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The Gemini mobile app now lets users create "personalized, illustrated storybooks complete with read-aloud narration" that can incorporate uploaded photos (Abner Li/9to5Google)
https://9to5google.com/2025/08/05/gemini-storybooks/

Gemini app can now create custom storybooks, comics, and more
The latest Gemini app feature lets you create “personalized, illustrated storybooks complete with read-aloud narration.” 

Just finished "The Melancholy of Summer" by Louisa Onomé. It's an excellent book about parental abandonment, rejecting and accepting help, and friendship, set in Toronto. There were a few threads that didn't quite get wrapped up by the end, but the ending wasn't dissatisfying, and the writing is excellent, particularly TV gee dialogue and the narration of Summer's thoughts. I felt like the strategic use of stutters both gave the main character extra vulnerability, but also helped subtly clue the reader into moments where Summer's perception of her interlocutors doesn't match their real feelings. Between this and "Like Home", I feel like Onomé's novels are a bit rough around the edges, yet they're still some of the most enjoyable books I've been reading, probably because she's pours so much humanity into her characters and lets their honest desire for something better rub off on the audience.
#AmReading

Ontological foundations for contrastive explanatory narration of robot plans
Alberto Olivares-Alarcos, Sergi Foix, J\'ulia Borr\`as, Gerard Canal, Guillem Aleny\`a
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22493 …

Ontological foundations for contrastive explanatory narration of robot plans
Mutual understanding of artificial agents' decisions is key to ensuring a trustworthy and successful human-robot interaction. Hence, robots are expected to make reasonable decisions and communicate them to humans when needed. In this article, the focus is on an approach to modeling and reasoning about the comparison of two competing plans, so that robots can later explain the divergent result. First, a novel ontological model is proposed to formalize and reason about the differences between com…

Steven Spielberg's "Artificial Intelligence" (2001) was on Netflix and I had never seen it. I had heard that the final act is very sappy and... spoilers... yes it has issues in my opinion (voice-over narration *and* an alien for exposition dumps?!) but the act works well in the context of the movie: I wasn't aware that this is a modern Pinocchio's tale and the movie is quite literal about it.
But what really blew me away were the animatronic robots:

Finished the audiobook, "Flybot", by Dennis E. Taylor. Ray Porter does the narration and he's always fantastic.
A scientist performing an experiment with a small EMP burst discovers a now-inert metallic fly. What looks like corporate espionage isn't so simple. A number of experimental microchips, capable of running AI at the hardware level have gone missing. He'd go to the police, but wants to learn more. And then there's a body... too late.
4/5 stars ⭐⭐…

Flybot
Mysterious tech, a devious AI and a couple of scientist…

Good Morning #Canada
Like many provinces, Nova Scotia has hundreds of abandoned towns because of depleted minerals, harsh living conditions, or forced relocation. But the ghost town of Broughton in Cape Breton must surely be haunted because of a suicide by one of its most important residents. Founded by the promise of coal mining, no amount of money was spared on the design of its buildings and streets. But poor management and family tragedy doomed the town, and today, only ruins remain. Oooooooo.....
Here's a delightful video on Broughton with narration that is suitable for #Halloween. Don't watch it alone...
#CanadaIsAwesome #CanadianGhostTowns