Over 111.8 million people in the U.S. talk to voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant every month, eMarketer estimates. Tens of millions of those people use assistants as data-finding tools, with the Global Web Index reporting that 25% of adults regularly perform voice searches on smartphones. But while voice assistants can answer questions about pop culture and world events like a…
RapidAI raises $25 million to analyze medical scans with AI algorithms
September 17, 2020
RapidAI (formerly iSchemaView), a startup developing a portfolio of stroke imaging and assessment products, today closed a $25 million round. The company says the funds will be put toward strategic growth initiatives around the world.
“Given our growth and profitability…
AI-powered weight training startup Tonal raises $110 million amid home workout boom
September 17, 2020
A little over a year after the close of its previous funding round, AI gym equipment startup Tonal today nabbed a $110 million tranche from new and existing investors. A spokesperson says the capital will enable Tonal to accelerate its marketing efforts, scale its supply…
Qualcomm details Cloud AI 100 chipset, announces developer kit
September 16, 2020
During its AI Day conference last April, Qualcomm unveiled the Cloud AI 100, a chipset purpose-built for machine learning inferencing and edge computing workloads. Details were scarce at press time, evidently owing to a lengthy production schedule. But today Qualcomm announced a release date for the Cloud AI 100 — the first half of 2021, after sampling this fall — and shared details about the…
Google Meet hardware promises AI features starting at $2,700
September 16, 2020
Google today unveiled Google Meet Series One, meeting room hardware that brings its AI-powered video calling features to businesses. The Series One compute system and sound bar both include the company’s Coral Accelerator Module with Google Edge tensor processing units…
Baidu debuts updated AI framework and voice platform, wireless earbuds
September 15, 2020
Yesterday evening, Baidu held a three-hour virtual keynote to kick off its Baidu World 2020 conference. In addition to voice-activated earbuds dubbed the Xiaodu Pods, the company showcased the newest generation of its natural language processing platform, DuerOS, and its…
AI researchers devise failure detection method for safety-critical machine learning
September 15, 2020
Researchers from MIT, Stanford University, and the University of Pennsylvania have devised a method for predicting failure rates of safety-critical machine learning systems and efficiently determining their rate of occurrence. Safety-critical machine learning systems make decisions for automated technology like self-driving cars, robotic surgery, pacemakers, and autonomous flight systems for…
How AI can reduce customer service costs by up to 30% (VB Live)
September 15, 2020
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Varada raises $12 million to automate data lake management with AI
September 15, 2020
Varada, a Tel Aviv startup offering “petabyte-scale” analytics for customers with data lakes, today nabbed $12 million as it prepares to launch its data virtualization solution in general availability. CEO Eran Vanounou said the funding will be used to support Varada’s…
At the Conference for Machine Intelligence in Medical Imaging 2020, which was held virtually this year, Nvidia researchers presented a paper describing an AI system that captures and transcribes clinical patients’ speech. The system identifies clinical words and maps the words in a standardized health database, tasks the researchers say could alleviate pressure on clinicians as they experience…
