Regal Consulting Services

12/12/2025

12/12/2025

"Wrangling with customer service is grinding us down, Chris Colin wrote in June. What if that’s the plan?" https://theatln.tc/r7lx50iC via The Atlantic
🎨: Timo Lenzen

12/09/2025

Microsoft’s new AI can simulate anyone’s voice with 3 seconds of audio

****Text-to-speech model can preserve speaker’s emotional tone and acoustic environment.***

Microsoft researchers announced a new text-to-speech AI model called VALL-E that can closely simulate a person’s voice when given a three-second audio sample. Once it learns a specific voice, VALL-E can synthesize audio of that person saying anything—and do it in a way that attempts to preserve the speaker’s emotional tone.

Its creators speculate that VALL-E could be used for high-quality text-to-speech applications, speech editing where a recording of a person could be edited and changed from a text transcript (making them say something they originally didn’t), and audio content creation when combined with other generative AI models like GPT-3.

Microsoft calls VALL-E a “neural codec language model,” and it builds off of a technology called EnCodec, which Meta announced in October 2022. Unlike other text-to-speech methods that typically synthesize speech by manipulating waveforms, VALL-E generates discrete audio codec codes from text and acoustic prompts. It basically analyzes how a person sounds, breaks that information into discrete components (called “tokens”) thanks to EnCodec, and uses training data to match what it “knows” about how that voice would sound if it spoke other phrases outside of the three-second sample. Or, as Microsoft puts it in the VALL-E paper:

To synthesize personalized speech (e.g., zero-shot TTS), VALL-E generates the corresponding acoustic tokens conditioned on the acoustic tokens of the 3-second enrolled recording and the phoneme prompt, which constrain the speaker and content information respectively. Finally, the generated acoustic tokens are used to synthesize the final waveform with the corresponding neural codec decoder.

Read more at:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/01/microsofts-new-ai-can-simulate-anyones-voice-with-3-seconds-of-audio/

12/08/2025

Every successful business leader understands this truth:

Ex*****on becomes easier when preparation comes first.

Before the year begins, before the quarter starts, before you launch your next offer — build the foundation.

Preparation is not optional.
It’s strategic.
It’s intentional.
It’s the separator between businesses that grow and businesses that stagnate.

Build now.
Win later.

12/08/2025

Marketing isn’t something you do only when you feel inspired. It’s a daily business habit that keeps you visible, relevant, and connected to your audience.

You don’t need perfect content.
You don’t need a complicated strategy.
You just need consistency.

One post. One story. One email. One value touch.
Every day.

The more your audience sees you, the more they trust you.
The more they trust you, the more they buy.

Your marketing doesn’t need to be perfect — it just needs to be present.

12/08/2025

"This is an interesting idea. A new browser extension called Slop Evader is offering a way for people to avoid the growing wave of AI-generated content by essentially freezing the internet in 2022. Created by artist and researcher Tega Brain, the tool filters Google search results so that anything published after November 30, 2022, the day ChatGPT launched, is excluded.

Brain designed it to give users a more genuinely human browsing experience, one not dominated by AI-written articles, synthetic images, or manipulated media that now fill so much of our lives. Tools like Slop Evader and Kagi Search’s SlopStop resemble a rising resistance to what many call “AI slop,” though Brain emphasizes that these tools aren’t meant to be permanent solutions.
Instead, they’re intended to spark reflection and collective action around how we interact with information online. Perhaps create a cultural shift.

Slop Evader currently filters content across seven platforms, but it comes with a notable trade-off - users lose access to anything recent. For Brain, that limitation is intentional, meant to encourage people to question their passive acceptance of synthetic media and consider how to push back against an internet that feels increasingly artificial." via Collective Evolution

12/08/2025

Your business can’t grow beyond the strength of your systems.

If you find yourself doing the same steps over and over — intake, onboarding, delivery, follow-up — that’s your sign to document it.
A workflow isn’t just “nice to have.” It’s the foundation of scalability.

When your business relies on memory, you slow down.
When your business relies on systems, you speed up.

The difference between hustling and scaling is structure.
Document what you repeat, streamline it, and watch how much time, energy, and revenue you unlock.

12/08/2025

"It's official. Stop using hashtags. 😆

Ha! Okay, not exactly 100% 'official' just yet... but check this out:

Instagram, X (Twitter), and TikTok have started phasing out hashtags stating that they are no longer necessary for discovery.

And we can assume if Instagram is doing this, so is Facebook... even though there is a prompt to add hashtags to every post. So maybe it's early days yet for FB.

Truth is, the hashtag was a tool created BY the people, FOR the people.

Now all the social networks are 'taking back control' of content distribution.

Their AI-powered algorithm simply analyzes ALL other aspects of your post, the caption, your bio, etc. etc. The algos handle discovery for you. I guess it makes sense now, eh?" - Mari Smith

Read more here:
https://news.thepublishpress.com/p/should-you-stop-using-hashtags

12/08/2025

"Do you run a Facebook group? (Or you're a member of at least one or more groups, yes?) Well, Facebook just announced that you can now convert your PRIVATE Groups to PUBLIC. 😳
What could possibly go wrong?! 😬

This is clearly a move to help gain more visibility, reach, awareness, and engagement on Facebook and even beyond. After all, *everything* is visible in Public Groups... even to people who do not have a Facebook account! 🔓👀

BUT, Facebook has thought through privacy implications at least a bit! 👇🏻

✅ ALL past CONTENT (posts, comments, reactions) before the switch remains PRIVATE, but still visible to members of the group *before* it became public, as well as to Admins and Moderators.
✅ Only NEW posts, comments & reactions will be PUBLICLY visible, including to people not even on Facebook. (This is how public groups have always functioned).
✅ The MEMBER LIST will be visible ONLY to Admins and Moderators.
✅ If you make the switch, you can still change it back from public to private.

Also NEW: if a group allows anonymous participation, members can choose to post or comment using their name, or anonymously, or with a new option to choose a NICKNAME. 🤔

"Converting to public means the group’s new content will be visible to everyone, so before making any changes, consider what’s best for your community and seek feedback from fellow admins, moderators, and members. Once you have converted your group, keep members informed by sharing a post about the update."

See Facebook's official announcement 🔗below.

💬 Your thoughts? Would you make the switch? Would you stay in a group that was private for the longest time and suddenly became public? I'd love to know how you feel about this... let me know in the comments! (Or DM).

(FWIW, I have *zero* intention of making my own private Mari Smith's Social Scoop
Facebook Group public. I would rather start a NEW group with the purpose being quite different. I like my private groups!)

📢 Content Authenticity Statement:
☑︎ Text = written manually by me, fingers on the keyboard based on Facebook's official announcement (link in the comments).
☑︎ Image = created in Canva with an AI-generated background + foreground image from Facebook's announcement." - Mari Smith

Read more: https://about.fb.com/news/2025/11/facebook-update-group-admins-flexibility-protecting-member-privacy/

03/24/2025

FinCEN Removes Beneficial Ownership Reporting Requirements for U.S. Companies and U.S. Persons, Sets New Deadlines for Foreign Companies

(Updated March 21, 2025)

"WASHINGTON––Consistent with the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s March 2, 2025 announcement, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) is issuing an interim final rule that removes the requirement for U.S. companies and U.S. persons to report beneficial ownership information (BOI) to FinCEN under the Corporate Transparency Act.

In that interim final rule, FinCEN revises the definition of “reporting company” in its implementing regulations to mean only those entities that are formed under the law of a foreign country and that have registered to do business in any U.S. State or Tribal jurisdiction by the filing of a document with a secretary of state or similar office (formerly known as “foreign reporting companies”). FinCEN also exempts entities previously known as “domestic reporting companies” from BOI reporting requirements.

Thus, through this interim final rule, all entities created in the United States — including those previously known as “domestic reporting companies” — and their beneficial owners will be exempt from the requirement to report BOI to FinCEN. Foreign entities that meet the new definition of a “reporting company” and do not qualify for an exemption from the reporting requirements must report their BOI to FinCEN under new deadlines, detailed below. These foreign entities, however, will not be required to report any U.S. persons as beneficial owners, and U.S. persons will not be required to report BOI with respect to any such entity for which they are a beneficial owner.

Upon the publication of the interim final rule, the following deadlines apply for foreign entities that are reporting companies:

Reporting companies registered to do business in the United States before the date of publication of the IFR must file BOI reports no later than 30 days from that date.

Reporting companies registered to do business in the United States on or after the date of publication of the IFR have 30 calendar days to file an initial BOI report after receiving notice that their registration is effective.

FinCEN is accepting comments on this interim final rule and intends to finalize the rule this year."

Read more at: https://fincen.gov/news/news-releases/fincen-removes-beneficial-ownership-reporting-requirements-us-companies-and-us

01/18/2024

Some of the most successful side hustles start small and build up over time. The key is to identify your skills, passions, and target audience. via Forbes Women

Some of the most successful side hustles start small and build up over time. The key is to identify your skills, passions, and target audience.