In August, Google AI researchers working with the ALS Therapy Development Institute shared details about Project Euphonia, a speech-to-text transcription service for people with speaking impairments. They showed that, using data sets of audio from both native and non-native English speakers with neurodegenerative diseases and techniques from Parrotron, an AI tool for people with impediments, they…
Huckleberry raises $18 million to match small businesses with insurance plans using AI
December 18, 2019
Small businesses are generally unprepared for unforeseen catastrophes, surveys show. A whopping three-fourths of U.S.-based outfits say they don’t have an insurance policy that meets their unique needs, while 40% admit they don’t have coverage of any kind. Of course, the…
A partnership with Didi Chuxing and new autonomous driving solutions weren’t the only things Nvidia announced at its GPU Technology Conference in Suzhou today. The chip firm took the opportunity to introduce TensorRT 7, the newest release of its platform for…
Today marked the kickoff of Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference in Suzhou, China, where CEO Jensen Huang debuted a host of products and services during his keynote address. In addition to Drive AGX Orin, the latest version of the Santa Clara-based company’s software-defined solution for self-driving vehicles and robots, Nvidia announced the open-sourcing of a suite of AI models for autonomous…
Why eBay believes in open-sourcing Krylov, its AI platform
December 17, 2019
It’s hard to find a tech company these days that isn’t attempting some sort of AI-related product, product, service, or initiative, but eBay went all-in by building its own AI platform, called Krylov. Sanjeev Katariya, eBay’s VP and chief architect of AI and platforms…
Hugging Face raises $15 million to build open source community for cutting-edge conversational AI
December 17, 2019
Hugging Face has announced the close of a $15 million series A funding round led by Lux Capital, with participation from Salesforce chief scientist Richard Socher and OpenAI CTO Greg Brockman, as well as Betaworks and A.Capital.
New-York based Hugging Face started as a…
Google is quickly putting its wildlife-spotting AI to good use. The internet giant has launched a Wildlife Insights tool that helps conservationists track wildlife by not only parsing their photos, but sharing them in a searchable public website. The AI automatically tosses out photos that are highly unlikely to include animals and tries to label the animals it does spot, dramatically speeding…
Google’s AI can identify wildlife from trap-camera footage with up to 98.6% accuracy
December 17, 2019
With respect to climate change, poaching, and encroachment on natural habitats, some animal populations have fared far worse than others. It’s estimated that the populations of more than 4,000 species shrunk by 60% between 1970 and 2014, and a recent United Nations global…
Anyscale, a company promising to let application developers more easily build so-called “distributed” applications that are behind most AI and machine learning efforts, has raised $20.6 million from investors in a first round of funding.
The company has some credibility…
Voximplant raises $10 million to automate call campaigns with AI
December 17, 2019
Can the cloud-based unified communications market, which is anticipated to reach $167.1 billion by 2025, be materially transformed by AI? Alexey Aylarov, Andrey Kovalenko, and Sergey Poroshin firmly believe so. They’re the founders of Voximplant, a startup developing products that imbue web and mobile apps with voice, text, and video chat. Voximplant provides the required infrastructure and…
