SOCIAL
Meta’s Developing New Spatial Audio Tools for AR and VR to Enhance Virtual Experiences

Visual elements are the main focus of next-level digital experiences, like AR and VR tools, but audio also plays a key role in facilitating fully immersive interaction, with the sounds that you hear helping to transport your mind, and bring virtual environments to life.
Which is where Meta’s latest research comes in – in order to facilitate more true-to-life AR and VR experiences, Meta’s developing new spatial audio tools which respond to different environments as displayed within visuals.
As you can see in this video overview, Meta’s work here revolves around the commonalities of sound that people expect to experience in certain environments, and how that can be translated into digital realms.
As explained by Meta:
“Whether it’s mingling at a party in the metaverse or watching a home movie in your living room through augmented reality (AR) glasses, acoustics play a role in how these moments will be experienced […] We envision a future where people can put on AR glasses and relive a holographic memory that looks and sounds the exact way they experienced it from their vantage point, or feel immersed by not just the graphics but also the sounds as they play games in a virtual world.”
That could make its coming metaverse much more immersive, and could actually play a far more significant role in the experience than you might initially expect.
Meta’s already factored this in, to at least some degree, with the first generation version of its Ray-Ban Stories glasses, which include open air speakers that deliver sound directly into your ears.
Which is a surprisingly sleek addition – the way the speakers are positioned enables fully immersive audio without the need for earbuds. Which seems like it shouldn’t work, but it does, and it may already be a key selling point for the device.
In order to take its immersive audio elements to the next stage, Meta’s making three new models for audio-visual understanding open to developers.
“These models, which focus on human speech and sounds in video, are designed to push us toward a more immersive reality at a faster rate.”
Meta has already developed its own self-supervised visual-acoustic matching model, as outlined in the video clip, but by expanding the research here to more developers and audio experts, that could help Meta build even more realistic audio translation tools, to further build upon its work.
Which, again, could be more significant than you think.
As noted by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg:
“Getting spatial audio right will be one of the things that delivers that ‘wow’ factor in what we’re building for the metaverse. Excited to see how this develops.”
Similar to the audio elements in Ray-Ban Stories, that ‘wow’ factor may well be what gets more people buying VR headsets, which could then help to usher in the next stage of digital connection that Meta is building towards.
As such, it could end up being a major advance, and it’ll be interesting to see how Meta looks to build its spatial audio tools to enhance its VR and AR systems.
SOCIAL
LinkedIn Adds AI-Generated Job Candidate Responses in Recruiter

LinkedIn continues to integrate generative AI elements, this time within its Recruiter platform, with AI-created messages that HR professionals can then send to potential candidates, which are customized and personalized based on InMail best practices.
As you can see in this example, the new process, built into LinkedIn Recruiter, will enable users to quickly and easily craft a message that they can then send to a potential candidate, simply by tapping the ‘Draft personalized message’ prompt at the bottom of the composer window.

As explained by LinkedIn:
“Using our own LinkedIn in-house generative AI model trained on successful InMails, we use the information from the candidate’s profile, job description, and the recruiter’s company to draft a highly personalized message to get the conversation started.”
Once the AI generated InMail is created, you’ll then be able to further customize the message by ticking the topic elements that you do or don’t want to include. You can then edit and send the message – which should help recruiters save time, while still maintaining personal outreach.
Though it also feels a little impersonal, like maybe this is an element that shouldn’t be automated?
I guess, when you’re dealing with such responses at scale, it’s not really personalized anyway. But as with some of LinkedIn’s other generative AI experiments, like AI created feed posts, it feels like this is taking some of the human interaction out of the platform, and removing the ‘social’ aspects out of ‘social media’.
Maybe that’s an idealistic viewpoint, and the time savings outweigh any overarching principles at play. But it seems like some of these things should be written by a human, in order to maintain that baseline of real connection within these apps – otherwise we’re headed to a future where it’s just bots talking to bots, and when you actually have to meet in person, you’ll never know what you’re going to get.
I mean, theoretically, the candidates could also have written their application via generative AI, and they could respond to these emails with their own generative replies. And if it’s a remote position, maybe you’ll never even meet in person, and it’ll all be just simulated engagement for simulated jobs.
Seems slightly off, but maybe these tools help in some cases, potentially a lot of cases – it just feels like LinkedIn is going to get a lot less genuine than it already is as a result.
Either way, it’s happening. LinkedIn says that it’s starting to roll out AI-assisted messages in Recruiter to ‘a handful of customers’ in the US and Europe, before an expanded launch beginning next month.
You can read more about LinkedIn’s latest Recruiter updates here.
SOCIAL
YouTube Ad Revenue Forecast To Rise 4%, Hit $30.4B, In 2023 05/30/2023

Advertising revenue across all
YouTube platforms, including YouTube TV, should see growth of 4% this year, to $30.4 billion and growth of 10.3% to $33.5 billion, in 2024, according to new WARC projections.
While relatively
modest, 2023’s growth will represent a turnaround from Q4 2022, when YouTube’s ad revenue dropped …
SOCIAL
LinkedIn Launches New ‘Find Your In’ Ad Campaign

LinkedIn’s launching a new promotional campaign, created by ad agency Droga5, which aims to highlight how you can use the platform to find your ideal career pathway.
The ‘Find Your In’ campaign looks to showcase how LinkedIn can unlock new possibilities, so you can be whatever you imagine, with the help of LinkedIn’s connectivity.
As explained by Droga5:
“It starts with a little girl who finds herself in a place that’s perfectly ordinary: the laundromat. But we quickly learn there’s more here than meets the eye. All it takes is a little bit of inspiration from a LinkedIn alert on a nearby phone to set off an unexpected and extravagant dance with her own potential. The future comes to life, teeming with opportunity and endless options to explore.”
Not sure that I felt inspired, as such, by the clip, but it is catchy, and it could prompt people to take another look at the app, and consider how they can utilize LinkedIn as a guide on their professional journey.
LinkedIn’s been working to maximize discovery, and capitalize on its record high levels of engagement, by better highlighting relevant influencers and niche creators, with a view to helping others discover new connections, and explore their passions in the app.
That, ideally, will help more people establish networks of likeminded professionals, which could indeed facilitate new career opportunities through the same.
The campaign could help to amplify this. The new push will run across TV, web and social media platforms over the coming months.
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