AI & RoboticsNews

Enterprises customize Clinc’s conversational AI to connect with their customers

Conversational AI platform company Clinc has experienced significant product pivots since it was founded by a group of University of Michigan computer scientists in 2015. It has also undergone leadership changes and investigations into its former CEO’s alleged pattern of sexual harassment. Now the company is carving out a niche within the financial services market, where its customizable…
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AI & RoboticsNews

Google’s Voice AI accelerator launches 12 startups

Google today announced the first cohort in its Google for Startups Accelerator: Voice AI, a 10-week program designed to pair startups with experts to help tackle product development, machine learning, and other technical challenges. The 12 companies selected will gain access to resources across Google’s programs and products, Google says, as well as to its people and technology. The pandemic…
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AI & RoboticsNews

AI isn’t yet ready to pass for human on video calls

Leading up to Superbowl Sunday, Amazon flooded social media with coquettish ads teasing “Alexa’s new body.” Its gameday commercial depicts one woman’s fantasy of the AI voice assistant embodied by actor Michael B. Jordan, who seductively caters to her every whim —…
AI & RoboticsNews

Salesforce Research wields AI to study medicine, economics, and speech

In 2015, Salesforce researchers working out of a basement under a Palo Alto West Elm furniture store developed the prototype of what would become Einstein, Salesforce’s AI platform that powers predictions across its products. As of November, Einstein is serving over 80 billion predictions per day for tens of thousands of businesses and millions of users. But while the technology remains core to…
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AI & RoboticsNews

Google fires Ethical AI lead Margaret Mitchell

Google fired Margaret “Meg” Mitchell, lead of the Ethical AI team, today. The move comes just hours after Google announced diversity policy changes and Google AI chief Jeff Dean sent an apology in the wake of the firing of former Google AI ethics lead Timnit Gebru in…
AI & RoboticsNews

AI Weekly: The challenges of creating open source AI training datasets

In January, AI research lab OpenAI released Dall-E, a machine learning system capable of creating images to fit any text caption. Given a prompt, Dall-E generates photos for a range of concepts, including cats, logos, and glasses. The results are impressive, but training Dall-E required building a large-scale dataset that OpenAI has so far opted not to make public. Work is ongoing on an open…
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