Technologies

Honor’s Magic V5 Boasts On-Device Live AI Call Translation for Guaranteed Privacy

In an exclusive interview with CNET, Honor’s President of Product Fei Fang reveals how the V5’s AI model will allow for more speed, accuracy and privacy.

«Hola! ¿Hablas inglés?» I asked the woman who answered the phone in the Barcelona restaurant.

I was calling in a futile attempt to make a reservation for the CNET team dinner during Mobile World Congress this year. Unfortunately, I don’t know Spanish (I learned French and German at school). And as it turned out, she didn’t speak English either.

«No!» she said, and brusquely hung up.

What I needed in that moment was the kind of AI call translation feature that’s becoming increasingly prevalent on phones — including those made by Samsung and Google, and, starting next week, Honor.

When Honor unveils its Magic V5 foldable at a launch event on Aug. 28 in London, it will come with what the company is calling «the industry’s first on-device large speech model,» which will allow live AI call translation to take place on device, with no cloud processing.

Currently the phone supports six languages — English, Chinese, French, German, Italian and Spanish. For aforementioned reasons, I can’t test all of these, but I’ve already had a play around with the feature and can confirm it did a very effective job of translating my garbled messages into French. I only wish I’d had it available to me in Spain when I needed it.

The model Honor has deployed was designed by the company in collaboration with Shanghai Jiao Tong University, based on the open-source Whisper model, said Fei Fang, president of product at Honor in an interview. It’s been optimized for streaming speech recognition, automatic language detection and translation inference acceleration (that’s speed and efficiency, to you and I).

According to Fang, Honor’s user experience studies have shown that as long as translation occurs within 1.5 seconds, it doesn’t «induce waiting anxiety,» in anyone attempting to use AI call translation. As such, it’s made sure to keep the latency to within these parameters so you won’t get anxious waiting for the translation to kick in.

«We also work together with industry language experts to consistently and comprehensively evaluate the accuracy of our output,» she added. «The assessment is primarily based on five metrics: accuracy, logical coherence, readability, grammatical correctness and conciseness.»

In addition to Honor’s AI model, live translation is being powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite chip. The 8 Elite’s NPU allows multimodal generative AI applications to be integrated onto the device. Honor’s algorithms work together with the NPU to keep power consumption as low as possible while maintaining the required accuracy of the translations, said Christopher Patrick, SVP of mobile handsets at Qualcomm.

There are a number of benefits to having the AI model embedded on the Magic V5, but perhaps the most compelling is the privacy it guarantees. It means that everything is processed locally and your calls will therefore remain completely confidential. The fact that the model lives on device and you don’t need to download voice packages also reduces its storage needs.

Another benefit of running the model on the phone itself is «offline usability,» said Patrick. «All conversation information is stored directly on-device and users can access it anytime, anywhere, without network restrictions.»

The work Honor has done on AI call translation is set to be recognized at the upcoming Interspeech conference on speech science and tech. But already, Honor is thinking about how this use of AI can be used to enable other new and exciting features for the people who buy its phones.

«Beyond the essential user scenario of call translation, Honor’s on-device large speech model will also be deployed in scenarios such as face-to-face translation [and] AI subtitles,» said Fang. The process of developing the speech model has allowed Honor’s AI team to gain extensive experience of model optimization, which it will use to develop other AI applications, she added.

«Looking ahead, we will continue to expand capabilities in areas such as emotion recognition and health monitoring, further empowering voice interactions with your on-device AI assistant,» she said.

Technologies

If You Were ‘Tricked’ Into an Amazon Prime Subscription, You Should Have Been Paid by Today

Amazon is paying $1.5 billion to people who mistakenly subscribed to Prime, and the first round of payments are due today.

Amazon Prime provides a lot of valuable benefits to its members, but the company’s registration practices for its premium subscription from 2019 to 2025 led to many customers accidentally subscribing to a service they didn’t want.

Amazon is now paying the price for that deception — the US Federal Trade Commission levied a massive $2.5 billion settlement on the company for its subscription tactics.

The majority of the settlement — $1.5 billion — has been earmarked to refund eligible subscribers, with the rest serving as a civil penalty. Amazon is also now legally required to provide a clear, obvious option to decline Prime, making it as easy to leave the service as it is to join.

Amazon isn’t admitting to shady behavior. «Amazon and our executives have always followed the law, and this settlement allows us to move forward and focus on innovating for customers,» Mark Blafkin, Amazon senior manager, said in a statement. «We work incredibly hard to make it clear and simple for customers to both sign up or cancel their Prime membership, and to offer substantial value for our many millions of loyal Prime members around the world.»

The online retail giant started sending out payments to eligible people in November and was supposed to conclude its initial automatic payments today, Dec. 24. Read on to learn more about Amazon’s settlement and what to do if you think you’re eligible for compensation but didn’t receive a payment.

Why did the FTC fine Amazon?

The FTC filed suit against Amazon, accusing the company of using «dark patterns» to nudge people into Prime subscriptions and then making it too hard to cancel. The FTC maintained Amazon was in violation of Section 5 of the FTC Act and the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act.

«Specifically, Amazon used manipulative, coercive or deceptive user-interface designs known as ‘dark patterns’ to trick consumers into enrolling in automatically renewing Prime subscriptions,» the FTC complaint stated.

Who’s eligible for Amazon’s payout?

Amazon’s legal settlement is limited to customers who enrolled in Amazon Prime between June 23, 2019, and June 23, 2025. It’s also restricted to customers who subscribed to Prime using a «challenged enrollment flow» or who enrolled in Prime through any method but were unsuccessful in canceling their memberships.

The FTC called out specific enrollment pages, including Prime Video enrollment, the Universal Prime Decision page, the Shipping Option Select page and the Single Page Checkout. To qualify for a payout, claimants must also not have used more than 10 Amazon Prime benefits in any 12-month period.

Customers who signed up via those challenged processes and did not use more than three Prime benefits within one year will be paid automatically by Amazon within 90 days. Other eligible Amazon customers will need to file a claim, and Amazon is required to send notices to those people within 30 days of making its automatic payments.

If you are eligible for the automatic payment, you should have received an email from Amazon by today explaining how to claim the money. You can be paid via PayPal or Venmo. If you prefer a paper check, don’t accept the digital payment. The FTC says Amazon will mail you a check that you must cash within 60 days.

How big will the Amazon payments be?

Payouts to eligible Amazon claimants will be limited to a maximum of $51. That amount could be reduced depending on the number of Amazon Prime benefits you used while subscribed to the service. Those benefits include free two-day shipping, watching shows or movies on Prime Video or Whole Foods grocery discounts.

Customers who qualify for the payments should have received them from Nov. 12 to Dec. 24, 2025.If you are eligible for compensation from Amazon but didn’t receive a payout, you’ll need to file a claim after Amazon starts the claim process. The FTC says it will update its Amazon settlement site once that process has begun.

Customers who did not use a challenged sign-up process but instead were unable to cancel their Prime memberships will also need to file claims for payment.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Connections: Sports Edition Hints and Answers for Dec. 25, #458

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for Dec. 25, No. 458.

Looking for the most recent regular Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle and Strands puzzles.

Today’s Connections: Sports Edition has a real mix of categories, including one that’s all about a certain famous athlete. If you’re struggling with today’s puzzle but still want to solve it, read on for hints and the answers.

Connections: Sports Edition is published by The Athletic, the subscription-based sports journalism site owned by The Times. It doesn’t appear in the NYT Games app, but it does in The Athletic’s app. Or you can play it for free online.

Read more: NYT Connections: Sports Edition Puzzle Comes Out of Beta

Hints for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections: Sports Edition puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.

Yellow group hint: Swing away!

Green group hint: What’s that on your bat?

Blue group hint: Catch the football.

Purple group hint: Lake Placid or Lillehammer.

Answers for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Yellow group: Baseball bat materials.

Green group: Associated with George Brett.

Blue group: NFL rookie WRs.

Purple group: Olympic ____.

Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English Words

What are today’s Connections: Sports Edition answers?

The yellow words in today’s Connections

The theme is baseball bat materials. The four answers are aluminum, ash, birch and maple.

The green words in today’s Connections

The theme is associated with George Brett. The four answers are 5, pine tar, Royals and third base.

The blue words in today’s Connections

The theme is NFL rookie WRs. The four answers are Burden, Egbuka, Golden and McMillan.

The purple words in today’s Connections

The theme is Olympic ____. The four answers are Games, rings, torch and village.

Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.

Technologies

Christmas Eve Gaming Crushed as Steam Goes Offline

Services related to the popular game hub seem to slowly be returning as of Wednesday afternoon.

Your Christmas Eve gaming session might not go as planned. Online gaming hub Steam went down on Wednesday. As of about 1:30 pm PT, the Steam store page was once again accessible, so services seemed to be coming back online.

The Steam outage appeared to begin mid-afternoon ET, according to Downdetector, which monitors site outages. (Disclosure: Downdetector is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis.)

A representative for Steam did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

As of Wednesday noon PT, Steam’s official X and Bluesky accounts hadn’t posted anything about the outage.

Gamers certainly noticed. «Steam down, Steam down!!!» wrote one Bluesky user.

Others commented on the bad timing just as gamers were enjoying time off or receiving gaming gifts. «‘You got a gift on Steam!’ oh cool ‘Steam is down’ oh cool,» wrote another Bluesky user.