We’ve seen a smart arm bracelet that can predict nightly seizures, but now a pair of researchers have created something even more promising: an AI system that can predict epileptic seizures with 99.6-percent accuracy. Even better, it can do so up to an hour before they occur. As IEEE Spectrum reports, that gives people enough time to prepare for the attack by taking medication. Around 50…
How power and transformative tech reshape our world
November 15, 2019
This week, VentureBeat launched a quarterly magazine. Like the AI Weekly, the special issue gives our editorial team a chance to reflect on important transformative technology influencing business, technology, and society.
The first issue focuses on the relationship between…
The latest Xbox One update adds Google Assistant voice controls
November 15, 2019
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…
IBM’s Lambada AI generates training data for text classifiers
November 14, 2019
What’s a data scientist to do if they lack sufficient data to train a machine learning model? One potential avenue is synthetic data generation, which researchers at IBM Research advocate in a newly published preprint paper. They used a pretrained machine learning model to artificially synthesize new labeled data for text classification tasks. They claim that their method, which they refer to…
StatMuse uses conversational AI and a database of sports trivia and statistics to answer your sports history questions on the major virtual assistant platforms, like Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant. The answers come through your speaker in the voices of sports bigshots…
Facebook research suggests pretrained AI models can be easily adapted to new languages
November 14, 2019
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…
Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI hits general availability
November 14, 2019
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…
Punchh, a startup leveraging machine learning and omnichannel integrations to create customer journeys, today revealed that it’s closed a $40 million series C round co-led by Adams Street Partners and Sapphire Ventures. AllianceBernstein also contributed to the tranche…
Google AI can tell you how close your voice is to Freddie Mercury's
November 14, 2019
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…
John Carmack takes a step back at Oculus to work on human-like AI
November 14, 2019
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…
