Technology explained, in plain words.

AI and language

• What is a large language model? A model trained to predict the next piece of text: fluent, and sometimes wrong with confidence.
• What is RAG? Look it up first, then answer: fresher answers with sources, only as good as the search.
• AI agent, chatbot, assistant: a chatbot answers, an assistant helps with your own things, an agent takes steps on its own.
• What is an AI agent? An AI that sends, books, moves and buys, and the rules a personal agent should keep.
• Prompt injection: instructions hidden in an email or a web page, and why an agent should ask before it acts.
• How speech recognition works: from sound to a picture of frequencies to words, measured by the word error rate.
• Why voice assistants struggle in noise: noise, distance and other voices, what research measured, and what helps.
• Voice assistants and speech differences: being cut off or misheard when you stutter or speak differently, and what research and settings change.
• How AI voices work: text to a picture of frequencies to sound, rated close to recordings by listeners.
• Hold to talk versus wake words: a microphone that listens for a word, or one that is on only while you hold a button.
• Turn off “Hey Siri” and “Hey Google”: where the setting is, and what you keep without it.
• AI companions and loneliness: relief in the moment in experiments, worse outcomes for the heaviest users over weeks.
• At home or in the cloud? What runs on a device and what in a data centre, and what each means for privacy.
• What is an NPU? The part of a chip built for neural networks, and what a TOPS figure does not tell you.
• What is reinforcement learning? Learning by trial and error from rewards, from Atari games and Go to robots.
• When AI leaves the screen: robot models that learn from the web, and what a home needs from a robot.
• What our ring and robot learn: four things we trained, the versions we set aside, and the part that does not learn.

Sensors and robots

• Time-of-flight sensors: measuring distance by timing light, and why glass and dark surfaces fool them.
• What is optical flow? How a drone measures its speed by watching the floor slide by, as bees do.
• What is SLAM? How a robot maps a room while working out where it is on that map.
• What is a Kalman filter? Predict, then correct: how phones and drones blend imperfect sensors.
• How robots recognise people: object detection, its misses and false alarms, and a camera at home.
• Teaching a robot to see cats, dogs and tulle: three versions of our own camera model, and why we did not use the second.
• Pets and home robots: what research on dogs, noise, robots and wild animals suggests.
• How a drone hovers: four propellers, two spinning each way, and a computer correcting them all the time.
• How a drone finds its way indoors: motion sensors, cameras, distance sensors, a map, and drift.
• What a fan does to a small drone: drafts, the floor and the ceiling, and two fixes tried in our simulation.
• Why glass and mirrors confuse robots, and how sound and a few rules help.
• Drones that change shape in flight, to pass gaps narrower than their open shape.
• Sim-to-real: why robots are tested in simulation first, and what the reality gap is.

Wearables, radio and power

• What is Bluetooth LE Audio? The LC3 codec, support for hearing aids, and Auracast broadcasts.
• What is LTE-M? A mobile network for small devices on small batteries.
• What is an eSIM? A SIM built into the device and set up by download.
• How tap to pay works: a short-range radio and a payment token instead of your card number.
• The future of payments in Europe: instant transfers, Wero and the digital euro.
• Haptic feedback: how a ring can say yes, no or not sure with a buzz.
• Are smart rings accurate? What studies against sleep labs found: close on how long you slept, weaker on stages.
• What is heart rate variability? The variation between heartbeats, why your number is your own, and how rings measure it.
• What is a normal resting heart rate? Usually 60 to 100 for adults, what moves it, and when to see a doctor.
• Can a smart ring replace a blood test? What light through the skin can tell you, the FDA’s warning about glucose, and what changed in 2026.
• Can a smart ring track your health in real time? What it measures all day, what it saves for the night, and what a wellness wearable may tell you.
• Why batteries wear out: heat, staying full and running flat, and the habits that help.
• What a smart ring is made of: titanium, ceramic and resin, and why radio signals care.
• IP68 or 5 ATM? Two standards for water, what each tests, and what no rating promises.

The rules

• What CE marking means: a maker’s declaration, not an EU approval, and not a mark of origin.
• What an FCC ID means: how radio devices are authorized in the US, and what may be sold before.
• Pre-ordering tech: deposits, refunds and delays under EU and US rules, and what to check before you pay.
• The EU AI Act and AI assistants: what applies, and when.
• Your data rights with an AI assistant in the EU, with a request you can copy.
• Home drones and the law in Europe: what applies inside your home.

For single words, see the glossary; for what the research says about phones and attention, see phone habits.