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Semantic Machines hopes to best Google in the conversational AI game
I believe it was Sartre who wisely said hell is conversational AI. Despite the best intentions of engineers, today’s machine learning really is the savior and handicap of personal assistants. Berkeley-based startup Semantic Machines might suffer the same Achilles’ heel, but its team of 18 artificial intelligence PhDs thinks it can get farther than the current… Read More
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Facebook’s secretive hardware team signs rapid collaboration deal with 17 universities
Facebook’s shadowy Building 8 research team needs help from academia to invent futuristic hardware. But today’s pace of innovation doesn’t allow for the standard 9-12 month turnaround time it takes universities to strike one-off research partnerships with private companies. Enter SARA, aka Facebook’s “Sponsored Academic Research Agreement.” It’s a… Read More
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The White House’s report on AI and the economy warns of increasing inequality
The White House has issued a sequel to its October report on how the U.S. should approach artificial intelligence and its effects on various groups and institutions. Today’s report focuses on the potential economic effects of AI, and while it’s far from a dark outlook, it does warn that with improper handling, automation could drive further inequality in this already deeply… Read More
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Watch Mark Zuckerberg’s Morgan Freeman-voiced Jarvis AI in action
Mark Zuckerberg has posted a new video of his homemade Jarvis AI assistant in action. The Facebook CEO detailed his progress with this project in a longer text post on Monday, but Tuesday’s video gives a better idea of how it actually works for Zuckerberg, his wife Priscilla Chan and their child, Max. The platform looks like a fairly capable voice-powered command center for the home in… Read More
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Prisma launches a social feed to see if style can transfer into a platform
Prisma, the app that popularized style transfer to apply art-esque filters to photos and videos after launching this summer, is finally attempting to turn itself into more than just a cool tool. In a big update being released today for its iOS and Android apps it’s adding it’s own social stream with a focus on location-based sharing. Read More
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Microsoft’s plan to use machine learning to improve eyecare in India
Competition that results in better care for people suffering from visual impairments is the right kind of competition. Following a path similar to that of Google’s DeepMind, Microsoft India announced this morning that it’s launching a new research group, the Microsoft Intelligent Network for Eyecare, to bring data-driven eyecare services to India. Whereas DeepMind’s… Read More
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Zuckerberg’s Jarvis home AI is like an Alexa that learns your musical tastes
Mark Zuckerberg set himself an ambitious personal project for 2016 – build a connected artificial assistant to help him automate certain tasks at home, including things like controlling the lights, watching for visitors and operating appliances. Zuckerberg said on Facebook that his task actually turned to be “easier than [he] expected” in some ways – which should come as… Read More
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Artificial intelligence finds its way into business through sales
Artificial intelligence (AI) had a coming out party of sorts in 2016. Even though it has been in development for decades, this year, with the perfect combination of cheap computing power and access to increasing amounts of data, it seems AI’s time has come. Its first foray in business has been directed at making salespeople more efficient at every level of the sales workflow. If… Read More
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RASA NLU gives developers an open source solution for natural language processing
For better or worse, 2016 was another year of bots. I probably got more pitches for bot startups than anything else. And yet, bots are far from hitting their stride. If we hope to break beyond the rigid functionality of today’s tools, a prerequisite is going to be giving bot developers a bit more open source love. RASA NLU, a new open source API from… Read More
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Omnity search engine finds documents relevant to yours — regardless of language
With the amount of published research, patents, white papers and other written knowledge out there, it’s hard to be even reasonably sure you’re aware of the goings-on around a certain topic or field. Omnity is a search engine made to make it easier by extracting the gist of documents you give it and finding related ones from a library of millions — and now supports over a… Read More
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Crunch Network
Why we are still light years away from full artificial intelligence
The future is here… or is it? With so many articles proliferating the media space on how humans are at the cusp of full AI, it’s no wonder that we believe that the future — which is full of robots and drones and self-driven vehicles, as well as diminishing human control over these machines — is right on our doorstep. But are we really approaching the singularity as fast… Read More
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Researchers use machine learning to pull interest signals from readers’ brain waves
How will people sift and navigate information intelligently in the future, when there’s even more data being pushed at them? Information overload is a problem we struggle with now, so the need for better ways to filter and triage digital content is only going to step up as the MBs keep piling up. Read More
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Airbus’ Vahana VTOL project asks what vehicle makes for the best self-flying taxi
Airbus debuted Project Vahana earlier this year, an ambitious project designed with the specific intent of creating small, efficient vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) craft for use in dense urban environments with a target launch date of 2021. Now, the company is proceeding with its plans, and detailing its Trade Study, the first part of which asks what a functional VTOL that meets… Read More
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Conversica lands $34 million Series B to build intelligent sales assistants
After a potential customer has first contact with a business, sales gets in gear, often responding with an introductory email. Conversica has developed an artificial intelligence system designed to automate these early contact emails, and pass it off to a human salesperson when the time is right. Today, it announced a $34 million investment. The round was led by Providence Strategic Growth. Read More
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Microsoft officially outs another AI chatbot, called Zo
What are chatbots for? I asked Zo, Microsoft’s officially launched chatbot, currently available on the Kik Messenger app, what she does — and she was remarkably coy in answering this question, initially complaining that our conversation felt like a job interview and then qualifying this hugely with the intimate confession that “our convos give my life purpose tbh”. Read More
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Uber’s self-driving cars start picking up passengers in San Francisco
The autonomous cars won’t operate completely driverless, for the time being – as in Pittsburgh, where Uber launched self-driving Ford Focus vehicles this fall, each SUV will have a safety driver and Uber test engineer onboard to handle manual driving when needed and monitor progress with the tests. But the cars will still be picking up ordinary passengers – any customers… Read More
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How to DIY a Westworld host at home
Building a Westworld host is kind of like putting together a piece of IKEA furniture while on hallucinogenics — directions are pretty much useless. Instead, here are some *guidelines* for DIY-ing your own Westworld host at home. Read More
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Microsoft to open Cortana virtual assistant to third-party devices and apps
Microsoft is making Cortana available to third-party device makers, and opening up the platform to third-party developers, too, so that they can integrate their own services in Cortana-powered devices. The news comes after an earlier revelation that Cortana would be coming to some IoT devices via next year’s Creators Update for Windows 10. Cortana’s new Skills Kit and Devices SDK… Read More
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Udacity adds 14 hiring partners as AI, VR and self-driving talent wars heat up
Udacity is positioned perfectly to benefit from the rush on talent in a number of growing areas of interest among tech companies and startups. The online education platform has added 14 new hiring partners across its Artificial Intelligence Engineer, Self-Driving Car Engineer and Virtual Reality Developer Nanodegree programs, as well as in its Predictive Analytics Nanodegree, including… Read More
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