I was flummoxed this week. My wife sent me an Amazon link touting an AI-powered toothbrush. The toothbrush uses brushing data flossed from other brushers on the Internet to adjust the brush profile used to clean your teeth. I swear.

It’s another Thursday, and I’m back on the air with Mark Starling, John, and the First News 570 crew. This week’s hot and fresh tech news: Amazon offers free AWS Cloud skills training, voice synthesizing company conducts fake Steve Jobs interview, and Microsoft and Facebook bore you in the metaverse. You can listen to me and Mark Starling point and laugh at all things tech every Thursday at 643 am ET live on the radio or the iHeartRadio app.

PSA: AMAZON OFFERING FREE CLOUD SKILLS TRAINING

It’s no secret I’m a fan of Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud computing infrastructure. This week, AWS announced free AWS Skills training at training centers at Headquarters in Seattle, Washington and HQ2 in DC. What’s notable here is that this training is free and in-person, Amazon is announcing more skills training centers will open in other locations in the country in 2023. It’ll still cost money to take their certification exams, but you can gain the knowledge to ace those exams free of charge. Yes, AWS is offering these courses virtually. This is an inexpensive way to get in the growing field of cloud computing and get certified.

MICROSOFT AND META BRING BORING OFFICE MEETINGS TO METAVERSE

We surely love the dystopian. Just when you think you’ve settled down for the weekend, and donned your VR headset to journey to the metaverse, you get interrupted by an avatar from the office asking you about your TPS reports. You decide to take the call, and the next thing you know, you’re whisked from an iHeartRadio Roblox party back to a boring ass virtual conference room.

Microsoft and Facebook-Meta have partnered with each other to bring office telecons to the godforsaken metaverse. Microsoft will be bringing Teams, Office, and Xbox Gaming Services to Meta’s Quest VR headsets. On the software end, Meta will allow people working in their Wookrooms product to join Microsoft Teams meetings and vice verse in-VR with their preferred avatars. Just don’t show up wearing your Bangalore avatar armor. Don’t fall asleep.

FAKE INTERVIEW BETWEEN STEVE JOBS AND JOE ROGAN LATEST AI STUNT

I know it sounds like I’m hating on the AI game, but I’m not. I’m hating on the players. AI technology abuse is just running rampant. A Dubai-based voice synthesizing company, Play.ht, is running a PR stunt called Podcast.ai to advertise its voice synthesizing services. The stunt features an interview with Steve Jobs, who is dead, and Joe Rogan. Steve Jobs’ voice was synthesized using machine learning models, and his interview responses were AI-generated using GPT-3 an AI text generation algorithm. Steve Jobs’ voice experienced digital chop in areas, but it was pulled off. It just pains me that so much time is wasted on these toys, and right now people are wondering how to synthesize elected officials’ voices for nefarious means. Imagine a synthesized Joe Biden, or Hell Donald Trump, calling up someone at DoD.

Thanks for reading, have a great weekend.

Stay safe out there.

Hey there, fans of The Cloud. Our next episode covers the possibilities enabled by autonomous vehicles. We’re joined by Eric Werner, one of our friends from US Ignite. The next episode will drop in about a week. You can check out our latest episode, STEM Isn’t the Answer, now on your local podcast platforms.