microsoft cautioned cybercriminals are going above and beyond to use detection-evasion techniques that are convincing and authentic-looking.

"An active phishing campaign is using a crafty combination of legitimate-looking original sender email addresses, spoofed display sender addresses that contain the target usernames and domains, and display names that mimic legitimate services to slip through email filters," MSI explained on Twitter.

The deceptive phishing campaign targets Office 365 organizations with employees who often send attachments to co-workers. MSI found phishing emails that seemed as if they were sent from a trusted source. Many of these emails contained faux Microsoft SharePoint attachments with labels such as "Price Books," "Bonuses" and "Staff Reports."

The phishing emails use a tactic called "typosquatting," which involves registering deliberately misspelled domains that, at first glance, look close to a well-known brand. Most quick readers would overlook the subtle typo.

If users fall for the bait and click on the "Open" link, it will lead them to a page that lures them to type in their Microsoft or Google credentials. According to MSI, these sign-on pages look very convincing, making users believe that they're on a trustworthy path to a legitimate website.

MSI kept emphasizing how authentic these phishing emails looked. Employers may not be able to rely on their employees' good judgment to identify suspicious-looking emails. That's why MSI shamelessly plugged its Microsoft Defender for Office 365 program as a solution, adding that this software "detects and blocks" these emails.
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Phishing attacks are a huge thorn in the side for many popular companies like Netflix and PayPal, but the Redmond-based tech giant should be particularly concerned. According to a CheckPoint Research study, Microsoft topped the list as being the most imitated brand for phishing attacks.

Benefits. A well-known example of an emerging technology is artificial intelligence (AI). This technology has many facets, including machine learning, natural language processing and speech recognition. In September/October 2020, the Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA) and Protiviti conducted a global survey of over 7,400 IT audit leaders and professionals to get their perspectives on the top technology risks their organizations will face in 2021. Nearly 50% of the over 4,500 global respondents to the ISACA survey showed they are already using AI technologies (22%) or are in the planning and pilot stages of adopting them (27%).

Companies that have adopted emerging technologies, such as AI, hope to benefit from the competitive advantages that these technologies can provide. For example, cost savings and heightened revenues are made possible through increased efficiency and enhanced customer products and experiences.

Companies can speed up the adoption of emerging technologies by investing broadly across the company and using technologies in a way where the responsibility resides with the process owner. This approach generates better cost savings as process owners can solve a business problem specific to them, resulting in operational efficiencies and an increase in quality analysis.

Internal audit can also embrace AI technologies to enhance risk monitoring and control effectiveness. In a use case-specific example, machine learning can analyze general ledger data and pinpoint incorrect or fraudulent journal entries among thousands of other transactions. Note that larger and more complex business problems—which may have a broader impact across multiple areas of the business or have aspects that present greater risk to the company—would require collaboration and consultation with data scientists, who could be internal personnel or consultants.

Risks. Companies adopting emerging technologies must not only consider the benefits but also the associated risks. To develop an understanding of individuals' perceptions, the ISACA survey asked respondents to indicate their views on the risks of adopting AI technologies. Most respondents rated the risks associated with AI to be low (30%) or medium (33%), whereas only 9% determined AI to be high risk. In practice, companies must consider the maturity and complexity of the business processes using AI to determine true risk to the company.

One risk is that these emerging technologies will not achieve companies' expectations. To combat this risk, a clear vision needs to be established and supported by defined objectives with realistic targets. Due diligence involves thorough research to identify requirements for new projects that have a significant impact on the company. IT governance should play a substantial role as emerging technologies are being integrated into the business, including representation across different IT groups—such as application development, security, and infrastructure—within the IT governance process. This will enable communication across various parts of the business and help identify additional needs while streamlining project implementation. Monitoring and regular status updates should be communicated to senior leadership throughout the project, as well as post-launch to help determine if ROI was achieved or miscalculated.

Risks can also emerge from changing regulations that may limit the success of an emerging technology. For example, privacy laws related to the collection of consumer data could impede a company's ability to use successfully certain emerging technologies by disrupting current products and services in production. New regulations are imminent, especially surrounding algorithmic bias for technologies that affect customers. Continuous monitoring of new regulations and nimble development processes are necessary to ensure models comply with changing and new regulations.

Finally, there is a risk that a misconfiguration of the technology could cause an algorithm error issue, which would affect data quality and create threats to data security. These risks can be mitigated by putting strong change management processes in place. These processes ensure test cases are effectively designed and performed, that version controls appropriately log changes to models and source code repositories, and that peer reviews are conducted for coding and model changes. During the planning and building phase, it is critical to be mindful of the data set to identify potential biases and ethical dilemmas.
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Adopting emerging technologies can create competitive advantages, but these benefits are naturally accompanied with risk. Process owners can take a proactive approach to identify risks by engaging with internal audit or enterprise risk management. Starting discussions about risks and controls early in the technology's implementation will help identify any unaddressed issues and process improvements and ensure emerging technologies are successfully integrated into the business.

Zoom has announced that it’s acquiring a company known as Kites (short for Karlsruhe Information Technology Solutions), which has worked on creating real-time translation and transcription software. Zoom says the acquisition is a move to help it make communicating with people who speak different languages easier, and that it’s looking to add translation capabilities to its video conferencing app. 

According to its site, Kites began at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, and its technology was originally developed to act as in-classroom translation for students who needed help understanding the English or German their professors were lecturing in.
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Zoom already has real-time transcriptions, but it’s limited to people who are talking in English. On a support page, Zoom also clarifies that its current live transcription feature may not meet certain accuracy requirements. The company says it’s considering opening a research center in Germany, where the Kites team will be staying.

A respected Apple analyst recently made a startling prediction about mixed reality/augmented reality (MR/AR): “We believe that MR/AR products could replace all display-equipped electronics in the long-term,” said analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. He expects Apple to play a big part in taking these emerging technologies mainstream.

He predicts that Apple will build several MR/AR products, eventually leading to augmented reality contact lenses. Because of these predictions, he believes that MR/AR could be the default human-machine interface in the future.

Part of Kuo’s job as an analyst for TF International Securities is to make projections about future technology. Often, he looks no farther ahead than the next iPhone, but a note sent to investors recently covers forecasts for at least a decade of change.

He believes Apple is committed to augmented reality because “MR/AR will be the next critical technology to define the innovative human–machine interface for electronic products,” according to the analyst. It will “redefine human behavior in creating, processing, and receiving information.”

For a look at what this prediction would mean in everyday life, a concept artist dreamed up a future Mac that uses AR to replace physical displays.

Kuo uses the term “MR/AR” in his research note, but both mean nearly the same thing. Each term has its fans. Whatever the acronym, the tech involves combining computer-generated images with reality to present additional information.

As the company that popularized the mouse and the multitouch screen, Apple has a long history of redefining the human–machine interface, which Kuo says gives it a leg up in making AR a mainstream technology.

AR Products Coming in Three Phases. Apple put a Lidar scanner in the iPhone 12 and the iPad Pro for enhanced AR, but these haven’t exactly taken the world by storm. Kuo says Cupertino won’t be successful in this area until it makes “standalone devices designed for MR/AR applications.” But the analyst believes Apple is committed to rolling out dedicated MR/AR devices over the coming years, though not as quickly as some have predicted.

Kuo says the first will be a headset. This will use “Sony’s Micro-OLED displays and several optical modules to provide a video see-through AR experience,” according to Kuo. But it might also include virtual reality capabilities and be integrated with Apple Arcade and Apple TV+.

A drawback of current VR headsets is that they are bulky. Kuo indicates Apple is trying to get its product down to between a quarter-pound and just less than half a pound (100g to 200g).

Kuo predicts the headset will launch in 2022 for about $1,000. This is in-line with a previous prediction from analysts at JPMorgan Chase.

Phase 2 will be AR glasses. And despite promises that these will debut soon by other sources, Kuo sees them launching “in 2025 at the earliest.” There’s allegedly not even a prototype yet, and the analyst didn’t guess at a price.

The headset is intended to be used in the home or workplace, but the AR glasses are for on the go. And that’s why they might not replace future headset versions in Apple’s product lineup.

And Apple augmented reality development won’t stop there. Kuo forecasts that the eventual culmination of Apple’s efforts in this area will be AR contact lenses. They will “bring electronics from the era of ‘visible computing’ to ‘invisible computing,’” according to Kuo.
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Of course, this product is well beyond current technology. That’s why the analyst will only predict, “We expect this product to be available after 2030.”

Editor’s note: In late February, Microsoft President Brad Smith testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on emerging technologies and their impact on national security. Later, he also testified at the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on the SolarWinds hack.

Read Brad Smith’s written testimony from the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing here and watch the testimony here.

Read Brad Smith’s written testimony from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing here and watch the testimony here.

The following is a Microsoft blog post from Brad Smith.
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For two centuries, technology has changed the nature of what it takes to defend a nation. In early 1940, improved tanks rendered worthless two decades of French investment along the fortified Maginot Line, as the German army simply plowed around it. And in late 1941, the United States learned that advances in naval aviation meant that battleships could no longer defend Pearl Harbor. Today, foreign cyberweapons pose a similar threat for the future.

Congress this week will explore the role digital technology’s influence on American power and security. While committees in both the House and Senate will rightly focus on the threats cyberweapons pose, the broader topic of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s hearing focus on the higher stakes represented: digital technologies across the board are rapidly redefining the way we secure the peace, maintain our defense and, when necessary, fight wars.

But today one would be hard-pressed to say that the country has a comprehensive strategy to harness these technologies for the country’s defense. A more cohesive approach is needed, in terms of infrastructure defense, military expertise and global engagement.

The recent SolarWinds cyberattack on the tech sector’s supply chain was a wake-up call. And just last week in Texas, nature demonstrated the vulnerability of our power grid. Yet, since 2014, Russian agencies have intruded into the U.S. electrical grid, and we shouldn’t assume they were alone or had benign intent.

This means we must prepare for more sophisticated foreign attacks. We need to strengthen our software and hardware supply chains and modernize IT infrastructure. We must also promote broader sharing of threat intelligence, including for real-time responses during cyber incidents.

Let’s start with the need for more open sharing of information. Today, too many cyberattack victims keep information to themselves. We will not solve this problem through silence. It’s imperative that we encourage and sometimes even require better information sharing, including by tech companies.

But cybersecurity is just the start. Emerging technologies such as cloud and edge services, AI and 5G will redefine the requirements for military operations at mission speed, based on their ability to harness massive amounts of data and computational power.

The Pentagon needs to move more quickly to use, secure and adapt commercial advances for military applications. This will require more agile procurement, more digital skills in personnel training, and a closer partnership between the government and the tech sector.

The development of digital technology often starts with commercial technology and then moves to military and intelligence adaptations, rather than the other way round. This is the opposite of the Cold War, and it changes almost everything.

It means that military supremacy in digital technology is dependent on broader national leadership in the field. And, while the computer revolution took root on American soil, it is now a worldwide endeavor with global powers, including China, competing in and sometimes leading the race.

This requires a holistic approach to government-sponsored basic research and technology trade policy. The United States has unmatched capability for basic research through our research universities. Yet government research spending has declined, and within the next few years China is expected to surpass us.

We also need to strengthen ties with our allies, building on the global nature of technology innovation. Microsoft’s quantum computing efforts illustrate this well, with labs in Indiana, California and Washington, as well as Denmark, the Netherlands and Australia.

Finally, global technology leadership requires successful work to promote standards and technology protocols that reflect American inventions. The U.S. has excelled in these fields through decades of international outreach. This can’t stop now.

A lot is at stake, including the nation’s unique role in providing global leadership. When we think about the role of technology for the country’s defense, our ability to establish and defend the most important connective tissue of the international order – in areas such as finance, cybersecurity, healthcare and transportation – marks one stronghold of American power and security.

We will need to lead with moral authority and not the strength of technology alone. As in the past, there is no substitute for technology the world can trust.

For the last 70 years, the United States has provided what we might think of as the global public operating system. The next 70 years will witness this not just as a metaphor, but as real software power. Our national security strategy therefore must continue to offer the best options for countries around the world as they transition every part of their national lives to a digital age.

It may sound cliche, but we’re officially in the digital economy.

“If you’re feeling whiplash, it might be the ten years forward we just jumped in 90 days’ time.” This is how the final McKinsey & Companies quarterly briefing of 2020 began, which was fittingly dubbed “The Quickening” — a stunning glimpse into the meteoric rise of all things digital. 

Their research found that eCommerce penetration in the United States had experienced ten years of growth in the first quarter of 2020 alone. 

That number is only increasing. If you’re a business owner or an aspiring entrepreneur, you must have a digital-first strategy if you want to succeed.

Entrepreneurs have learned that you must pay attention to emerging trends and consumer behavior.

You need every advantage you can get in changing economies and market downturns. It means taking advantage of opportunities, trends, and technologies to which your competitors are not yet paying attention.
Here are three emerging mega-trends you need to understand.

The No-Code Revolution. Building software has traditionally required technical expertise or significant investment in a development team.

According to PayScale, the average annual salary for a single React engineer (a popular front-end development framework) is $92,020. These hurdles meant that lots of budding entrepreneurs with great ideas were stuck dead in their tracks in the past.

Enter the “no-code” revolution.

Tools like Bubble.is, Airtable and Glide help level the playing field by allowing anyone regardless of programming knowledge to build a fully-fledged web or mobile application with drag-and-drop components and visual interfaces.

Using these tools, business owners or team members can unlock innovation and improve efficiency in even the smallest of companies – without using any code.

The Rise Of The Bots. According to Juniper Research, retail sales resulting from interactions with chatbots are forecast to nearly double every year – reaching $112 billion by 2023.

Juniper anticipates that retailers who don’t take note and implement bots in their business will face substantial challenges from more technologically inclined disruptors.

While somewhat in their infancy in the west, globally, bots are big business. 

In China, a significant portion of commerce happens through bots via the WeChat app. According to Tencent’s Q4 2019 financials, the number of commercial transactions happening on their app reached 1 billion per day.

Bots are growing rapidly here in the western world, too, with venture capital firms pouring huge amounts of money into bot-driven companies like Drift and Intercom.

Bots can be used to drive sales, collect leads, help solve customer problems without human interaction (increasingly important as more and more consumers shop online), or can even be used as fun engagement tools – think text-based adventure games – to keep an audience sticking around.

Voice Apps Are Radio 2.0. Podcasts are booming. In 2020, Spotify sent earthquakes through the tech world when they announced they would be signing leading podcaster Joe Rogan to an exclusive deal worth $100 million.

Online listening has doubled over the last ten years, reaching 70% of the United States, while the 2020 Infinite Dial study recorded an incredible 100 million monthly podcast listeners.

But it’s not just podcasts. Looking ahead, there’s a new wave of voice apps on the horizon.

The first to make a big splash has been the audio-only Clubhouse, which Vogue called “the new FOMO-inducing social app to know”. 

You can think of Clubhouse as a real-time version of a podcast. Nothing is recorded, and there’s nothing you can do in the app other than listening to or joining in with the conversation.
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The no-code revolution, automated bots, and the rise of audio are three things that any business can take advantage of to increase efficiency, drive innovation, and build lasting relationships with end customers, clients, and consumers.

One of my ‘go-to’ technology research firms is Forrester Research. Recently, the firm said 2021 would be the year that edge computing graduates from experiment to practically applicable technology, primarily driven by AI and 5G. Edge computing is a technology that places the processing close to the data source rather than concentrated processing at a distant central location.

Forrester has released a bundle of tech predictions for 2021, and part of it is a firm claim about edge computing: 2021 is the year it will finally become a real value. 

“Until now, edge computing was promising but still developing. In 2021, new business models will emerge that facilitate the deployment of edge in production,” Forrester said in a summary of its predictions. 

The new business models that will push edge computing “from science project to real value” in 2021 are based mainly on two factors. Forrester said: Cloud platforms having to compete with artificial intelligence and the widespread proliferation of 5G will make edge use cases more practical.

With those two drivers in mind, Forrester made five predictions about how the tech world will evolve in 2021 that will directly impact edge computing.

Edge Hosting Will Evolve into a Full-Fledged Marketplace. Content delivery networks (CDNs) like Akamai and Fastly, Forrester said, are starting to target edge computing demands, leading to them reaching out to colocation companies to find small, widely distributed data centers where applications can be hosted closer to the populations they serve. 

Even large colocation firms lack the localized presence needed to meet edge computing demands, Forrester said. Those same large companies often obscure the small local players required to complete their edge services.

“In 2021, colocation marketplace aggregators like Edgevana and Inflect will emerge as attractive options for the CDNs and global colocation leaders serving enterprise needs, even in rural locales,” Forrester predicts.

Kubernetes Will Dominate, but There Won’t Be an Orchestration Winner. Forrester predicts that lightweight Kubernetes deployments will end up accounting for 20% of edge orchestration in 2021, but that doesn’t mean the battle for edge orchestration will end. Canonical, Huawei, OpenStack, Rancher, and other companies are also trying to expand their lightweight, edge-optimized platforms, and competition will be fierce in the year to come.

AI Will Leave the Data Center for the Edge. Forrester predicts that the use of AI in edge computing will undergo a significant shift in 2021: Instead of machine learning models being trained in the data center, learning will start to happen at the edge. 

That shift will be possible thanks to new chips from Intel and Nvidia and new machine learning techniques like reinforcement and federated learning. “Edge application intelligence will blossom in 2021 to accelerate digital transformation, especially in industries that must bridge the physical and digital worlds in real-time,” Forrester said.

Private 5G Networks Will Spread. Nationwide 5G from major telecom networks won’t be sufficient to meet edge computing needs, Forrester said. In its place will be private 5G networks deployed by companies and developed by manufacturers like Ericsson, Huawei, and Nokia. 

In 2021, Forrester predicts, private 5G networks will be used in cases like factory floor automation, AR/VR for remote inspection, surveillance, quality assurance, remote monitoring, predictive maintenance, and employee safety.

Public Cloud Growth Will Slow While Edge Spending Will Grow. Forrester predicts the public cloud market will experience a growth decline from 42% in 2018 to 24% in 2022 due to market maturation. In its place will be an explosion of growth in edge computing, meaning more growth for companies that have invested in cloud-like solutions for edge computing and content delivery, not centralized data centers.
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Public cloud entities won’t disappear, but they won’t dominate the future of distributed computing, Forrester predicts. “Their culture is based on massive data centers and tight control of the architecture; the exact opposite of what firms need to serve customers locally. Vendors with a winning edge strategy will do better.” 

Amazon is now starting to roll out its Amazon Sidewalk local networking system to customers in the U.S. Here's what you should know about it.

First announced in September 2019, Sidewalk is a new idea and long-term effort for extending the smart home to entire smart neighborhoods by using various local networking options. 

On November 24th, Amazon began sending out emails to Echo device owners letting them know that an update with Amazon Sidewalk will soon be rolling out. Though the system will take time to build out, the first steps are happening now.

With that in mind, here are some of the essential points that users should know about Amazon Sidewalk.

What is Amazon Sidewalk? Amazon Sidewalk is a new type of wireless network that makes smart home capabilities much longer ranged. A Sidewalk Bridge connects to your Wi-Fi network and essentially extends the connectivity range beyond what your router can output. In some cases, Amazon says this range could be half a mile.

It works by using various communication protocols, such as 900MHz radio signals and Bluetooth Low-Energy, for inter-device communications. The system will intelligently switch between these protocols depending on the range and power needed.

These Sidewalk networks work a bit differently than your home Wi-Fi, however. The bandwidth in a Sidewalk network is open for not just your own devices, but your neighbors', too. It's a bit like a local mesh network, but across a neighborhood. 

Most Amazon device owners already have a Sidewalk Bridge in their homes. Recent Echo and Ring devices will soon receive over-the-air updates that will allow them to work as bridges.

Benefits of Amazon Sidewalk. As mentioned earlier, one of the first and primary goals of Amazon Sidewalk is to extend the range of your smart home gadgets. What that looks like in practical terms could differ depending on your smart home setup.

A Sidewalk network could, as an example, ensure that outdoor security cameras or lights have a working connection even if they're far from your Wi-Fi router. It could also mean faster connectivity if a device connects to a nearby Sidewalk Bridge instead of attempting to connect to a router farther away.

If you happen to drop a Tile device while walking around the neighborhood, it could still be within the range of the local Sidewalk network — and it'll be able to connect to the appropriate servers using a neighbor's Sidewalk bandwidth.

Sidewalk will also make the onboarding of devices much quicker and simpler. And Amazon envisions other uses, too, such as a pet safety service called Amazon Fetch that alerts users if their pet wanders outside of a preset perimeter.

Are there any downsides to Amazon Sidewalk? For one, Sidewalk isn't a replacement for a home Wi-Fi network. The bandwidth available on a Sidewalk network is pretty small — Amazon says the maximum bandwidth is just 80Kbps, with a cap at 500MB. As such, it's only useful for low-power devices like smart locks, security sensors, and Tile trackers.

There are, of course, security and privacy concerns, too. If your dog has a Sidewalk-connected tag on its collar, it means that you may be sending Amazon the location, duration, and frequency of all your dog walks. Amazon does have a white paper that explains some of its Sidewalk-related security policies.

Of course, there's also the question of it being a shared network. Although Amazon says it will encrypt all traffic sent through a Sidewalk network, users won't know who is on a specific network or how much traffic their neighbor might be sending over it.

All in all, users will only be able to exercise marginal control over their local Sidewalk networks. There isn't currently a way for users to figure out which Sidewalk Bridge their compatible devices are connected to.
Can I opt out of Sidewalk? The downsides and implications of Amazon Sidewalk wouldn't be as pressing if it weren't enabled by default. The system is opt-out instead of opt-in.

Once Amazon enables Sidewalk, users will see an information splash screen that explains what it is and what it does. There, they'll have the option to disable it — it'll be turned on by default.

Users will also be able to disable the local networking system through the Amazon Alexa app. The option is located in Settings > Account Settings > Amazon Sidewalk.
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If users do disable Sidewalk, their devices won't connect to their local neighborhood networks. On the flip side, neighbors won't be able to use their Sidewalk bandwidth, either.

Zoom calls will now come with the option of live captions, in a move that’s likely to make life easier for remote workers whose attention spans suffer steep declines during online meetings.

In March 2018, we published in issue 4-39 an article “Transcribe Your Meetings in Real Time” introducing you to Otter.ai, a Los Altos, CA start-up. Now the company is expanding its technology to enable speakers on a Zoom call to see their words turned into accurate captions in real-time. This should put an end to the unfortunate miscommunications frequently caused by remote collaboration tools.

So, there should be no more excuses for misreporting the numbers presented by your sales team or missing the list of targets put forward by your manager.

Captions will appear directly within the call, with a couple of seconds of lag. Presumably, they will be accurate enough for crucial information to come out in plain text consistently. 

The new feature will be incredibly helpful to users with accessibility needs and non-native English speakers struggling to make out the meaning of a sentence. Otter.ai currently only supports the English language but can handle a variety of accents, including southern American, Indian, British, Scottish, Chinese, and various European accents.

Two years ago, Otter.ai launched its popular speech-to-text software. Available as a mobile app or as a web-based tool, the technology soon started supporting online conferences, offering users the option to turn Zoom cloud recordings into written conversations to keep a record of their virtual meetings. 

Earlier this year, Otter.ai launched Live Notes – a new feature that enables users to open a live transcript of the call during a video conference in a separate shared file, which transcribes what is being said in real-time.  
Based on a sophisticated algorithm, Live Notes can separate human voices to identify different speakers and includes their name in the transcript to indicate that a given participant has started intervening. Users can then go back to the file to check a detail if they have missed a sentence or jumped late into the call.

Therefore, the new announcement builds on top of Live Notes, integrating the transcribed quotes directly into Zoom’s platform during a virtual meeting. In a demo call showcasing the technology, Otter.ai’s founder Sam Liang said, “Now, you will have Live Notes still going on in the background, but then you will also have the captions put down in the call. And there’s a pretty broad range of people that this will be helpful too.”

“It’s definitely a great help for people with a hearing disability, but also for international, distributed workforces who don’t speak English as their native language. And education as well: online classes could benefit from captions, on top of the Live Notes that they can go back to, to facilitate learning.”

The transcription is not precisely pitch-perfect: some sentences don’t make sense, and words occasionally come up deformed. Overall, however, Otter.ai’s algorithm, especially given the tool’s ease of use and accessibility, appears to be pretty accurate – an assessment echoed by most online reviews and user experiences.

Liang is confident that the technology’s accuracy is only improving as more users get on board, providing more training data for the speech-to-text algorithm and helping the AI work its way through background noise and strong accents.

By considering the context of an entire sentence, rather than working on a word-by-word basis, the AI can make more accurate decisions. 

Similar methods have sparked the interest of the industry’s most prominent players, with IBM now offering a cloud-based, highly accurate speech-to-text platform as part of Watson’s services. In contrast, Amazon Transcribe provides an API for automatic speech recognition.

However, Otter.ai is arguably the most consumer-facing technology out there. Liang confirmed that the company is now working on a smoother integration with platforms like Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, or Cisco Webex to open up access to the transcription and live-captions features.
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In Zoom, live captions are available now for Otter customers paying for a Business plan, as well as for Zoom Pro customers.

Wireless engineers, automakers, and governments have spent years preparing for a future where autonomous cars will communicate with each other and sophisticated transportation networks – an initiative known as “cellular vehicle to everything,” commonly abbreviated C-V2X. Recently, the 5G Automotive Association (5GAA) offered a roadmap for mass deployments of automotive communications technologies, and its timeline includes several interesting dates that aren’t as far off as some people might have guessed.

Based on the current pace of cellular industry standards organization 3GPP’s 5G releases, global 5G deployments, and the state of the automotive communications supply chain, the 5GAA expects three C-V2X stages over the next decade:

1. From 2020 through 2023, automakers will rely on 4G LTE-V2X technology to enable basic safety features, such as left-turn assistance and emergency electronic brake light features, to improve traffic efficiency. They’ll augment primary local hazard and traffic information that’s already being shared over cellular networks.
2. Starting in 2024, the 5GAA predicts a “large-scale introduction” of 5G-enabled automated driving technologies that rely on communications between vehicles and infrastructure. For example, 5G-V2X will be used to park cars in parking garages automatically – a car-to-private infrastructure use case Bosch is already testing in German and U.S. locations – followed by “more complex environments and scenarios” including public roads. Tele-operated driving will also be possible.
3. In 2026, 5GAA expects all new autonomous vehicles will include 5G-V2X, kicking off an age where cars cooperate by sharing high-definition sensor data. Some of C-V2X’s most widely anticipated autonomous functionality, such as cars being able to share their upcoming intentions with each other and the network, as well as combining video and depth information for real-time cooperative perception, will be in pilot test stages at this point. Urban and highway pilot programs for dynamic intersection management and cooperative traffic flows could take until 2029.

5GAA expects that the 3GPP will continue to evolve the 5G standard from current Release 16 through 2023’s Release 18, enhancing industry support and specifications for 5G-V2X as carriers continue building out their 5G infrastructures. As nice as it would be if autonomous vehicles could just start relying on 5G today, the reality is that 5G infrastructure isn’t yet built out enough around the world. There are technological and legal practicalities to consider, as well.
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Allocating wireless spectrum to vehicles will be critical to 5G-V2X deployments, the 5GAA notes, ideally harmonized internationally at 5.9GHz, as well as low band spectrum for use in rural driving, and mid-band spectrum in urban environments. The group expects basic safety to require 10 to 20MHz of spectrum for direct 4G communications, plus 40MHz or more for advanced 5G driving.