Tech Life

Voice cloning is becoming so sophisticated that even live phone calls can be generated by machine. Is it possible to protect yourself ? Mouthguard technology is monitoring the hardest tackles on rugby players - our reporter gives it a try. Also in this week's Tech Life, we look at tracing your family tree with tech. And hear about winter-proof long-distance drones delivering supplies in Norway.

PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images/demaerre

Associate Professor Lee Seok Woo, from NTU, in Singapore, tells us how a Tom Cruise film inspired him to create a battery, powered by tears, that's so small it could be fitted to a contact lens. Ben Derico reports from San Francisco on why Chatbot detectors are mistakenly accusing people for whom English is a second language of cheating in exams. Analyst Ben Wood, from CCS Insight, brings us up to speed on Apple's latest product plans. And journalist Jack Thompson guides us through the farming revolution in Senegal, being powered by WhatsApp voicenotes.

This week, the academic Kate Crawford tells us how she travelled the world to find the true cost of AI. Reporter Chris Vallance updates us on a watermark system - developed by Deepmind, Google's AI arm - which aims to show whether an image was generated by a machine or designed by a human. Mansoor Hamayun, Co-Founder and CEO of Bboxx tells us about the company's smart cooking valve, designed to protect lives - and trees - in Rwanda. We speak to Fu’ad Lawal, the founder of Archivi.ng,and archivist Grace Abraham, about why the key to Nigeria's tech future may lie in digitsing newspapers from its past.

(Picture credit: an imagined digital landscape, by Andriy Onufriyenko, for Getty images)

We join the search for tomorrow's innovators at a global competition in Portugal. Who will win ? Listen and find out. Also, why do some AI chatbots perform better using the English language ? And new signings are heading to one of the world's most popular football video games.

Photo: Competition finalists, Lisbon, November 2023.

This week Tech Tent is presented by Joe Tidy, who's been to El Salvador - which has bought thousands of bitcoins and become the first country in the world to make it legal tender. Now prices are crashing so will its experiment end in failure? Bitcoin podcast host Natalie Brunell and finacnail commentator Frances Coppola give their thoughts. Also: entrepreneurs at London tech week on their hopes and fears for the future. A Facebook moderator tells Chris Vallance of the strain of screening graphic content from the Ukraine war. And Liv McMahon pays the tech team's respects to Internet Explorer, put out to pasture after 27 years in which it transformed home computing.