Incorporating AI and machine learning technologies into everyday workflows isn’t as easy as the testimonials would have you believe. That’s the top-level finding from a survey of 750 business decision makers conducted by Algorithmia, which found that while machine learning maturity in the enterprise is generally increasing, the majority of companies (50%) spend between 8 and 90 days deploying…
Microsoft’s FastSpeech AI speeds up realistic voices generation
December 11, 2019
State-of-the-art text-to-speech models can produce snippets that sound nearly human-like on first listen. In point of fact, they underpin the neural voices available through Google Assistant, as well as the newscaster voice that recently came to Alexa and Amazon’s Polly…
Why explainable AI is indispensable to Zillow’s business
December 11, 2019
Zillow, an online marketplace that facilitates the buying, selling, renting, financing, and remodeling of homes, employs lots of AI technologies to do things like estimate home prices. But the output of AI systems like these can be opaque, creating a “black box” problem…
Life insurance isn’t as popular as it once was, despite the fact that a majority of people consider it to be important. Over 80% of consumers agreed in a recent survey that people need a life insurance policy, yet just 62% say they have one themselves. In fact, only 44% of U.S. households held individual life insurance as of 2010 — a 50-year low — compared with the 72% of Americans who owned…
Google taps AI to improve news results in Search
December 11, 2019
Google says it’s implementing AI and machine learning techniques to improve story suggestions in Google Search. In a blog post this morning, the tech giant announced that users in the U.S. in English (with more languages and locations to come in the next few months) who…
AI Index 2019 assesses global AI research, investment, and impact
December 11, 2019
Leaders in the AI community came together to release the 2019 AI Index report today, an annual attempt to examine the biggest trends shaping the AI industry, breakthrough research, and AI’s impact to society.
It also examine trends like AI hiring practices, private…
LeanDNA raises $15 million for AI factory inventory and delivery management software
December 11, 2019
Factories regularly face inventory shortages and missed deliveries, but they’re wounds of a self-inflicted nature. Just ask Richard Lebovitz, the founder of LeanDNA, who previously founded Factory Logic, which was acquired by SAP for an undisclosed amount. He’s the founder and CEO of LeanDNA, an Austin, Texas-based startup building a cloud-based actionable intelligence platform for factory…
ELLIS launches $220 million initiative to keep AI talent in Europe
December 11, 2019
The European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) today announced the selection of 17 cities in 10 European countries and Israel where it’s establishing project that it hope grows into AI research institutes keen on societal impact.
Each selected site…
Gosu.ai’s raises $2.8 million for AI-based coaching for gamers in League of Legends
December 10, 2019
Gosu.ai, the AI-driven video game coach, has raised $2.8 million for its AI-based video coach that helps players get better at playing League of Legends.
The news comes after the company last week unveiled its plans for a desktop voice assistant that proactively offers…
MIT and IBM’s ObjectNet shows that AI struggles at object detection in the real world
December 10, 2019
Object recognition models have improved by leaps and bounds over the past decade, but they’ve got a long way to go where accuracy is concerned. That’s the conclusion of a joint team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and IBM, which recently released a data set — ObjectNet — designed to illustrate the performance gap between machine learning algorithms and humans.
Unlike many…
