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Microsoft has introduced Dragon Copilot, a voice-activated AI assistant for doctors that integrates dictation and ambient listening tools to automate clinical documentation, including notes, referrals, and post-visit summaries. The tool is set to launch in May in the U.S. and Canada. CNBC reports: Microsoft acquired Nuance Communications, the company behind Dragon Medical One and DAX Copilot, for about $16 billion in 2021. As a result, Microsoft has become a major player in the fiercely competitive AI scribing market, which has exploded in popularity as health systems have been looking for tools to help address burnout. AI scribes like DAX Copilot allow doctors to draft clinical notes in real time as they consensually record their visits with patients. DAX Copilot has been used in more than 3 million patient visits across 600 health-care organizations in the last month, Microsoft said. Dragon Copilot is accessible through a mobile app, browser or desktop, and it integrates directly with several different electronic health records, the company said. Clinicians will still be able to draft clinical notes with the assistant like they could with DAX Copilot, but they'll be able to use natural language to edit their documentation and prompt it further, Kenn Harper, general manager of Dragon products at Microsoft, told reporters on the call. For instance, a doctor could ask questions like, "Was the patient experiencing ear pain?" or "Can you add the ICD-10 codes to the assessment and plan?" Physicians can also ask broader treatment-related queries such as, "Should this patient be screened for lung cancer?" and get an answer with links to resources like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. [...]

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US stock markets have dipped after President Donald Trump confirmed the imposition of a 25 percent tariff on most goods coming into America from Canada and Mexico, and an extra ten percent tariff on China.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Chipmaker TSMC said that it aims to invest "at least" $100 billion in chip manufacturing plants in the U.S. over the next four years as part of an effort to expand the company's network of semiconductor factories. President Donald Trump announced the news during a press conference Monday. TSMC's cash infusion will fund the construction of several new facilities in Arizona, C. C. Wei, chairman and CEO of TSMC, said during the briefing. "We are going to produce many AI chips to support AI progress," Wei said. TSMC previously pledged to pour $65 billion into U.S.-based fabrication plants and has received up to $6.6 billion in grants from the CHIPS Act, a major Biden administration-era law that sought to boost domestic semiconductor production. The new investment brings TSMC's total investments in the U.S. chip industry to around $165 billion, Trump said in prepared remarks. [...] TSMC, the world's largest contract chip maker, already has several facilities in the U.S., including a factory in Arizona that began mass production late last year. But the company currently reserves its most sophisticated facilities for its home country of Taiwan.

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Shareholders urged to press CTRL-Z on loyal Gelsinger's 'retirement'

Comment Former Intel CEO Craig Barrett has a simple solution to the x86 giant's woes.…

Former Intel CEO Craig Barrett urged the rehiring of Pat Gelsinger, who was abruptly fired two months ago, arguing he should "finish the job he has aptly handled over the past few years." "Pat Gelsinger did a great job resuscitating the technology development team," Barrett wrote, criticizing the company's current leadership under "a CFO and a product manager." He suggested firing the Intel board rather than splitting the company. Barrett's comments come in response to proposals from four former board members advocating for Intel's separation into design and manufacturing businesses. Barrett dismissed these board members as "two academics and two former government bureaucrats" lacking semiconductor industry expertise. The former CEO praised Intel's technological resurgence under Gelsinger, noting its capabilities now match industry leader TSMC's 2nm technology, with additional advances in imaging technology and backside power delivery to complex chips. "Intel is backâ"from a technology point of view," Barrett wrote, arguing the best path forward is building on current momentum rather than organizational restructuring that would disrupt the company's 100,000-plus employees across multiple continents.

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Too shiftless to even click on a few things while online shopping, hm? Just ask this built-in assistant

The Opera web browser now boasts "agentic AI," meaning users can ask an onboard AI model to perform tasks that require a series of in-browser actions.…

The world's biggest call center company is using artificial intelligence to "neutralise" Indian accents for Western customers. From a report: Teleperformance said it was applying real-time AI software on phone calls in order to increase "human empathy" between two people on the phone. The French company's customers in the UK include parts of the Government, the NHS, Vodafone and eBay. Teleperformance has 90,000 employees in India and tens of thousands more in other countries. It is using software from Sanas, an American company that says the system helps "build a more understanding world" and reduces miscommunication. The company's website says it makes call center workers more productive and means customer service calls are resolved more quickly. The company also says it means call center workers are less likely to be abused and customers are less likely to demand to speak to a supervisor. It is already used by companies including Walmart and UPS.

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Silicon Valley, the place that did more than any other to pioneer artificial intelligence, is the most exposed to its ability to automate work. That's according to an analysis by researchers at the Brookings Institution, a think tank, which matched the tasks that OpenAI's ChatGPT-4 could do with the jobs that are most common in different US cities. From a report: The result is a sharp departure from previous rounds of automation. Whereas technologies like robotics came for middle-class jobs -- and manufacturing cities such as Detroit -- generative AI is best at the white-collar work that's highly paid and most common in "superstar" cities like San Francisco and Washington, DC. The Brookings analysis is of the US, but the same logic would apply anywhere: The more a city's economy is oriented around white-collar knowledge work, the more exposed it is to AI. "Exposure" doesn't necessarily mean automation, stressed Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings and one of the study's authors. It could also mean productivity gains. From the Brookings report: Now, the higher-end workers and regions only mildly exposed to earlier forms of automation look to be most involved (for better or worse) with generative AI and its facility for cognitive, office-type tasks. In that vein, workers in high-skill metro areas such as San Jose, Calif.; San Francisco; Durham, N.C.; New York; and Washington D.C. appear likely to experience heavy involvement with generative AI, while those in less office-oriented metro areas such as Las Vegas; Toledo, Ohio; and Fort Wayne, Ind. appear far less susceptible. For instance, while 43% of workers in San Jose could see generative AI shift half or more of their work tasks, that share is only 31% of workers in Las Vegas.

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And Monday's not looking that steady, either

This weekend's Microsoft 365 outage, which left unlucky subscribers unable to login and use its Outlook email service as expected, has been blamed on a "problematic code change" by the Windows giant.…

Britain, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, now suffers from its opposite: profound energy shortages and deep affordability crises [non-paywalled link]. A new report titled "Foundations" identifies the root cause -- "it is difficult to build almost anything, anywhere" in the UK. Housing exemplifies this malaise. Since the 1990s, homeownership among young British workers has halved while housing prices doubled. The 1947 Town and Country Planning Act effectively nationalized development rights, requiring special permission for new construction and establishing restrictive "green belts." Despite Margaret Thatcher's market reforms, British house-building never recovered. This constrictive policy has stymied potential growth beyond housing, Atlantic reports. Cambridge remains a small city despite biotech breakthroughs that might have transformed it into a major hub. Transit infrastructure languishes -- Leeds is Europe's largest city without a metro system. Energy production has collapsed, with per capita electricity generation now roughly one-third of America's. Britain faces a self-imposed scarcity crisis. Environmental regulations, while beneficial, created a one-way system where lawsuits easily block development. As co-author Sam Bowman summarized: "Europe has an energy problem; the Anglosphere has a housing problem; Britain has both." The solution requires comprehensive reform-- overhauling the planning system, reducing anti-growth litigation, and encouraging energy production to unlock what the private sector "already wants to do."

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Annual Barcelona tech fest brings demo devices that aren't commercially available... will they ever see light of day?

MWC Lenovo has used the MWC event in Barcelona to demo some unusual concept devices including a laptop with a folding screen and another that can be powered by the sun.…

U.S. publishers are increasingly abandoning paperback editions of nonfiction books, eliminating a traditional second chance for authors to reach readers with lower-priced versions of their work. New adult nonfiction paperback titles plummeted 42% between 2019 and 2024 [non-paywalled source] to under 40,000, while hardcover titles fell just 9% during the same period, according to Bowker Books in Print. "It's profoundly demoralizing that a book that might have taken four years to write and was published with such promise is done after five months," Dan Conaway, a senior literary agent with Writers House, told WSJ. The shift reflects changing consumer habits, the rise of digital formats, and market realities where Amazon sometimes prices hardcovers below paperbacks. Barnes & Noble now promotes just one nonfiction paperback monthly.

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Investigation understood to have ended following settlement

SAP paid former CTO Jürgen Müller €7.1 million ($7.5 million) after he left the German software company by mutual agreement in September last year.…

Job placement rates have declined at all top U.S. business schools [non-paywalled source] since 2021, leaving MBA graduates anxious about their expensive degrees' return on investment. Harvard Business School, which produced Wall Street titans like Bill Ackman and Ray Dalio, saw the percentage of graduates without job offers three months post-graduation rise from 4% in 2021 to 15% currently. Similar trends are evident at Stanford, Chicago Booth, MIT Sloan, and Wharton, where 7% of 2024 graduates lacked offers within three months of completing their programs. Industry experts cited in a Bloomberg report attribute the downturn to tepid white-collar job growth, declining private-sector wages, and high-profile layoffs at companies including Meta and JPMorgan.

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Ghost positions, HR AI no help – biz should talk to infosec staff and create 'realistic' job outline, say experts

Analysis It's a familiar refrain in the security industry that there is a massive skills gap in the sector. And while it's true there are specific shortages in certain areas, some industry watchers believe we may be reaching the point of oversupply for generalists.…

Nvidia and Broadcom are conducting manufacturing tests using Intel's advanced 18A chip production process, according to Reuters, signaling potential confidence in the struggling chipmaker's contract manufacturing ambitions. The previously unreported tests could lead to significant manufacturing contracts for Intel, whose foundry business has suffered delays and lacks major chip designer customers. AMD is also evaluating Intel's 18A technology, which competes with Taiwan's dominant TSMC, according to the report. The current tests focus on determining capabilities of Intel's process rather than running complete chip designs. Intel faces additional setbacks, with qualification of critical intellectual property for 18A taking longer than expected, potentially delaying some customer chip production until mid-2026.

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Speaking of some concept devices that Lenovo has unveiled, the company today teased its ThinkBook "codename Flip" AI PC Concept at Mobile World Congress, featuring a flexible 18.1-inch OLED display that can transform between three configurations: a traditional 13.1-inch clamshell, a folded 12.9-inch tablet, or a laptop with an extra-tall vertical screen. Unlike the motorized ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 expected in June, the Flip uses the display's flexibility to fold behind itself, eliminating motors while gaining 0.4 inches of additional screen space. Users can mirror content on the rear-facing portion when folded or enjoy the full 2000x2664 resolution display in vertical orientation. The concept also features a SmartForcePad trackpad with LED-illuminated shortcut layers. While still in prototype phase, Lenovo has specs in mind: Intel Ultra 7 processor, 32GB RAM, PCIe SSD storage, and Thunderbolt 4 connectivity.

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Microsoft Copilot reckons that it didn't have to be like this

There has been a clear uptick in the adoption of Windows 11 as enterprises migrate PC fleets ahead of the end of support date for Windows 10.…

Daniel Parris: Some TV shows take a while to "get good." Modern classics like Breaking Bad, The Wire, Community, and Bojack Horseman are notorious for "starting slow" and are often recommended with a disclaimer like "Give it a few episodes; I promise it gets good!" At the same time, some shows never get good. Recently, I started a spy series called The Agency, which could best be characterized as premium mediocre (at least so far). There are big-name actors (Michael Fassbender, Jeffrey Wright, Richard Gere), expensive sets, and glossy camerawork -- but after a few installments, I'm trapped in a liminal space between engaged and listless. At the end of each episode, I'm left with the same thought: "Maybe the next one will get good." Committing to a mediocre program or continuing with a floundering series elicits a state of (mildly) torturous ambiguity. Should you cut your losses, or is this show some late-blooming classic like Breaking Bad? What is the optimal number of episodes one should watch before cleansing a subpar series from their life? Surely, a universal number must exist! Like 42, but for television. So today, we'll explore how long it takes a new show to reach its full potential and how many lackluster episodes you should grant an established series before cutting ties. His analysis reveals that viewers should watch six episodes before quitting TV shows. The study, based on IMDb user ratings, found most series require six to seven episodes before early ratings match or exceed the show's long-term average. After six consecutive subpar episodes, the likelihood of permanent decline exceeds 50%, making it the optimal point to abandon disappointing series. Several acclaimed shows including Breaking Bad, Friends, and Seinfeld required multiple episodes before reaching their quality potential, with Seinfeld needing 16 episodes to match its series average. The research also identified a pattern where long-running shows typically experience quality decline around seasons five and six, with ratings dropping below first-season averages and continuing to fall.

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Flying to the Turks and Caicos tonight? Good luck

SpaceX is set to have another go at launching its monster Starship rocket today after the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) gave the venture the green light.…