Dede Sophie

A car that chats to you as you drive along could well sound like the ultimate automotive distraction, but that’s the premise of a presentation by BMW at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, writes Brian Byrne. The car is embodied with the name Dee, sounds cute but is really an acronym for Digital Emotional Experience. Using augmented reality and artificial intelligence, Dee is presented as its owner’s ‘ultimate companion’ that ‘gets to know you better every day’. The presentation even includes actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, kind of stopped in his tracks when the car converses with him and suggests a ‘digital hug’. It’s all a bit twee, and somehow like driving in the middle of a TikTok movie, but I can see how CES-goers would enjoy it. Motorheads, not so much. You don’t have to go to Las Vegas to meet Dee, just click here . 

CONGRATS TO LUCKY WINNER – EMILY! “My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.” So begins the story of Susie Salmon, who is adjusting to her new home in heaven, a place that is not at all what she expected, even as she is watching life on earth continue without her — her friends trading rumors about her disappearance, her killer trying to cover his tracks, her grief-stricken family unraveling. Out of unspeakable tragedy and loss, The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold succeeds, miraculously, in building a tale filled with hope, humor, suspense, even joy. I was in a hurry when I opened this audiobook and didn’t realize at first it was the author herself reading it out loud! It certainly made for a unique reading experience, and that made it all the more fulfilling somehow. I hadn’t read the paper version of the novel and was unprepared for the gamut of emotions the story takes a listener through. I was quite intrigued by the h