Why hello YouTube and the interweb It's nice to see you again. I'm Joshua Montgomery the CEO of Minecraft AI and Today I'm in our Lawrence production facility. I'm doing and asked me anything About our future roadmap for the micro project. So behind me you can see Fun 3d printer where we print prototypes for the mark one actually Stepping off camera for a second. You can see here some of the latest and greatest prototypes of the mark two Where you know this this piece came off of the the printer behind me You see the internal structure and whatnot. This is the one of the outer pieces for the new mark two and then this right here is a the first mock-up of the resonating chamber for The speakers and then of course the the faceplate for it Those are printed back there on the back behind me. You can see bd Who's responsible for doing assembly and customer support for all the the Minecraft units? I think he's got 16 mark ones to ship today. So That makes it a good day. And then of course We've got a full wood shop here on site 3x the CNC laser cutters Fuse deposition printer in addition to the SLA PCB fabrication facilities that we can reflow Circuit boards and do a bunch of other work like that. So This is our office in Lawrence, Kansas This is actually where things got started the whole purpose behind the microp project on day one was to Voice enable this space which we've got distracted and haven't yet done But the idea being to be able to turn on the lights Turn on and off the air compressor be able to operate all the equipment control the video screen in the lounge over there all via voice and our goal was to To just make something that was ubiquitous that anybody could speak to and when we went looking to see if anybody would let us If there were any tech out there, let us do it You know what we found was Siri which? Typical of Apple products was closed off proprietary and we couldn't access it Google Assistant was in its early days And then actually we never even heard of Amazon Echo before we got started In fact when I used to go and talk about Minecraft to other other people What I would start the conversation with you know, it's it's this little this little speaker in it that sits in the corner and it listens to you talk and you know, it does stuff on your behalf and They would look at me like I was insane. I actually saw it article recently that it talks a little bit about Amazon and Some of their future plans, you know and one of the things that this author was speculating about was that Amazon was going to build a home robot To voice enable that you could you can not only have the voice and voice technology but also have the ability to to manipulate the local environment and Simultaneously, I was reading about a Silicon Valley startup that had recently failed That had spent a year pursuing financing to build a home robot Right that was once again voice enabled and did things in the home and I couldn't find a single VC in the valley They talked to 200 VCs That was interested in funding them and I imagine that's a really similar experience to what my friends at Universal computing up in Toronto or my friend Jonathan Nostrom And Ivy went through When two or three years before the Amazon Echo came out, you know, those guys were out hustling money The guys at the guys built the Ubi up in Toronto, which is you know kind of an early smart speaker And in both cases, I think that the company has struggled to get investors to see their vision And my guess is knowing Jonathan and having spent some time with him It wasn't Jonathan's ability to communicate the message that was the problem He's a 500 graduate very well-spoken very intelligent man My guess is that the VC on the other side of the table Probably didn't have as many brain cells as they needed to see the future the way that Jonathan saw it And as a result, you know, there were some pretty significant challenges surrounding fundraising and putting together the type of Financial resources that are necessary to do a project of this the scope and so you know our friends at Amazon did a Superbowl commercial at the beginning of 2016 where they really unveiled the echo in a serious way with Alec Baldwin as a representative and All of a sudden voices like the hottest thing in Silicon Valley and VCs all have a voice thesis Where they're talking about Making investments of voice although they're making in many cases crummy investments or in a lot of cases You'll see a firm that has a strong voice thesis that has made no investments in a voice company And so I kind of wonder if Amazon is going to roll out a robot and just kill it like ship Umpteen million units globally and all of a sudden, you know, everybody in Silicon Valley is going to have a home robotics thesis and the guys At the start up the wired was writing about it be like we were doing that like two years before Amazon where it was our financing So anyway, I have digressed that was me talking about Why people didn't understand it when we got started the whole voice enabled thing clearly now everybody understands it Which is why, you know, we've been really luck You know, we were in the right place at the right time with the right piece of technology And we very much have the right team in the right community and it feels really good to be Sitting in this chair today, you know looking around me and seeing the work that's being done on my craft seeing Advances in the technology. I got the first samples back from the new speech synthesis engine mimic to Model today. Actually, that's not true. I got a set of samples a few days ago There were really really bad It sounded like some kind of nightmare that you would hear in the movie with like voices whispering in the background Like it was crazy bad. It was so bad that we didn't share it with the community. They were really bad and And just a few minutes ago. I got the the response from the next next generation of training We've since the first first voices we got we we've had a couple lambda quad machine learning rigs that we've now deployed for Keith and He's been able to run a lot more steps and the new voice I know we were supposed to have him deployed on April 30th, but We we're not quite there yet We've had some trouble getting as much data as we needed as fast as we needed it But now we've got the data We've got four hours of audio four hours of voice and it sounds awesome When we get to like six eight ten twenty hours of voice with the with the boy Danny the voice artist The new British voice is gonna sound fantastic. It was really gonna sound good and unlike our competitors who have Trained men everywhere to yell at their female sports speaker Our smart speaker is male No misogyny here my cropped. So anyway, let's move on and talk a little bit about the roadmap coming up I actually sent both some investors who are looking at writing us a check for our series a As well as my team an update yesterday on milestones and what we're looking for From both the team and the community between now and August. So so I can walk through that by August Our goal is to have my craft be feature complete and by feature complete I do not mean like every skill be perfect I do not mean the having full coverage of skills, you know the way that the the proprietary stacks do Feature complete as a very different meaning for me for me feature complete means all of the basic core technologies of the microstack are working and The data feedback loops that make the machine learning grow in intelligence over time are Closed and many of you in our community have already reached into our precise wakeward tagger and have tagged some of the precise queries that we That we our community has been donating for those of you that haven't please take a moment create an account at home.microft.ai when you log in up at the top it says tagging if you click that it'll load the precise tagger and all it is is effectively Hot dog not a hot dog Maybe it's hot. I mean that's really what it is. So it's either hey my craft not a my craft or My craft, you know as as the wake, you know the wakeward the person who just said my craft or they said Minecraft or they said Microsoft If they if it's a total miss, that's not my craft If it's right on so hey my crap, boom you hit the right on button, but if it's half the phrase So hey Mike would get almost or if they said twice a my craft. It didn't work a my craft a second time and The both samples are in there. You'll mark it as almost as a duplicate. So it's super easy Anybody can learn to do it in like three minutes like kids have been spending time working in that But that's an example of what we're trying to build a machine learning feedback loop And there's a blog post on our site that if you haven't read it I'd encourage you to read how to build a strong AI and AI that interacts just like a person where people can't tell What they're talking to? The answer is building these machine learning feedback groups so that people use the system By using it they generate the data The community tags the data categorizes it adds the intelligence to the data It gets fed back into the machine learning group at machine learning software and then fed back to the community for use And so you create this cycle where you're creating tagging categorizing training, you know Feeding the technology back creating the data tagging and over time it gets smarter and smarter and smarter as more data Pours into that loop and the community engages with it. So Precisely our wakeward tagger is our first instance of that because it is such a simple model It's either a microp or not a microp or you know some partial version of that So the community's done that this morning and we were at 49,000 tagged utterances That means that's 49 other 49,000 instances of a microp that people have confirmed not once but twice is Accurate that's been fed to our model and if you log into that you can see the tag at the top. It says Progress if you click the progress button, it'll actually show you a chart showing how accurate the machine the wakeward tagger has become So anyway, so we're doing that for precise already and that's deployed and we're really super happy with the scenario In fact, we're happy enough that we've now Started to release some money to our partner workaround For those of you who don't know workaround is a company that sends work to refugees From Syria or Atreia other places around the world that have strike Yemen They have strife and conflict where people are leaving their homes in many cases they're going to countries where they're not allowed to work and So what workaround does is it creates work for? Folks who are in that situation where if they have a smartphone or they have a tablet or they have a laptop that's connected to the Internet They can do this work and get paid a fair living wage for where they're staying So they they're not being taken advantage of they're not working at the low market rates They're able to actually feed their families at the rates that the workaround is paying and for a company like us That allows us to send simple work like wakeward tagging to somebody who is in dire need so that that person can can earn a living and feed their family and Do a good deed out there in the world. So So anyway, the precise stuff is working well enough that we're now we're now releasing some of the work to To pay trainers the idea there is eventually there'll be a balance between volunteer and paid We're thinking it's right around 20,000 volunteer utterances Unlock the money that we need to pay to have 5,000 paid utterances done And by doing that, you know, we we get the community continues to be involved But it gives the community a strong reason to come tag queries They're not taking work away from people in need. You know, we need to have the community involved in the process But when we reach a certain point it allows us to to release some finances so that we can pay You know folks in need to tag our answers and create work for people in the AI economy. So that's super exciting But anyway, precise is working well. Okay, but it's only one of several feedback loops One of the other feedback loops we're building is called persona where we take missed queries So if somebody says what's your favorite color and the AI can't answer that would get fed to the persona engine The community then decides on an answer Orange, I don't know if somebody in the community makes a suggestion somebody else in the community validates it in the future There may be some kind of voting process with that. We're not quite sure that That gets fed back into the machine learning engine and the next time somebody asks the same question The AI is able to answer Today we're gonna be we're doing that for subjective things like favorite color or favorite sports team or whatever Eventually that'll also include objective data. So they won't build tools that allow you to go out and grab a data source from Wiki data for example So a user might ask how tall was Abraham Lincoln, right and the AI might not be able to answer That gets fed into persona Somebody in the persona community says oh wiki data has got a table that has the height of all the US presidents in it They plug that in and in the future the AI can answer not just for Abraham Lincoln But also for all the presidents of the United States and because we are building a international community also an international President so if you want to know how tall Mr.. Trudeau or mr. McCrone are Chris you can you can ask the AI that question And so anyway, so for a for me Feature complete means all of those loops are up and operational the community is generating data The community is volunteering to share that data The community is tagging that data and that data is being used to improve the machine learning algorithms that answer questions from the AI At the same time we need to have a very high quality voice And I just mentioned that I just got the first samples of the new mimic 2 and they're awesome And we need to have the tools in place so that we can do skills arbitration or skills Deact that Still skill disambiguation arbitration Amazon's calling it skill arbitration They're bigger their vocabulary will probably stick. I would call it disambiguation. Although that's a hard word to say The idea there being if I say Play white noise, right? There are two potential answers to that question. They're actually multiple right it might launch the Pandora skill and play My white noise playlist on Pandora. It might launch Spotify and play The band white noise or it might launch a white noise skill, right? And actually play, you know, white noise static through the through the speakers so I can sort of waves or whatever through the speaker so I can sleep so You know one of the things that we're looking to build is an auto test function that allows us to identify At a minimum identify when a phrase might be ambiguous across multiple skills And then begin building tools that disambiguate there now My guess is and not my guess like the answer to how to do that is by using machine learning algorithms Which get sent back into our into our feedback loop? We have a plan to get that done. It's it's on the on the development Roadmap somewhere probably after the August that we're talking about so Between now and August we have a few things we want to get done precise wakeward tagger We want to have it finished we want to be able to collect data tag data feed it back to the engine feed the engine back into the Devices and to the instances of my crop down there. Good news. It's done. It's finished We're halfway there to getting the hey my cropped wake we're done When we get that done We will go ahead and And We will go ahead and begin adding additional wakewards And BD, can you go kill that please or connect it to the interweb one or the other? Sorry, I just kicked a device over there That's in testing So we'll have a mycroft done shortly after that we will begin working on a new wakeward I'm open to suggestions right now. I'm thinking it's Trinity Because we we do have any Shweppy reading a female American voice and it'd be great to have a female American voice for Mycrofts back in Trinity, but obviously there's there's other opportunities there so The next item after after the precise wakeward tagging that we want to have complete is to have the deep speech engine be the default STT engine for the speech to text engine for the platform and With the reason we want to do that is right now. We're taking all the queries from the users We bring them into our server and then we aggregate them we mix them together Right and we send them to a third party to be tagged in that third-party Software features back in answer now. There's no way Using the network paths and the authentication paths that we're using to figure out that you are the source of that data Whatever random and user you are But you know if you say your social security number into the device That's going to get sent to the STT engine and of course anybody who's reviewing those logs Would have access to your ST your personal information and that's something that we want to protect And so the best way to do that is for us to move the speech to text process on to Mycroft equipment and then nuke the logs for people who don't opt in to share data so that we don't keep the data at all We've been working very closely with Michael and Kelly and the Mozilla deep-speech team in Berlin for Six months or a year now those guys have made fantastic progress if you haven't already go and visit their project at voice Mozilla.org You can contribute your voice to that product that project in like 10 seconds You know just read three phrases it go and your voice will be included in the training set You can also review other people's contributions about about it that they're accurate So that team is has built a speech to text engine that is Equal to or better than humans with some corpuses of texting Let me let me highlight that last phrase some Corporances of text so if a user is Using the technology in the same way that they contributed the data Which means sitting in front of a computer screen reading the text from the screen It is as accurate or more accurate than a human at interpreting that speech which is fantastic That is the first step The issue is if the user is using a smart speaker in a kitchen with their kids yelling in the background the TV on and They have a thick foreign accent Deep speech today doesn't have any data Like that to train on so that we can improve the technology so deep speech really relies on very very clean data and As a result it's not as useful as we would have liked it to have been for a smart speaker Because of course people use the smart speakers or they use the the Raspberry Pi in environments that have noise They have accents, you know, there's a variety of different things that impact the quality of the speech and so You know, we made deep speech available to developers March 31st like we told folks we would However to enable you have to go through the CLI the command line interface We will be providing shortly. I think an option for that, but because of the lack of training data It's not as good as the third-party STT yet. Now. The awesome thing is we just finished negotiations with A Mozilla in fact BD just stand and sent the contract over to Mozilla over to our team to Plumb in my crops back end to the Mozilla deep speech data system So when you opt in when you if you don't opt into the micro stack We don't keep squat right and if we do keep squat it will last we will keep that if we do keep data on you We will keep the data just as long as I don't know that we're keeping the data Okay, as far as I know we are not I've told the guys not to I haven't personally inspected the servers But I'm confident that they've implemented our our goal our They've implemented their instructions if for whatever reason we find a log somewhere or we realize that There's a buffer somewhere that's keeping data that shouldn't be it'll last just as long as we know We don't know about it, right? So if you don't opt in we don't keep your data that our goal is ideally perfect privacy for end-users if people opt in So you opt in you go check the little checkbox on the thing and say hey I want to share my data with the community and you begin using the technology those utterances Will get sent to the Mozilla deep speech team where they will be transcribed Verified and fed into the deep speech engine so that Use it it improves over time with use in the real world and as far as I know We're the only deployed technology that's using deep speech in a serious way And I hope that they find other partners because more and merrier and more data we generate the better for everybody in terms of building accuracy but But anyway, that's something that needs to be built So deep speeches available But the plumbing between mycroft and Mozilla has yet to be built the good news is we've got the negotiation and the legal out of the way so we can actually do it and Eventually that will not only be the English utterances, but ours is in in other languages So the next big milestone is we want to make sure that the natural language understanding engine so that's the engine that takes a phrase of text, you know turn the lights on in the kitchen for example and Converts it into an intent so and so the turn the lights on the kitchen the intent would be activate IOT skill Object lights location kitchen toggle position on and then it executes a piece of code that runs up the IOT skill and goes out and turns on the IOT device So the NLU engine, you know, that's a very simple intent You know we and that's called a known entity rules based system So it knows that an object is lights so location is kitchen that toggle position is on that has a list of those things So our adapt engine, that's how it works. We also have a petitions engine which is a machine learning engine which takes example phrases and Trains a dialogue engine to understand what those phrases mean effectively And so each skill within our framework has a long long list of all the phrases that are supposed to activate that skill and data abstractions to abstract the data from that That gets trained in a machine learning engine and then the machine learning engine spits out JSON for the intent So both of those things are working our developers and many cases are using bodacious in some cases. They're using adapt in some case I think that makes them But the piece that we haven't built the piece that's on the roadmap today is the piece that takes queries and Allows us from the real world people who are using the technology and allows us as a community to categorize them and Put them with the appropriate skill. So if I say turn the lights on in the kitchen course great I say make it brighter where I cook Okay, it has no idea what to do with that brighter is not an object cook It may be an object, but it's a it's an activity, right? It doesn't communicate to an AI that uses known entities what the heck it's supposed to do But if we feed it into pedacious and we feed enough examples like that into pedacious So make it darker where I park make it bright where I mobile on whatever it is Over time with enough phrases the machine learning engine is able to suss out exactly what the what the intent was from the user The thing is as a developer who's developing a skill today has to imagine all of the potential phrases the user might use which of course Developers have fantastic imaginations. Don't get me wrong But it's very difficult to have a comprehensive imagination right unless you're maybe Jim Henson and so the The piece that we want to build between now and August is the piece that allows us to automatically take mist intent So make it brighter where I cook that gets fed into the engine we're calling persona, okay, and somebody in the persona community grabs that and says Oh, this is what the guy meant he meant make turn the lights on in the kitchen so I'm going to grab the IOT skill and I'm going to drag this phrase over there however we built the interface and Next time that pedacious intent gets trained, you know It'll know what to do with the with the user's utterance and be able to go out there and turn the lights on the way the user Users intended so that is is one of the pieces that we're looking to get done is to build the plumbing that allows us to capture data from people who opt-in only from people who opt-in like foot stop that a couple times and Feed it to the to the community and then on to the machine learning engine so that the technology can improve So the first part's done adaptive pedacious have been in production for a while, but the second piece the plumbing isn't quite done So next item is the company's mimic speed synthesis engine. That's our new Text-to-speech so it text comes in audio comes out. We want to be a fully deployed We're going to deploy that with one default voice and one hate voice, okay, so you know As much as I would like to Richard Stallman my craft right free to everybody Free software means no price free software also means freedom to use it You know nobody's ever charged for anything It all should be given away because there's zero incremental cost. It's all knowledge Ideologically on the line of that right, but ultimately Beatty's got to pay his mortgage right, you know, we have a great team of full-time people We have a bunch of server infrastructure that needs to live We have to operate in the real world where money is a thing You know, there are those that would argue that patronage would be a great Great way to fund the project and you know what if you have a patron out there who's got 10 or 15 million dollars Which is what it would take to really take this to the next level. Please connect me with them You know seven email founders of my craft that AI will find me And I'm happy to reach out to that patron, but since patronage is few and far between in a world where money's not free we have to develop mechanisms that allow us to both be open and Make our technology available, but also pay the bills And so for us one of the pieces that we think has value to our community is enhanced voices So voices that sound great voices that might be celebrity voices were given some serious thought to that You know voices that might have an accent that you like if you want to talk to somebody from Georgia We can add a Georgia accent that you know a female Georgia voice and we'll call her Samantha, right? So there's so much some options there So when we deploy the mimic 2 engine, we're going to continue with the British male voice Partially because it sounds cool, but but actually there's a lot of ideology there the concept that You know in this new me-too world like in a world where we're actually starting to pay attention to women and their role in the world and And how they're treated by especially here in the technology space It just seems to me to be a bad idea to deploy a voice assistant where you yell at the one You know and in many cases, you know, I'd be very curious as to what Amazon's data set looks like surrounding people screaming at Alexa I'm gonna go ahead and say that there's some misogynistic nasty stuff in there, right? And so the idea that we would use a male voice And a British male voice like a bond to come back out of the speaker and punch in the throat if you're mean to it Appeals to me. So the default voice will continue to be British male Default name will continue to be my craft show ox older brother and the smarter of the two brothers For the foreseeable future Enhanced voices though will be available and we're starting with the female voice that's being generated by our design lead Derek's wife Amy She's been recording now for a couple weeks We're getting really close to having a comprehensive data set and when that's done. We'll be deploying a High-quality American female voice for people who who choose to become patrons of the project So that is on the horizon if you had asked me two hours ago how I felt about reaching this milestone between now and August I had it told you I don't feel very good about it And then my CTO Steve sent me a sample of the the new mimic model, which I mentioned earlier that Really made me feel wonderful about where we are with the speech that this is sounds really good. It's awesome And then finally You know by 8 6 so August 6th I've asked the team to build internationalization tools One of the things that we're doing next year is taking my crop global So if you look around our little shop here in Lawrence, Kansas, I mean, it's a beautiful facility It's large. We've got a lot of really smart and capable people working both here in Kansas City We've got folks as far away as Stockholm and far away the other direction is Melbourne but It only speaks English right and it really doesn't speak English broadly it only speaks Really Midwestern American English the same type of English. I I speak which I'm told people from England say makes me sound dumb So there we go It doesn't really fully understand the thickly accented English. So English from maybe India I don't know if Kathy has trouble down down under in Australia But my guess is it doesn't work as well down there as it does For us here because of course, this is where the data set for a lot of the STT engine came from and so the goal for This year and for this sprint and for milestones between now and August is To develop the tools that allow us to take my craft into other languages and those tools Are primarily text-based although we do need folks to start yelling at my craft in other languages Mozilla is going to be helping with this on the 15th of May. I believe If it's not the 15th of May with somebody, please correct me in the comments Mozilla is doing a global sprint around adding new languages to the deep-speech project If you have a language that you want to make sure survives Okay, so it's pretty clear that English is going to survive Mandarin and Cantonese will survive French German What but there are a lot of languages that have small populations now? Icelandic Afrikaner and a host of other other languages out there and in some cases the populations that are speaking these language are beginning come become very very very small and and So if you speak a language where maybe the population that speaks your languages a couple thousand people Maybe it's one town one community or one village The tools that we are building should help to capture that language for prosperity both to Understand that language to speak that language and through our intent parsing engine and eventually the dialogue engine To be able to speak to an AI that speaks that language To be able to speak your native language, which maybe a thousand people speak but also have that simultaneously translated into Mandarin or English or For one of the more Broadway spoken languages is definitely something that's on the horizon using the data separate building so If you have an interest in supporting international languages, I strongly recommend that you participate in the global sprint the 15th and then certainly Look for me next year when I come through your country So we can talk about how you might contribute there the international language tools will be a series of online tools that allow you to Translate from any language my crop speaks to any language So if the two languages you speak are French and Swahili Once we get the French data set bill you should be able to go from French to Swahili and begin building prompts and dialogues Begin reading phrases for the speech understanding Tagging phrases for the the speech to text and then of course, you know if the technology is going to speak your language We're going to need you know the new voices. We're doing them a four hours We might get it down less than that I think we're going to take the current their first voice up to maybe 20 hours of audio But the eventual goal is a very small thing so two or three hours of somebody speak You know speaking using specific phrases into the computer creating the samples we feed on the machine learning engine and boom Magic machine learning The the technology is able to to go from text to whatever language we happen to be supporting You know one of the things about big tech is Big tech is so big Right that in order for them to grow their business. They have to get into big markets And so, you know the last I checked and don't quote me But I think the Google STT engine spoke about 80 languages, right? There are more than 7,000 languages spoken globally and Google is supporting 80 of them because of those are the 80 biggest markets and and with the size of their Their market their market cap with the amount of revenue that they have to generate to be successful with the amount of revenue They have to generate to grow Building technologies in these markets. Just it doesn't make sense for right and their business They're they're not there to not be evil. They're there to make money, right and You know unless they convert to a B Corp, they're legally required to only pay attention to making money Yeah In our case, we're a bit of a different animal, you know I think the final destination for my craft is is a B Corp. So it's a public benefit corporation That really is here to support the community not to make money. I mean making money is important because you have to pay people and what not but That's not doesn't have to be the only goal of a company and B Corp So the B Corp structure allows you to do that and So as a company like that, it's more important to me to be all-inclusive To support everyone to build as many languages into the technology as possible And so if we can get to seven thousand one hundred global languages, I don't see any reason. We can't Let's do it. Let's do it as a community So the tools that we're looking to build by August will allow anybody who speaks initially English and whatever the other languages To begin translating the prompts to begin contributing speech to begin contributing phrases And start that process We'll probably build a scoreboard of some kind that shows, you know, in a scale of zero to a hundred how far along we are in each language And then the question becomes Who in Iceland wants to make Icelandic available as a language for Automated speech recognition and speech synthesis and wants to build a an AI that it represents ice I did an AI that You know writes a book sometimes during its life an AI that Understands the darker winter an AI that You know has the ferocity of Of a people founded by of a nation founded by Vikings, right? Because the you know, it only takes one or two interested people in that country to translate it from English to Icelandic and then the language and the persona and the the ability to Synthesize now language all become captured in in perpetuity right they become available for everyone because of course our data sets are open And as the machine learning stuff and improves in quality Those data sets will become more and more important as people use this technology and new and novel ways So we're looking to have those tools built by August August 6th is when we leave and actually Iceland's the first destination And then after that we'll be coming to a lot of communities around the world in terms of broad Cities that we're going to be visiting. We're visiting our friends in Reykjavik. We'll be visiting Amsterdam After that will be in Berlin then Paris then Madrid then Lisbon and Barcelona Athens Rome Then we're going to head across the equator down to South Africa to visit Johansford We'll be up in Mumbai and then on to Singapore Then we go down under and we'll be in in Sydney and Auckland Followed by a trip to Fiji to talk about Polynesian languages After that we're headed up to Taipei Seoul in Tokyo to talk about tonal languages and how we can support those and then on to San Juan Buenos Aires and Santiago To look at a different flavor of Spanish from Castilian Spanish and so and in each one of those destinations we'll be branching out to speak to Communities in the surrounding area. So when we're in Greece You know, we'll be able to hop across the GNC and talk to folks who might speak Czech or might speak Slovak You know the same when we're in In Paris, maybe we get out to London and visit some folks who speak Welsh and maybe as far as As Ireland, you know to look at Gaelic and so on and so forth. So So we're super excited to be taking the trip and the goal of the trip is to Number one we want to make sure that we have an international Community that is supporting the Minecraft idea globally that you know somebody who wants to deploy a voice assistant and lives in Moscow can build a voice assistant that speaks Russian Using all using tools that have been community developed and work extremely on other languages So that they can apply that voice assistant for their special use case The same as somebody who speaks Swahili You know who wants to build a voice assistant, maybe for a project in the mobile market in Africa We'll have access to that technology and we want to have a global community that's supporting that and engaged and working together You know one of the things in this world I think that divides us as language that we don't speak the same language and in many cases We don't those languages confined or in form our thinking and so having voice technologies that allow us to do some taste translation that allow us to collaborate and interact Using the most natural form of human communication Makes a lot of sense and so we're we're looking forward to building that that global community over the course of the next year Looks like I have a few more minutes. I might cut this off early because I'm feeling repetitive today but anyway So some of the skills we talked last time was skills development review and deployment process We met a lot of progress there. I think we could involve the community a little bit more But it as of 1802 Those of you who didn't get the email you definitely look if you've already blow the skill You need to do a little bit of rework to pull it into 1802 We're we've implemented auto test procedures to help it help prevent skills from colliding on various different intents and We're requiring new skills coming in to have a certain structure and a certain layout So that they all played nicely together. We've had some instances where skills were stepping on each other and it creates a bad user experience so Laying that process out and then you know basically setting up a stone It's important Clearly there's a community role to be played there and we actually I think we already are engaging the community in a lot of ways But that's been a big rock for for 1808 The custom wake words is a big rock actually we have that you know Once we're done with the first hundred thousand with a microp we move on to the next one And once that one's done we move on to the next one So if you've got a wake word you're excited about whether it's Samantha or Trinity or Jarvis Get in there and help us finish the hey my craft wake word and then raise your hand and say we want to build this next So custom wake words is a big piece for us by the by the time by August 8th and or August of this year It looks like we're on track for that back-end account and metrics management We made a lot of progress with that. So Chris Bayer joining us has been a huge boost So Chris comes from the bats trading platform bats is a stock exchange located in Kansas City He's got mad expertise and building high availability back-end systems and has already Reduced the cost of running our back-end by a factor of five. So awesome work Chris Chris will be working with Mateus and we may be making a couple of additional hires to to really flesh out the back-end system and to better track metrics For for exactly how people are using the technology Obviously, we'll want to be tracking metrics for folks who opt in and continue to foot stomp that Deep speech integration. That's actually done So you can use deep speech as the default engine even though it's still not as high quality as some of the third-party engines If you're more interested in privacy than quality mimic or the deep speech engine is where to be Certainly the best way to improve that quality is to hit opt-in and donate your data the more data with your Personal voice that's in the deep speech Data set the easier it will be for the AI to understand it So there's a really strong incentive, especially if you have a thick accent if you come from a social demographic That's not very well represented Get in there and contribute that voice stop on zilla.org put in two or three hours of audio It doesn't take that long you can do it in an afternoon and that data will get pulled into the deep speech engine All of a sudden magically you'll find that it understands your voice really really well If you rehearse the phrases before reading them on the screen So instead of like reading it like rehearsed a couple times and speak it naturally that engine will pick your your language up better in the future So that's an important trick mimic to integration. So mimic to the new speech synthesis engine. We're now getting a Samples back from that. So the next step will be to do to fully integrate that into the stack It's early man, you know, it wouldn't surprise me if they had that done by the end of month I'm certainly by the end of June. So that's a an exciting milestone and then Auto testing is the is the other big rock and I talked about a little earlier, but building unit tests throughout the software stack That's a professional software development thing I Would argue there are many people who would argue about this. I Would argue fast and dirty up front get it working and start getting data and figuring out how users want it before you build a comprehensive auto Unit testing suite. I think that probably there are watchers out there who just had like a heart attack That's not you build software It is when you're in startup, but maybe it's not how you build at a university Maybe it's not how you build it a big court, but it's how you build it when you've got to build something fast And that needs to work before you run out of money Okay, I think we're past that point like we have out of a financing We've been blessed by the support of the community. We've been blessed by the support of some patient capable investors And so building unit testing into the software is an important milestone or important goal for us to reach between now and August That allows us to deploy high-quality software and to identify problems before they become problems Last but not least You know, I think one of the important milestones between here and the 1808 release Is there really a technical milestone? It's a community milestone today today. We cross 17,000 users a micro That's a pretty awesome number. I mean the fact that that many people Are interested in creating an account are interested in interacting with the technology is phenomenal Between now and August and in the next three to four months I'd love to see that number break 25 times And so, you know, if you have a friend who's interested in voice who's been talking about their echo or is maybe building skills in the Amazon community You have a friend who works at a company that might be looking at doing some kind of a voice integration for a product If you have a developer conference you're speaking at you're excited about what we're doing here at my crop share our story like let people know Why voice is important the technology we're building here at my crop not the stuff at Amazon not the stuff at Google Not the stuff at Microsoft that stuff's all vertical channels They're going to continue to own that stuff within their corporation, right? Like they're building what they're building and they're doing a good job, right? Their software is not going to get integrated into everything Because my crop is open Because companies and individuals can use it the way that they want to use it Because they can customize it both the wake word and the the skills and then the user experience and the personality My crops going to get built into pretty much everything if it runs a Linux kernel or it runs embedded There's a really good chance that a decade from now. It'll have some piece of the my crop stack in and that's super super cool and so You here today who are working on the software who are have set through a one hour Asked me anything To learn more about where we're headed as a community You the person who you know, even if you just interacted with the stack a couple times on a on an Ubuntu desktop today. That's cool You are contributing in a significant way to something that has a significant role to play in the future of technology Share that help us to grow the community to 25,000 to 50,000 to 75,000 It's very much a more the merrier situation, you know, how many languages can we support? How many users can we support? Broadly, can we make this technology? How many people who can't read today can a voice-enabled microstack teach to read tomorrow, right? How many people who can't see today will have global access to the internet and access to information in a completely transparent way because of the microstack How many people? You know, we'll get in a self-driving car and speak to a mycroft enabled voice assistant To tell him hey, I'm headed to the hospital where I'm gonna have my first kid take me to the hospital Right a lot and and that's super super exciting and we're looking forward to having you in our community If you've already made a contribution, thank you If you have yet to make a contribution reach in even if you just go into Homed out mycrafted AI and tag one precise query just one That's a contribution and we'd love to have have you as a contributor to the project I'm gonna step off There was in theory gonna be some kind of a feedback mechanism during this thing where I'd be able to like live interact with the community, but they kind of Stranded me on a desert island here in Lawrence Bay, and they're all in Kansas City building awesome software So I'm gonna punch out. I really do appreciate you taking the time to pay attention to to our project today I really appreciate your contribution. I really appreciate you as the user. Thank you very much for tuning in And I'm looking forward to the next time we connect Thank you


Hello and welcome to the Sewers podcast. Each episode we'll be discussing the latest in economics, politics and culture. I'm Isabel Edwards and today I'm talking to Dr. Osella Ferrari about Asia as method in theatre. So thanks for coming to speak to me today. And this discussion sort of stems from the paper you wrote about the TOKI experimental project. So I was wondering if maybe we could start by explaining a bit more about what that project was about. Yeah sure. So the project started in 2010 with the Shanghai Expo when the Japan Pavilion Commission a production. Basically the pavilion the theme of the Expo in general was sustainability, environmental sustainability and better life, better city, better life and the sorts of themes. Therefore the one of the main themes of the pavilion was the TOKI which is the Japanese crested ibis bud and in Japanese it's called TOKI, in Chinese it's called Tukuan and the scientific name is Nippon and Nippon which is where they suggest its significance for Japan in terms of it's a national identity symbol. I think it was named as a national treasure in the 1950s and it's also connected very much to diplomacy so it has some sort of significance not only in terms of identity but also in terms of reconciliation efforts between China and Japan. Why? Because at some point the TOKI was believed to be extinct until they found some specimens in China and in 1999 China donated the first couple to Japan which was seen as a gesture of friendship and diplomacy so much so the political science in the US I think Mary McCarthy has written an article called Ibis Diplomacy basically comparing this exchange of bird gifts to you know panda diplomacy or ping-pong diplomacy and other diplomatic projects. So basically the TOKI the first pair was in 1999 another one I think in 97 and two also and last year as well a couple of others and there's a sanctuary in Japan on an island called Sado where they now the first they were bred in captivity and I think now they were released to the wild but just to underscore the significance in 2007 I think at the height of disputes between China and Japan about a number of issues China had promised another pair and then they withdrew the gift. Right okay yeah so it just sounds low what is it about this bird but it's actually quite interesting so anyway so the theme of the of the pavilion was the TOKI so there were a lot of videos about it the personnel of the of the pavilion were dressed there wearing head gear that was reflecting on the colors of the bird and so on and so forth so a Japanese director Satomakoto who is he's I think in his 70s now he's one of the pioneers of avant-garde theater underground in Japan in the 70s now he directs a theater in Tokyo so he was commissioned a production and I think in his theater now they do quite a lot of children's theater so the idea was that this performance would be for a general audience and would be like the final performance the final thing that they would see after concluding the visit to the pavilion and so children were also on these audiences and and Sato asked to collaborate so to do a collaborative production with Danny Yong who is another pioneer of Asian theater from Hong Kong and that is quite unusual if you think about it because normally you think of the expo as a showcase of national culture so I don't I think it was the only case of collaboration and also another unusual potentially a controversial thing was that after Danny Yong came on board they invited a performance from Lending to participate in a project performance from Lending, a performance of this type of traditional indigenous theater called Kunju-kun opera which is the most ancient form of Chinese theater which is still practiced today and and that is unusual I said because normally if you think about again national cultures Beijing opera would come you know as the first choice but I didn't and also potentially controversial because Lending is the site of a massacre that occurred in 1937 over six weeks and it's still the memory and the legacy of this massacre is still contentious and it keeps affecting sign of Japanese relations to this day and not only the Kunju actors were involved but also children from Lending so after the the expo they continued this partnership and this collaboration focused on the development of traditional Asian forms which have been listed as intangible cultural heritage of humanity by UNESCO and then eventually in 2012 this started the festival in Lending which I've written about so it's quite overtly political what's happening I think we'll come back to talk about that but just before that I wondered what it actually looks like when you've got so many different styles of theater that are all interacting at once so we've got these very ancient forms and then something more modern in there how I don't know if you if you went to see it or if you've seen it but how what is it like when they're all interacting together well the interaction is based on a format which again Daniel's company called Zuni from Hong Kong they have pioneered in the 90s and it's one table and two chairs so one table and two chairs is the standard standard stage setting of most forms of indigenous Chinese theater so Beijing Opera Contue and so on and so forth so basically in 1997 Yong and his company they started a collaboration project which initially involved sign-of-one practitioners from Taiwan China Hong Kong so again political to reflect on the idea of one country to system because 1997 was the year when Hong Kong was returned to China so one table and two chairs one country to system right so so from then this one table and two chairs became a broader signifier of relationship so it has been used for many projects by Zuni involving practitioners of many different types of theater for many different parts of the world and so basically the traditional arts or indigenous I prefer the term of Asia so mostly no theater from Japan could you from China and also they were practitioners from Indonesia India Thailand participating in the festival Nanjing they were I don't know exactly how they were matched but basically you often had you have usually had two performers because the format is one table two chairs two performers 20 minutes right yeah that's interesting because it is prescriptive in a way but at the same time it leaves you a lot of freedom so it's been it's been very interesting to watch how people interacted with the format and what kind of meanings they invested this format with depending on where they came from culturally politically also you know gender relationships class relationship age relationship you can do a lot like they do in fact in the traditional theater you know in Beijing opera could you for example one table and two chairs can signify a tribunal can signify the court of the emperor or you can signify I think if when they step on it it can mean you know height or position of height anyway so so basically it's not the interaction is unstructured it's it's quite structured and that allows the comparison you know and also another principle I think is this idea of deconstructing the traditional forms through modern methods of directing and also by letting traditional and modern performers interact with each other and what kind of statement do you think it's making about sort of political situation in Asia is it almost is it reflective of improving relations or do you think it's almost saying this is what we should be moving towards is this greater collaboration well I think there's an artistic aspect to it which is related to this fact that consul no and some of those other arts what are considered now intangible cultural heritage so this is felt by the practitioners as both you know source of pride and also I think a source of funding in terms of in terms of could you definitely China has given it much more prominence in terms of cultural diplomacy of 2001 anyway so it's a form of pride the source of pride on the one hand but also a source of responsibility and anxiety because of the you know you are living national treasure how they call them in Japan so as a living national treasure what do you do are you do you belong to the museum or are you responsible for continuing the form in a way that can engage new performers no practitioners new audiences so it's quite tricky and that's why also the idea of the calling the festival toki not only because of this sign of Japanese of its important in sign of Japanese diplomatic relations but also because the talking bird is is caged right right so in a way as a traditional performer you belong to this cage way puts you there as a treasure but then what do you do from there you know you'll be constricted so the idea of this project artistically I think is to try and find a way of developing this forms well at the same time respecting them although there's been discussions you know some critics say that this this toky experiment was kind of violating tradition yeah we're making it more you know and and and politically of course I think it's an example of how you can produce you know a micro political acts of reconciliation through the arts you know and also that an idea you know as I said you know arts theater dance are often used for cultural diplomacy but by governments by this case you know the political and governmental intervention is minimal if not zero so so in my achieve something more genuine on a human level and this is a sort of annual is it continuing now it's an annual project or has it from 2012 to 16 it's been done every year and I was there in 2015 I think yes then I think I'm not sure I think because the Japan side of the funding probably was you know has a limited duration then it changed and soon he started something called creative playground whereby young practitioners were taken to Nanjing on a study tour and also other practitioners of both more than contemporary and traditional arts went to Hong Kong to train the practitioners I don't think the Japanese presence was so good because they are but then it's interestingly one of the participants from Singapore a young younger that young director he participated in 19 and then he took the format of Singapore right okay so it's spreading further away and there's this sort of distinctly Asian you know it's from it's built on that cultural heritage and I think the way we've described it almost described sort of seems that before that there was a different way of looking at theatre in Asia and always more of a Western centric approach from where we'd be looking so do you think that this has kind of changed the the dynamics of theatre between Asia and the West or do you think it's always had its own thing but it's the way that we're looking at it has maybe evolved well I don't know I don't know how much of an impact this particular project has had on the on the practice in general although you know one of the reasons why I wanted to write about it is it was to try and show that there are different ways of of practicing let's say tradition and also perhaps different methods by which you can approach the study of not only Asian theaters but also in the cultural theater or comparative drama or theater so the idea and that's behind you know this is why I applied this theory of Asia as method which is obviously not my theory but it's it started in the 1960 Japanese scholar and sinologist actually Takya Jiyoshimi gave a speech called Asia as method in which he proposed basically to try and look at Japan's modernization trajectory comparatively within Asia so he also mentioned China India so very a very pioneering approach for that time when Japan was mostly looking westward you know to America rather than Asia and and then more recently this Taiwanese scholar Chen Kuanxing wrote a book I think in 2000 was probably he wrote a series of articles in Chinese and then he published a book with Duke I think I can't remember the date anyway it's called Asia's method towards the imperialization and and and this book inspired me to try and think of how the theory which he does not apply to the arts specifically in his book how could that work perhaps to look at the arts and particularly the theater because I often find when I when I read you know theory of intercultural theater was for example if you look at comparative literature world literature the benchmark you know it's always a Euro American Caucasian Anglophone whereas everything else Asia Africa tends to be marginalized or or tokenized so so in this case the idea is to shift the focus of the inquiry towards Asia which doesn't mean to you know to move from one got some sort of hegemonic perspective to another hegemonic perspective but just to try and bring attention to practices that my or areas that might have been overlooked and yes so kind of dissentering the discourse basically and do you think there's a link to be made there between what's happening there and then what's happening more broadly and so as with the decolonizing the curriculum discussion that's been going on so for example you know making reading lists much less you're American and British writer-centric and making those much more open well there are definitely echoes although my research not only the article you've read but I've written a book which I finished recently on this subject so there are echoes between the two although they are not directly related on the colonizing source and research but definitely the echoes and it's important you know both for research and teaching you know to include and to produce some sort of cultural shift where you include more and more non-west in the curriculum including you know teaching students to look at things from the perspective of the regions that we study and in the language I would like to say of the regions that would study because I think you know knowing the language of the region that you are looking at is quite important to you know to if you want to understand anything about that region the cultural language are quite some sort of the starting point so I also think the decolonization in fact if you work at the intersection at the crossroads between a region and a discipline is again almost natural it's your starting point because for example when you go to conferences it's interesting particularly if you're working theater I find because when we go to various studies conferences the theater there's very few of us there but then when you go to theater studies conferences or performance studies conferences the Asian stuff again the Asian content tends to be a bit sideline so it's difficult to strike the balance and that's what I think is important to do and do you think that the theater still has that prominent role for questioning things that are happening or making those sort of reflections of society so I guess now I don't know how many young people are going to the theater and I don't know if they are maybe it's like musicals and things and I'm not sure if it's is it becoming a little bit obsolete in terms of a reference point but the theater you know has also evolved you know we're so engaged with popular culture social media now you have online theater online theater festivals a theater even including traditional theaters of Asia you know like last year there was a program here in London about now and neuroscience they've involved robotics AVR VR in I met and also it was interesting when I was in engine the toky festival to look at how audiences engaged with traditional forms you know you had less of the funds you know the traditional funds normally some kind of middle-aged mostly women I think who attended the performances but then you also had quite young people and it's interesting because they were constantly filming or taking photographs of the performances and immediately Instagramming them we chatting them you know we charges the Chinese most popular social media in China so I think you know that there are still audiences that engage or the engagement both on the side of the practitioners and the reception side has also you know shifted so yeah so I don't think we can talk about obsolescence yeah and if anything it's nice to think about that becoming a more diverse audience and making it more accessible if it is online to probably more people than would have gone yeah physically yeah yeah absolutely I will thank you so much for talking to me today about your your research and what you've been up to it's been really interesting to hear and thanks for joining us for the size podcast if you would like to hear more you can head over to the sales blog or visit our website


OK, guys, I think we're going to go ahead and start. I think we've given people enough time to drag in after lunch. Everybody's here to learn how to get involved in the WordPress community and give back a little bit to WordPress, right? Otherwise, I'll give you a minute to go ahead and head out. This URL right here, this short URL, is where all my slides are. It's on the side of every slide as well. There's a lot of links in my slides that will take you to various places to get connected with the various groups involved in WordPress. So I encourage you to either go there or at least write down the URL so that you can check them out later at your convenience. I'm Aaron Campbell. I'm a developer through and through, but that's not the only way to contribute to WordPress. So I'm going to go through lots of different ways. But I would like to get a feel of what everybody does. Who in here is a developer like me on the coding side of things? Somebody that's more on the designer side of things and more on the management or using WordPress side of things. Fantastic, because we have ways for every one of those groups to contribute. And who makes a living or at least some money related to WordPress? Awesome. So you all, I can guilt trip every one of you into trying to give back some. Awesome. So the biggest thing to start out with is why. Why contribute back to WordPress? And I think that there are a ton of reasons. But I just want to touch on some of the biggest reasons. I think you all are at least interested in some way or another in contributing or you wouldn't be here. But the first and the biggest one is profit. Who here wants to make money? It's OK to make money with WordPress. Even though WordPress is free, that's fine. That's how I make my living. It's OK to profit off WordPress. We want you to be able to profit off WordPress. That's awesome. No, you don't get paid directly for contributing to WordPress.  Who works for themselves? Professional development. Everyone that just raised your hand, one of the most difficult things for me when I was working for myself was, how do I consistently get better at what I do when I don't have other people to sharpen my skills off of? How do you make sure that you're always progressing forward, always getting better, and not stagnating where you are? Getting the chance to work with everybody else that works with WordPress, whether you're coding, whether you're working on user interface, whether you're translating. We have people that are doing all sorts of stuff, and they are fantastic at what they do. And you get the chance to work with all of them if you are also contributing back. And I found that for me, when I was freelancing, this was one of the best ways that I kept my skills up and kept getting better at what I did.  Every one of you knows more about WordPress than 90% of the population. Having said that, the more involved you are with the project, the more you will know, the more you will learn. And it's not just maybe learning about things that WordPress does, but as you get involved and you start to pay attention to the development processes of WordPress, you start to know what's going to happen in WordPress. In the next release, or even the release after that, or what our plans are for next year, and those kinds of things benefit your clients. They let you plan better when you're planning projects and let you be more in demand, because a client wants somebody that can plan that far ahead. It's not building a site that works now, but you wasted a bunch of time building a feature that WordPress was already developing itself and it got released three weeks after you released the site. And another big thing, who has just the easiest time finding fantastic clients all the time? Yeah, that's a wonderful process, isn't it? Getting referrals. The WordPress community is massive. There are thousands and thousands of people. I mean, these kinds of events that there's what, 600 people at this one, something like that, these kinds of events are happening all over the place. Every weekend, as a matter of fact, there's two this weekend, right? San Diego's on the same day. And three, what's? Seattle. And with this huge community, we're a pretty friendly community and people trade, work around and refer clients and the more involved you are, the more of these people that you link up with, the better. And as you are exercising your skills at giving back to WordPress, you're also showing all these people in the community what your skill set is and how good you really are at what you do. And it makes them comfortable referring clients to you. And it's a great way of getting work to start rolling in. And last but one of the most important ones is just simply to make WordPress better. Almost everybody raised their hand and said that they make money off of WordPress. I do, that is what pays my bills. And so I want WordPress to be as good as it can possibly be because it benefits me as much as it benefits everybody else. So some ways to help. There are a lot of ways to help. I'm gonna try to run through some basics on all of them. But you don't have to write code to contribute back to WordPress. That is not necessary at all. If you do write code, great. I mean, we'll take that as well. But there are a lot of other ways to help. The first step for getting involved, who has used Slack? Who has used the WordPress Slack to hang out in all those rooms? This is your first step for getting involved. Every one of those groups that you just saw, every one of those ways of contributing back to WordPress, they all have a channel, a chat room in Slack. And anybody that has a WordPress.org account, if you don't, you can sign up for one, can get on the chat and go into any of those rooms and start to see what that group is talking about, see what they're working on and get involved. Who here is multilingual? Anybody? See, I'm definitely not. This is one of the few ways that I have never given back to WordPress. But translations, WordPress for last year was the first year that non-English downloads of WordPress surpassed the English downloads. That's fantastic. We offer WordPress in so many different languages. And we need people to do that translation because I guarantee that everything that I write in WordPress only has an English string. And so somebody's gonna need to translate that for everybody else. Documentation, who here does documentation work, whether it's for your company or your clients? Awesome.  I write code and I'm bad at it too, just to boot. But no, I write code and a lot of the other developers that write code are not fantastic at documenting the code that they write. Some of them do better with the inline documentation, the documentation that's meant for other developers, but talking to end users is not always our forte. And we need people, we need people to help fill out the codex. Who's gone to the codex to try to look for solutions for help in the past? Who has always found what they were looking for in that codex? Yeah, nobody raised their hand. And who, once they found their answer, went back and put it in the codex. One guy, Brian, thank you. It's a wiki. You can edit the codex, you can add to it. You can fix inconsistencies and errors in it. And we need people to do that, because as we get new users in and they need help and they end up at the codex looking for the same thing that you were looking for before, they have to do the same thing you had to do. Go find it somewhere else. And it's not a fantastic experience. And if you can have, unfortunately, have to deal with that experience, but then help so that the next person in line doesn't have to, maybe they'll have the same experience and with a different problem that you'll benefit from later. Support. A lot of you guys said that you worked for yourself, so you guys all do support, don't you? You answer questions for your clients on a pretty regular basis. Doesn't matter how well you know WordPress, you can do it, right? If you have ever created a single post in WordPress or say successfully attached an image and embedded it into your post in WordPress, you can help somebody who's trying to figure out how to do that. The support forums are massive. There are over 60 million sites running WordPress. At least some of those people need help with something that you know how to do. And who has used the support forums to get answers? And who has answered questions in the support forums? A lot of times when you're searching through there and you're looking for an answer and you find one that's unanswered, it's as simple as when you find the answer, dropping it in there and everybody benefits. And again, this is one of those things, we're not some big corporation like Apple that has paid support personnel that sit at their genius bars and answer all your questions, we crowdsource this. I mean, you get your questions answered but if you can also answer other people's questions, that's how we keep those active and useful. Accessibility, is anybody in here specifically into the accessibility side of the internet? Awesome. So we have an entire team that works on accessibility. This is one of those things that because WordPress is so pervasive, depending on the numbers that you look at, WordPress is somewhere between say 20 and 25% of the internet. I think that we have a responsibility to set the standard for accessibility, to make sure that WordPress can be used by everyone, whether they are hearing or sight impaired or whatever the problem is, we need to make sure that we are able to be used by all and we have a group that helps make sure that we do that. And this is one that another place that you can get involved if that is the kind of thing that you are that you are doing. User interface, so who, the designer type people that we're doing, user interface, user experience and design type stuff, who are you guys again, the designers? All right. We also have an entire UI UX group. Who here chose WordPress because it was the easiest to use of the available CMSs? Yeah, that is a very common reason that you say, why did you choose WordPress? Well, because it was easy to use, because it was user friendly. Well, it's only gonna stay that way if we have people paying attention and making sure that we are taking all these new features that we're building and making sure that there is usable for the masses as possible. Testing, okay. So, this is one of those places that I find that I'm not necessarily above begging. We need testers, so.


What's going on guys welcome back to the channel critical overload here, so I never thought I'd get to do this again well, I knew I would get to talk about it at some point but not in a Full-length video dedicated to the franchise will be talking about G prescribers for once again We'll be talking about Jonathan Breck who has openly slammed the film And it's on the video recording for you guys to enjoy as well not that he's being overly negative It's not what he's doing. He's just being quite honest in sharing his negative thoughts on the whole film Or the whole approach to the film if you will while also talking about if he would return to the role of the creeper and Then I also want to shift into talking about this rumor surrounding Victor salva and giving my thoughts on that and where I think That stems from because it comes from IMDB and we know IMDB can be edited by anyone But Jonathan Breck again has openly slammed G prescribers for and I just wanted to share my thoughts on that before discussing these rumors surrounding the creator Sabotaging for shout out to Jeepers creepers Brazil for sending this my way This interview with Jonathan Breck happened at horror fest last month or in September actually and horror news Network was the ones Who were responsible for interviewing Breck at the event? I'll leave a link to the video in the description and I'll leave a link to the article in the description as well But when asked about Jeepers creepers for Brecks said he had not gotten an official call about reborn So we we heard about this but again, you now have him on video talking about all this He said that he didn't get a call about reborn and instead found out from a friend from a friend Who congratulated him on being in the new movie? He was sure to let his friend know that that wasn't true Breck talked about being upset because the makers of that one didn't even call for consulting on the creeper character at all So when I was watching the video This man made it clear. He wanted to help them make a good movie That just makes that even more aggravating These people they were not trying to make a good movie and I think all of us are aware of that And it became very apparent when we sat down and endured an hour and some change of absolute Criminal activity I would just sum it up to they all should still be charged in book They all should still be going one-on-one with the undertaker for the person who likes to chime that down in the comment section When I talk about this franchise, I'm still going to keep that same energy Knowing what I know now coming from Jonathan Breck who has stated he wanted to help them make a good movie You just can't these people bro. It's just something else Breck actually said that he realized that these people just wanted to make money off of the IP Now I don't know of course if there's something that he found out on the back end of it all because of course He might be more tapped in than me or anyone else, but He basically made it known that he realized they were just trying to make money off of the IP so He said also that the fans do deserve a good movie and when a film like reborn is made cutting so many corners There are no redeeming qualities He also did say like we've heard him say before that he would again Play Jeepers creepers or play the creeper again for almost nothing if the opportunity came But he doesn't see it happening due to politics But he remained open-minded and I mean honestly you kind of have to if you can cut corners and do trash like reborn You can get a proper sequel to those first two movies I think we all have to accept this though guys as much as a lot of you still want to see a proper Jeepers creepers Sequel you have to accept that Jonathan Breck who admitted this in his video. He's getting up in age I think he just admitted he's about to turn 59 soon So soon he's about to be 60 that doesn't mean that he still obviously cannot don the makeup He can do whatever he thinks he's up to if he's in good shape to do and I'm not saying I wouldn't be against Breck being back But what I think we all have to take a step back and realize It's not even a matter of Brett coming back to the role as much as it is Who is going to give us a proper film? Who's gonna give us a film that is rooted in you attempting to actually put forth your best effort and Put out a quality film. You don't necessarily need to have Jonathan break You don't need to have Gina Phillips. You don't need to have any of the other Stars it is just something we would prefer if we were to finally get the inevitable Well, I won't say the inevitable But if we were finally to get what many people have been clamoring for again since 2003 and what's been hyped all throughout the mid 2000s and what unfortunately got canned in placement of what we got in 2017 and what we still have not gotten with the travesty that came out more recently a Sequel to jeepers-creepers too. You don't need Jonathan break. You don't need Jenna Phillips. What you need is competence You need competence. You need somebody who is passionate about horror unlike the last director We just had you need someone who is not having a laundry list of lawsuits Involved trying to produce your movie like we have currently with these band of idiots and all of their allegations that surround them about crew members losing their homes and all of this other wacky nonsense that should not be going on but I Digress I know a lot of you would prefer to see Jonathan break back I think we all should just accept that that's not even what the root of the problem is that's like number 50 on the things we need We need to get the producers that have this damn IP hostage away from it That's what we need first and foremost, but before I shift back into my rent There's this IMDB trivia listing on the reborn What page that says the controversy about jeepers-creepers reborn grew even more when several journalists Accused Salva of wanting to sabotage the production and premiere of jeepers-creepers reborn despite receiving monetary benefits Many speculated he may have used his friendship with several producers to put obstacles on jeepers-creepers reborn Now see I'm not trying to toot my own horn here But again like I mentioned anybody can edit this I think that perhaps some of my videos that were put out in the past were viewed and What I was communicating was going on with jeepers-creepers 3 was misunderstood and placed on to what happened with jeepers-creepers 4 I'm not saying that there's not some truth to this I would have to do some digging into this to find out if there was some sabotaging going on But keep in mind last time there was sabotaging going on with the franchise that has been made public It was related to producers actively working to sabotage the premiere of jeepers-creepers 3 I don't know if there's any truth to Victor Salva actually trying to sabotage jeepers-creepers 4 But I'll do my best to dig and purport that to you guys if I'm able to but again We now have Jonathan Rick on video admitting that he actually the thing that still is aggravating me He wanted to help these people make a good movie He wanted to be a consultant of some capacity these people were not trying to make a good movie They were trying to make a quick buck They're still trying to possibly make a quick buck if they move forward with this fifth film And it just seems like we're stuck in a stuck in age a web of nonsense Ultimately what would have to happen is you again need competence back in the creative room Ultimately if we get a proper jeepers-creepers film that could be 30 years from now I mean it's a god-honest reality We have to accept and it could be very good, but if we get it right now Hopefully it can be good, but if they're same producers are involved I Just have I have no hope.  I'm on Facebook Twitter and Instagram You can message me there of course I'm doing movies news reviews like me to cover in the future and with all that in my guys I will see you in the next video


t 3.4 years of time driving or idling every year where they're just sitting around kind of running their cars or driving their cars around. So I think if we're gonna be having a climate change agenda or really thinking about having climate change being central to our agenda, then we want them to be using that many resources every year. Thank you. I think we're gonna move back to the council and we've completed public comment. Is there anybody else in the council that would like to make a comment at this time? And otherwise we're going to stop.  Yes, thank you. As chair of the finance committee, I have been spending a lot of time thinking about some of the budget questions that have been talked about. Including making funds available for bringing in other agencies that could contribute to the work of the department. We are very tightly budgeted right now, even more so than in a normal year because of how COVID-19 is affecting our revenues or stream right at the present and for the next year or two years. The reality is that the police department that was just pointed out has about 38 patrol officers and not all of them are available. Some are in training and with vacation and trying to cover three shifts. It is a real question as to whether it is ever going to be feasible to diminish the size of the department, staffing for patrol officers and still to be able to meet the needs to service the community. So the idea that we would easily be able to just transfer some money in order to be able to take on the kind of different approaches that have been suggested. I'm concerned as to whether that's really a feasible alternative. So that's, thank you. Just one last check before we adjourn the meeting. Darcy, you have your hand up. Yes. I want to say that we had an incredibly good presentation by the police department and we've had excellent questions by the town council and some townspeople. But I really enjoyed hearing the voice of young people and their points of view are not easily absorbed sometimes into what we're thinking. But I just feel so much of my time here at Amherst, I don't hear that voice in the town of Amherst. I don't hear it and our committees which require so much time and work are filled with older people with experience in what they're doing. So when we do come up with our new committee which I think Meg Gage has some very good words that it should not use the word civilian and it shouldn't use the word oversight and I agree with her arguments. But this committee that we're talking about looking and examining at the police department working together that we must have some young voices on that too because we just need to, we need to hear them and we need to integrate them into our voices. So thank you. So just let me conclude by again thanking Captain, I'm sorry, police chief Scott Livingstone, Captain Young, Captain Ting and for this very, very thorough presentation. While it hasn't answered all of our questions, I will confer with the council and also with Paul as well as looking at the tape and see what other questions we need to advance to you. Some of those in fact will be data and obviously some of that may take some time and some transparency. And down the road, as we hear more and more from other constituents, council will make a decision along with the town manager as to what kind of committee there might be to work with the police department in creating that greater transparency for our community. Again, I wanna reiterate, this is just the beginning of a conversation but it was an extremely informative presentation and informative comments as well. So I just wanna thank everyone and particularly our police department for putting this great effort forward. So with that, the meeting is adjourned.


Welcome to All Hands Update. I'm Petty Officer Tyrell Morris. Naval Supply Systems Command, or NAFSUP, announced mail-by-dates for pre-December 25th deliveries of holiday cards, letters, and packages. NAFSUP recommends you check with local, civilian, and military post offices for information regarding size restrictions and customs declaration form requirements as some restrictions may apply. All classes of mail addressed to FPO addresses must contain the proper 9-digit zip code or the new Navy standardized address format to ensure delivery. Mail not addressed correctly could be returned to the sender as undeliverable. Ensure your packages don't display hazardous material markings such as bleach, alcohol, or cleaning fluids as they will not be processed by the U.S. Postal Service. For more information, visit the Naval Supply Systems Command website.


Officials of the NSCDC in Ondo state have arrested two suspects for allegedly transporting a boat loaded with suspected adulterated diesel in Ijoshun, a local government area of the state. The arrest of the two suspects is coming a few days after commissioning of the Marine Base in Ijoshun, a local government area of the state, by officials of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps. A boat loaded with several litres of adulterated diesel was intercepted on the waterways. The product was being moved to an unknown destination by the two suspects before they were intercepted by the NSCDC officials. We also saw what they are doing on this river. You can see this large boat, popularly called Kotono Boat, now they use it to load AGO, suspected AGO, which we will still take to the laboratory to see how good or otherwise it is. But you can see that this one, what is inside there, not even three trailers can carry it. You can see it yourself. So that is what they do. We have arrested two suspects in our custody and they are helping us with further investigations. We want to know the destination of this suspected product. We also want to know the source. We can really address the issue of economic sabotage that is deadly in this country.


The People's Democratic Party, PDP, has called for the resignation, arrest and investigation of the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INAG, Professor Mahmoud Yacoubo, over alleged manipulation of the February 25 presidential election results. In a keen context, PDP presidential candidate and former vice-president at Iqobu Bakar lost to Bola Tinubu of the ruling all-progressives Congress APC. Speaking during a press conference on Friday in Abuja, the PDP National Publicity Secretary Debord O'Logan-Abois alleged that the election results were manipulated or mutilated as the Commission deliberately refused to transmit polling units' results as provided by the Electoral Act. He maintained that the INAG Chairman's exit will be the first step to rebuilding confidence in the electoral body. The People's Democratic Party has further reviewed the widely condemned infractions brazen violation of the provisions of the Electoral Act 2022, criminal manipulation and nutration of election results perpetuated by the Professor Mahmoud Yacoubo-led Independent National Electoral Commission, INAG, to subvert the will of Nigerians in the February 25-23 presidential and national assembly elections. From all indications, the INAG under Professor Mahmoud Yacoubo was compromised to rig the election by brazenly violating the provisions of the Electoral Act 2022 as well as INAG's regulations guidelines a minor issue for the election. Consequently, the PDP demands that the Chairman of INAG, Professor Mahmoud Yacoubo, immediately step down from office, having abused confidence and died the hope of millions of Nigerians as well as political parties and the international community for a fair and credible election. Furthermore, the PDP demands that the Inspector General of Police and the Director General of the Directorate of State Services DSS immediately commence investigation into the electoral violations and manipulations by INAG with the view to prosecuting Professor Mahmoud Yacoubo and other featured commission for electoral offense.


What is going on guys, it's your boy D-VJ here today with another Destiny video and in today's Destiny video We have top five free cat reactions of the week now you guys enjoyed last week's episode So if you enjoyed this episode too, if you could leave a like I would appreciate the support I will warn you guys a lot of these dudes be screaming so Headphone users be aware turn down that volume. I'm telling you now But guys hope you enjoyed the video and peace out till next time Peace!