AI & Robotics

Google AI today shared that it’s created a model for detecting an endangered species of orca whales in the Salish Sea, a waterway between the United States and Canada. Underwater microphones situated at a dozen points in the Salish Sea that includes the state of Washington and Vancouver Bay are used to alert officials when a Southern Resident killer whale is detected. Less than 100 of these…

Conversational AI is a catch-all term for natural language models for artificial intelligence that can interpret human words, speak to people, or carry out tasks or computation with natural language. But talk to any of the best-known AI assistants today — Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant — and they’re not exactly conversational. They can tell you jokes, answer factual questions, and even…

Ever wish you could automatically dub foreign film dialogue into another tongue? Amazon’s on the case. In a paper published this week on the preprint server Arxiv.org, researchers from the tech giant detailed a novel “speech-to-speech” pipeline that taps AI to align translated speech with original speech and fine-tune speech duration before adding background noise and reverberation. They say…

There’s plenty in the way of competition with respect to the audio transcription market, which is estimated to be worth $31.82 billion by 2025. But AISense — the startup behind speech-to-text service Otter — managed to carve out a niche for itself in the four years since its founding. Its funding reflects this — the company today confirmed to VentureBeat that it’s raised $10 million in a…