AI & Robotics

At the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference this week in Vancouver, Canada, machine learning took center stage as 13,000 researchers explored things like neuroscience, how to interpret neural network outputs, or how AI can help solve big real-world problems. With more than 1,400 works accepted for publication, you have to choose how to prioritize your time. For Google AI…

If you’re going to throw megabucks at a show about AI, you’d better make sure you’ve got the right host for it — and most would agree that YouTube’s decision to get Robert Downey Jr, aka Iron Man, on board for their multimillion dollar The Age of AI endeavor was a pretty good shout. Announced last year, the eight-part show lands on YouTube on December 18th. Episodes…

Can mechanical abnormalities in a combustion engine, a fan, or a pneumatic press be inferred from the sound they produce alone? As it turns out, yes — and with great precision. Patterns embedded within the noise communicate valuable information, some of which foretell trouble. Inspired by this idea, software developer Gal Shaul and analog signal processing engineer Saar Yoskovitz cofounded…

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 service. But because most of the models share the same synthesis approaches in common — this is, they generate a…