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Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for May 23.

"Rather than jumping over someone to get what you want, consider reaching out your hand and taking the leap side by side," the beloved Muppet told graduates Thursday evening.

(Image credit: Riley Sims)

Some 50,000 people have been isolated by the flooding in New South Wales, after days of heavy rain. Four bodies have been retrieved from floodwaters since Wednesday.

(Image credit: AP)

Six people, including music talent agent Dave Shapiro, were on board a private jet that crashed into a San Diego neighborhood on Thursday.

(Image credit: William Liang)

Some of Harvard's sports teams could be wiped out by a Trump administration decision that would make the school with the nation's largest athletic program ineligible for international student visas.

(Image credit: Jessica Hill)

The academy in Emmitsburg, Md., is often described as the national war college for firefighting. It offers training that ranges from leadership to how to conduct fire, arson and blast investigations.

(Image credit: Justin T. Gellerson for NPR)

This is a wacky, wild superhero game at its core -- and superheroes aren't perfectly balanced.

Enterprises find themselves at a pivotal moment in communication technology, facing a difficult decision: embrace modern technology or protect their investments in existing systems. This has created a divide between all-new cloud solutions and approaches that work with the infrastructure organizations already have in place. Avaya's new Infinity platform solves this dilemma by offering a way to do both.

Bridging Technological Divides

The enterprise communication technology landscape has fragmented into distinct camps. On one side stand cloud-native solutions promising flexibility and innovation but requiring complete system replacement. On the other hand, traditional vendors offer incremental improvements to on-premise systems without fundamentally reimagining their architecture.

Our approach with Avaya Infinity platform targets the substantial middle ground with a hybrid solution for enterprises seeking modernization without abandoning functional infrastructure investments. This hybrid model acknowledges a fundamental reality: most large organizations operate complex technology ecosystems built over decades, making complete replacements impractical regardless of the benefits.

Differentiated Architecture

What differentiates Avaya Infinity platform is its architectural approach. It’s a secure platform that ensures compliance, deployment flexibility, and top-tier performance — a single code base across on-prem, cloud, and hybrid environments. Rather than forcing customers into two distinct choices, Avaya Infinity platform offers:

• Modern, Secure, Ready-to-Use Architecture: The unified platform with a single code base delivers the flexibility, security, and control that large enterprises expect. This approach ensures data privacy, regulatory compliance, and unmatched scalability. The modular design enables organizations to activate specific capabilities without implementing the entire platform—essential for phased adoption strategies.
• Layered, Intelligent Orchestration: AI capabilities function as an enhancement layer across both cloud and on-premises components, end-to-end, allowing intelligence to flow throughout the platform regardless of where components physically reside. It unifies AI, native applications, and disparate systems, whether they’re from Avaya, our partners, or enterprises’ existing own infrastructures. This empowers enterprises with a seamless, single-source approach to business agility and desired outcomes.
• Data-Driven Customization: Enterprises can customize experiences for their customers, contact center agents, and employees by leveraging rich data insights. With intelligent engagement tools, this platform enables hyper personalization at every touchpoint, driving satisfaction and loyalty.

This architecture addresses the realities enterprises face in the contact center. The vast majority of organizations simply cannot afford operational disruption during technological transformation, yet they’re also unable to ignore competitive pressure to implement AI-powered experiences.

The Strategic Benefits

Avaya Infinity platform offers a hybrid solution that enables organizations to:

• Extend the value of existing investments while incrementally introducing new capabilities
• Deploy AI capabilities selectively based on specific business needs and readiness
• Scale cloud adoption at a pace aligned with organizational change capacity
• Maintain operational stability throughout transformation processes

For those managing customer experience strategies, this approach transforms the contact center into a connection center ─ connecting channels (voice and digital), connecting insights (data and behavior), connecting technologies (unifying AI, applications and disparate systems), and connecting workflows (delivering hyper personalized experiences). When customer interactions generate not just service outcomes but actionable intelligence, every conversation becomes a source of competitive advantage.

Balancing Innovation and Stability

The enterprise technology landscape has historically swung between innovation cycles and stability periods. Today's environment is unique in demanding both simultaneously—rapid innovation in customer experience alongside operational stability in core systems.

Avaya Infinity platform embraces this hybrid reality offer a compelling vision: transformation without operational upheaval. Its architecture is enabled by existing investments while enabling future capabilities, indicating that for most enterprises, technology evolution occurs on a continuum rather than through discrete revolutions.

The Path Forward

Avaya Infinity platform supports sustainable transformation strategies using on-premise investments while systematically introducing AI-powered innovations. It delivers what enterprises need today and expect tomorrow.

Watch this video to learn more about Avaya Infinity platform and contact an Avaya expert to request a demo here.

No details or release date, but boy will it be cool to see Malenia wipe the floor with someone else for a change.

Google's unveiling of a new line of AI-fueled smart glasses built on the Android XR platform was only one of dozens of announcements at Google I/O this year. Even so, one facet in particular caught my eye as more important than it might have seemed to a casual viewer.

While the idea of wearing AI-powered lenses that can whisper directions into your ears while projecting your to-do list onto a mountain vista is exciting, it's how you'll look while you use them that grabbed my attention. Specifically, Google's partnership with Warby Parker and Gentle Monster to design their new smart glasses.

The spectre of Google Glass and the shadow cast by the so-called Glassholes weraring them went unmentioned, but it's not hard to see the partnerships as part of a deliberate strategy to avoid repeating the mistakes made a decade ago. Wearing Google Glass might have said, “I’m wearing the future,” but it also hinted, “I might be filming you without your consent.” No one will think that Google didn't consider the fashion aspect of smart glasses this time. Meta’s Ray-Ban collaboration is based on a similar impulse.

If you want people to wear computers on their faces, you have to make them look good. Warby Parker and Gentle Monster are known for creating glasses that appeal to millennials and Gen Z, both in look and price.

"Warby Parker is an incredible brand, and they've been really innovative not only with the designs that they have but also with their consumer retail experience. So we're thrilled to be partnered with them," said Sameer Samat, president of Google’s Android Ecosystem, in an interview with Bloomberg. "I think between Gentle Monster and Warby Parker, they're going to be great designs. First and foremost, people want to wear these and feel proud to wear them."

Smart fashion

Wearables are not mini smartphones, and treating them that way has proven to be a mistake. Just because you want to scroll through AR-enhanced dog videos doesn't mean you don't want to look good simultaneously.

Plus, smart glasses may be the best way to integrate generative AI like Google Gemini into hardware. Compared to the struggles of the Humane AI Pin, the Rabbit R1, and the Plaud.ai NotePin, smart glasses feel like a much safer bet.

We already live in a world saturated with wearable tech. Smartwatches are ubiquitous, and wireless earbuds also have microphones and biometric sensors. Glasses occupy a lot of your face's real estate, though. They're a way people identify you far more than your watch. Augmented reality devices sitting on your nose need to be appealing, no matter which side of the lenses you look at.

Combine that with what the smart glasses offer wearers, and you have a much stronger product. They don't have to do everything, just enough to justify wearing them. The better they look, the less justification you need for the tech features.

Teaming up with two companies that actually understand design shows that Google understands that. Google isn’t pretending to be a fashion house. They’re outsourcing style strategies to people who know what they're doing. Google seems to have learned that if smart glasses are going to work as a product, they need to blend in with other glasses, not proclaim to the world that someone is wearing them.

How much they cost will matter, as setting smart glasses prices to match high-end smartphones will slow adoption. But if Google leverages Warby Parker and Gentle Monster’s direct-to-consumer experience to keep prices reasonable, they might entice a lot more people, and possibly undercut their rivals. People are used to spending a few hundred dollars on prescription glasses a reasonably sized extra charge for AI will be just another perk, like polarized prescription sunglasses.

Success here might also ripple out to smaller, but fashionable eyewear brands. Your favorite boutique frame designer might eventually offer 'smart' as a category, like they do with transition lenses today. Google is making a bet that people will choose to wear technology if it looks like something they would choose to wear anyway, and a bet on people wanting to look good is about as safe a bet I can imagine.

You might also like...

• Why 2025 will be the year of the AI smart glasses
• Meta AI is here to take on ChatGPT and give your Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses a fresh AI upgrade
• I tried Google's Android XR prototype and they can't do much but Meta should still be terrified

The suit claims that efforts to get sensitive information about food aid recipients from states violates federal privacy laws.

(Image credit: Spencer Platt)

The project, known as EPIC City, has yet to break ground, but members of this Muslim community feel stereotyped.

(Image credit: Yfat Yossifor)

A federal appeals court said it would not intervene — at least for now — to thwart the Trump administration's plans for the near-total dismantlement of Voice of America.

(Image credit: Bloomberg)

Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim worked for the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C.

This weekend, they were slated to go to Jerusalem — Milgrim was to meet Lischinsky's family for the first time. According to Israeli ambassador Yechiel Leiter, Lischinsky had bought a ring and was planning to propose.

Instead, they were gunned down outside an event at the Capitol Jewish Museum on Wednesday night.

The killing comes aside a rise in antisemitic incidents. Daniel Shapiro, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, reacts to the news.

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(Image credit: Tasos Katopodis)

The iPhone and Vision Pro maker is playing catchup with Meta and Google.

The Chagos Islands are in the middle of the Indian Ocean and home to a strategic military base on Diego Garcia.

(Image credit: U.S. Navy)

The judge says the administration "unquestionably" violated his earlier order, which stated migrants cannot be deported to a country other than their own without having adequate notice and a chance to object.

(Image credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Move over Teamfight Tactics. Marvel Rivals' new limited-time mode is the perfect addition to the auto battler genre.

The U.S. Department of Justice and top state officials are investigating a proposed Muslim housing development in North Texas known as EPIC City for potential religious discrimination. The project's developers say they're years away from breaking ground.

Jean Paul Al Arab and his 6-month-old led police on a brief foot chase during a University at Buffalo ceremony. The school said the grad violated rules about who can participate in the commencement.