The promise of conversational AI is that, unlike virtually any other form of technology, all you have to do is talk. Natural language is the most natural and democratic form of communication. After all, humans are born capable of learning how to speak, but some never learn to read or use a graphical user interface. That’s why AI researchers from Element AI, Stanford University, and CIFAR…
Zencity raises $13.5 million to help cities aggregate community feedback with AI and big data
August 5, 2020
Zencity, a platform that meshes AI with big data to give municipalities insights and aggregated feedback from local communities, has raised $13.5 million from a slew of notable backers, including lead investor TLV Partners, Microsoft’s VC arm M12, and Salesforce…
Just how comprehensively do natural language processing (NLP) pipelines support widely spoken languages? A recent study coauthored by researchers at Clarkson University and Iona College sought to investigate the degree to which NLP tools understand eight dialects: English…
Syntiant, a startup developing AI edge hardware for voice and sensor solutions, today closed a $35 million round. CEO Kurt Busch says the funds will be used to ramp up production throughout the remainder of 2020.
According to a report published by Meticulous Research, the speech and voice recognition hardware market is expected to reach $26.8 billion by 2025. That’s because devices like smart…
(Reuters) — Chinese artificial intelligence company Shanghai Zhizhen Intelligent Network Technology, also known as Xiao-i, has filed a lawsuit against Apple, alleging it has infringed on Xiao-i’s patents.
Xiao-i is calling for 10 billion yuan ($1.43 billion) in damages…
A new study from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) proposes a machine learning system that can examine X-rays to diagnose conditions including lung collapse and an enlarged heart. That’s not especially novel — computer vision in…
A new whitepaper coauthored by researchers at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence examines the ethics of AI in surgery, making the case that surgery and AI carry similar expectations but diverge with respect to ethical understanding. Surgeons are faced with moral and ethical dilemmas as a matter of course, the paper points out, whereas ethical frameworks in AI have arguably only…
Data-driven construction reporting company Buildots this week announced it raised $16 million, a combination of a $3 million seed round and a $13 million series A. Cofounder Roy Danon says it’ll be used to scale and improve the company’s products as Buildots expands to…
Candis, a startup developing a platform for automated accounting and payment processes, this week closed a €12 million ($13.97 million) financing round. A spokesperson for the company said it’ll be used to further development of Candis’ machine learning engine and fuel…
In partnership with researchers at MIT and the Georgia Institute of Technology, Intel scientists say they’ve developed an automated engine — Machine Inferred Code Similarity (MISIM) — that can determine when two pieces of code perform similar tasks, even when they use different structures and algorithms. MISIM ostensibly outperforms current state-of-the-art systems by up to 40 times, showing…
