From a growing skills gap to a stubborn productivity crisis, business leaders are under increasing pressure to improve efficiency while also fostering employee engagement. Everyone agrees that technology can help, and many businesses are now harnessing AI to enhance processes like customer service and repetitive workflows. But many industry leaders are overlooking another key driver of business growth: creativity.

Investing in creativity traditionally might have seemed like a nice-to-have, but organizations that encourage curiosity and inspire teams to question the status quo outpace their competitors. Canva’s recent survey, conducted with Harvard Business Review, showed that 96% of business leaders agree that creative ideas are essential to an organization’s performance and long-term success.

Strands is a brand new daily puzzle from the New York Times. A trickier take on the classic word search, you’ll need a keen eye to solve this puzzle.

Like Wordle, Connections, and the Mini Crossword, Strands can be a bit difficult to solve some days. There’s no shame in needing a little help from time to time. If you’re stuck and need to know the answers to today’s Strands puzzle, check out the solved puzzle below.

How to play Strands

Hint for today’s Strands puzzle

Today’s Strand answers

Today’s spanagram

We’ll start by giving you the spangram, which might help you figure out the theme and solve the rest of the puzzle on your own:

Today’s Strands answers

• PACK
• HERD
• KNOT
• FLOCK
• PRIDE
• SWARM
• SCHOOL
• COLONY

Mobile apps continue to transform the daily lives of modern users. In 2024, these programs have reached a completely new level with the integration of AI, automation, and personalization. These new apps help you stay productive, keep track of your health and fitness, manage your finances effectively, and even find time for learning within a busy schedule. Today, we’ll talk about the most useful Android apps in daily life that can boost your productivity and help you change your life.

Productivity

The main goal of the most useful Android apps in daily life is to help users organize their time and complete tasks efficiently. By optimizing your workflow, these apps help you increase daily productivity and make the most of every free minute. In 2024, these best Android apps have become smarter, often using AI to analyze user behavior and provide personalized recommendations:

– Todoist. This app helps you manage your daily tasks more effectively. It integrates with other services and calendars;

– TickTick. A convenient must-have task planner that includes a calendar, timer, and focus functions. With this app, you can manage your time more effectively throughout the day;

– Trello. Task boards with a simple interface and team collaboration features. It’s a great choice for those working on team projects, thanks to its simplicity and visualization tools.

Health and well-being

More and more users are paying attention to their physical and mental health. The most useful Android apps in daily life can handle a variety of tasks—fitness, body system monitoring, meditation, and more. These apps will help you stay in shape both physically and mentally:

– Calm. A meditation and sleep improvement app with many preset scenarios for relaxation;

– MyFitnessPal. Helps you track your nutrition and physical activity. It’s an essential tool if you’ve decided to adopt a healthy lifestyle. The app includes a food database that helps you calculate the calorie content of meals.

Learning and development

Learning and development apps help users acquire new knowledge at their own pace and in their free time from everyday tasks. These apps not only assist in learning new languages but also in mastering programming:

– Duolingo. An interactive language-learning app with gamification elements. You can learn new words and practice anytime, earning various rewards and achievements;

– Headway. This app lets you read books in just 15 minutes—it highlights key ideas, helping you gain new knowledge without spending too much time. It’s perfect for busy people—you can integrate learning into your packed daily schedule.

Financial management

These apps will boost your financial literacy level—you’ll be able to track your expenses, plan your budget, make transactions, and invest with minimal effort. In 2024, such apps use AI technology to analyze user behavior and offer more personalized financial advice:

– YNAB (You Need a Budget). This app helps you plan your budget, track expenses and income conveniently, and analyze your financial habits;

– Revolut. A user-friendly banking transfer service that also includes budgeting tools. It helps analyze expenses and allows you to make international payments quickly.

Social and communication

These most useful Android apps in daily life keep users connected without worrying about their security and personal data privacy. One of the 2024 trends for such apps is maximum user confidentiality.

– Signal. The most secure messaging app for communicating with others. It ensures a high level of privacy through end-to-end encryption;

– Telegram. A popular messenger with numerous additional features—users have access to bots, channels, and groups. Another advantage is its fast performance and adaptability to nearly all smartphones.

New trends in Android apps in 2024

The year 2024 brought significant changes to most useful Android apps in daily life. These include the use of new technologies, enhanced security standards, and a growing focus on environmental awareness. We’ve highlighted a few key trends that are shaping new Android apps:

– Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Integration. These technologies help apps track user behavior and adapt the interface and available features based on the collected data. They also simplify everyday tasks. For instance, in the Grammarly app, AI analyzes the text and automatically corrects mistakes;

– Eco-friendly Apps. In 2024, environmental awareness became a major focus in the mobile industry. Many apps aim to help users reduce their carbon footprint and use natural resources more consciously. An interesting eco-friendly app is Ecosia. It’s essentially a browser where the creators use all the money earned from ads to plant trees;

– Cashless Payments. In 2024, there is a growing demand for free Android apps that allow for cashless payments. With these apps, you can transfer money instantly and securely without needing to visit banks. We’re also seeing an active integration of cryptocurrencies. For example, Google Pay not only offers convenient contactless payments but also allows you to manage all your bank cards in one place;

– Gamified Apps. Gamification is one of the key trends in the mobile industry in 2024. Now, game-like elements such as achievements, levels, and rewards are used to motivate users to take certain actions. This trend is especially popular in educational and fitness apps. A great example is Habitica, an app where managing daily tasks and habits turns into an engaging RPG experience.

Conclusion

Mobile technology is making life easier, more convenient, and more enjoyable for modern users. Today, smartphones have various daily life apps for productivity, health, learning, and financial management, which automate most tasks. These apps help maintain a balance between work and personal life effortlessly. Try out a few options from the productivity apps list to improve your life. Start with Headway, which helps you learn even with a busy schedule, and install Todoist to boost your productivity. Share your thoughts in the comments—what apps do you already use regularly? Which ones have had the biggest impact on your daily life and helped improve it?

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Be My Eyes, the accessibility app for mobile devices that puts blind and low-vision people on a live video call with a sighted guide, will help Microsoft train its AI. Be My Eyes will provide anonymized video data to improve scene understanding in Microsoft’s accessibility-focused AI models.

The data sets Be My Eyes gives Microsoft will include “unique objects, lighting and framing that realistically represents the lived experience of the blind and low vision community.” The goal is to make Microsoft’s AI more inclusive for people with vision disabilities.

The companies say all personal info has been scrubbed from the metadata. The provided data won’t be used for advertising or any purpose other than training Microsoft’s AI models.

Although this is Be My Eyes’ first such data partnership, it’s worked with Microsoft before by incorporating its Be My AI tool into Microsoft’s Disability Answer Desk. As its name suggests, Be My AI is the company’s GPT-4-powered spin on an assistance product. In that case, it helps people with vision disabilities navigate Office, Windows and Xbox.

Be My Eyes also struck a deal with Hilton earlier this month. In that case, dedicated hotel staff help blind and low-vision lodgers do things like adjust their thermostats, make coffee and raise or lower their blinds. A previous 2023 partnership between the two companies helped train the Be My AI model.

Connections is the latest puzzle game from the New York Times. The game tasks you with categorizing a pool of 16 words into four secret (for now) groups by figuring out how the words relate to each other. The puzzle resets every night at midnight and each new puzzle has a varying degree of difficulty. Just like Wordle, you can keep track of your winning streak and compare your scores with friends.

Some days are trickier than others. If you’re having a little trouble solving today’s Connections puzzle, check out our tips and hints below. And if you still can’t get it, we’ll tell you today’s answers at the very end.

How to play Connections

Hints for today’s Connections

We can help you solve today’s Connection by telling you the four themes. If you need more assistance, we’ll also give you one word from each group below.

Today’s themes

• KINDS OF BEANS
• ATTRACT
• AUTOMATIC GEAR SHIFTER POSITIONS
• ___ POOL

One-answer reveals

• KINDS OF BEANS – KIDNEY
• ATTRACT – DRAW
• AUTOMATIC GEAR SHIFTER POSITIONS – DRIVE
• ___ POOL – CAR

Today’s Connections answers

Just in time for the 2024 US elections, the call screening and fraud detection company Hiya has launched a free Chrome extension to spot deepfake voices. The aptly named Hiya Deepfake Voice Detector “listens” to voices played in video or audio streams and assigns an authenticity score, telling you whether it’s likely real or fake.

Hiya tells Engadget that third-party testers have validated the extension as over 99 percent accurate. The company says that even covers AI-generated voices the detection model hasn’t trained on, and the company claims it can spot voices created by new synthesis models as soon as they’re launched.

We played around with the extension ahead of launch, and it seems to work well. I pulled up a YouTube video about the blues pioneer Howlin’ Wolf that I suspected used AI narration, and it assigned it a 1/100 authenticity score, declaring it likely a deepfake. Suspicions confirmed.

Hiya threw a well-earned jab at social media companies for making such a tool necessary. “It’s clear social media sites have a huge responsibility to alert users when the content they are consuming has a high chance of being an AI deepfake,” Hiya President Kush Parikh wrote in a press release. “The onus is currently on the individual to be vigilant to the risks and use tools like our Deepfake Voice Detector to check if they are concerned content is being altered. That’s a big ask, so we’re pleased to be able to support them with a solution that helps put some of the power back in their hands.”

The extension only needs to listen to a few seconds of a voice to spit out a result. It works on a credit system to prevent Hiya’s servers from getting slammed by excessive requests. You’ll get 20 credits daily, which may or may not cover the flood of manipulative AI content you’ll come across on social media in the coming weeks.