AI & Robotics

Accel Robotics, one of a growing number of AI startups that’s setting out to enable automated cashierless stores, has raised $30 million in a series A round of funding led by SoftBank, with participation from New Ground Ventures, Toyo Kanetsu Corporate Venture Investment Partnership, and RevTech Ventures. Founded out of San Diego in 2015, Accel Robotics is creating the AI and computer vision…

Amazon’s re:Invent 2019 conference kicked off with a bang — or rather, with product announcements made during a midnight keynote at The Venetian. The Seattle company’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) division unveiled Amazon Transcribe Medical, a new edition of its automatic speech recognition service that lets developers add medical speech-to-text capabilities to their apps, and it debuted…

If the price of vacuum robots has kept you away from the tech, we may be able to help. We’ve partnered with Wellbots to provide Engadget readers with an exclusive discount on iRobot’s high-end Roomba i7+ and i7 series vacuums. You can get the i7+ for $699, instead of $999, by using the code “ENGADGETBOT” at checkout, and the i7 for $499, down from $699, with…

What if you could manipulate the facial features of a historical figure, a politician, or a CEO realistically and convincingly using nothing but a webcam and an illustrated or photographic still image? A tool called MarioNETte that was recently developed by researchers at Seoul-based Hyperconnect accomplishes this, thanks in part to cutting-edge machine learning techniques. The researchers claim…