AI & Robotics

Google Cloud is making Contact Center AI generally available for use today. The cloud service is built with conversational AI engine Dialogflow to automate interactions with customers in call centers. Contact Center AI contains Virtual Agent to automatically respond to customer queries with voice or text or hand off the conversation to a person when a bot is unable to help a customer. Agent Assist…

Six years ago John Carmack left the company he founded, iD Software, to join Oculus VR as its Chief Technology Officer and push forward the future of virtual reality tech. Today the engineer behind many developments in 3D gaming has announced that a new “consulting CTO” role at Oculus “will only be consuming a modest slice of my time.” Instead, he’s turning his…

Graphcore, a U.K.-based company developing accelerators for AI workloads, this morning announced a milestone: Its Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs) have launched on Azure. It marks the first time a large-scale cloud vendor — Microsoft — has made publicly available Graphcore’s chips. IPUs on Azure are open for customer sign-up, Graphcore says, with access prioritized for those “focused…

Before the marketing departments of the world got ahold of the term “artificial intelligence,” it used to bring to mind some sort of robot. Boston Dynamics is one of the best-known company in the robotics space, largely thanks to its viral videos of its robots in action. But the company doesn’t talk to press much, so we jumped at the opportunity to sit down with Boston Dynamics CEO Marc…