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Digital Planet: Stephen Fry's Digital Life

Factual: Science & Nature

Stephen Fry

30/09/2014

Stephen Fry's Digital Life

BBC World Service - Digital Planet, Stephen Fry's Digital Life

The actor, writer and technophile Stephen Fry describes how tech has changed his life

Stephen Fry's digital life; The evolution of machine translation; The latest tech advances at Berlin's IFA show.

Stephen Fry is a writer, actor and technophile. An early adopter of technology, he has been in and out of love with Twitter but has never managed to curb his love of gadgets and is enthralled by the changes brought to his life by technology. Fry and his publisher, Penguin UK have just launched an ambitious project. They effectively aim to crowd source the future of the book. Penguin will release a chunk of free, cross media content from Stephen Fry's new memoir, More Fool Me, and will actively invite others to re-interpret the work through tech mash-ups and all kinds of online mayhem on a global scale. Fry reflects on Click how it has fundamentally changed his life. 

Machine Translation Evolves
Machine translation has grown quickly in the last few years. As well as offering benefits for those who want to understand and communicate in another language it throws up potential challenges to those who make a living through translation. Big tech companies like Google and Microsoft enable the widespread use of such tools. Click hears how Google Translate was the go-between between lovers who could not speak each other’s language, and how professional translators might in the future act as editors to clarify the results of machine learning. And Click is joined by Macduff Hughes, engineering director for the Google Translate team. 

IFA at 90
Back in the 1920s, radio was the star at Berlin's very first IFA. Ninety years later and now one of the world’s biggest consumer electronics shows, IFA showed earlier this month that it is thriving. All the big names in tech were there. Alongside IFA, a summit of international designers and engineers, doctors and architects took to the stage to explain how tech is reinventing their worlds. Our reporter, Abby D’Arcy went along.

(Photo: Stephen Fry ©Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)

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