AI & Robotics

Xbox One’s November update is here, bringing with it a bunch of new features and tools designed, as always, to improve your gaming experience. First up, and probably most notable, is the roll-out of Google Assistant voice controls. We’ve known this was coming for a while, and after a brief spell in beta, it’s now available to all Xbox users. If you’ve got a Google…

Multilingual masked language modeling involves training an AI model on text from several languages, and it’s a technique that’s been used to great effect. In March, a team introduced an architecture that can jointly learn sentence representations for 93 languages belonging to more than 30 different families. But most previous work in language modeling has investigated cross-lingual transfer…

Bohemian Rhapsody is one of the most well-known rock songs in the western world, and has been watched more than a billion times on YouTube alone. It’s likely that pretty much everyone has had at least one crack at aping singer Freddie Mercury’s unique vocal delivery. Now, Google, Queen and UMG have teamed up to build the FreddieMeter, an system to determine how close you can get to…

GM’s Cruise announced this past June that it would postpone plans for a driverless taxi service, which it previously said would debut in 2019. But the setback hasn’t discouraged its over 1,000 staffers from iterating toward a public launch. In fact, work on the underlying systems and infrastructure has accelerated in the intervening months, according to head of Cruise’s AI and machine…