Add the Xbox One to the long list of things Google Assistant can control. This morning, Microsoft and Google jointly announced the Xbox Action, which enables console owners of any Assistant-enabled smart speaker, smart display, or mobile device (iOS or Android) to launch games, automatically queue up and load apps, and more with their voice.
It launches in beta starting today in English…
OnePlus SMS app taps AI to categorize messages and display content as visual cards
September 27, 2019
OnePlus is introducing a new AI-powered feature to its SMS app today, one that automatically groups messages together by category — much like Gmail does for email. Additionally, traditionally plain-text SMS messages will now be displayed as visualizations to make them more…
AI completes users’ rough sketches
September 27, 2019
Artistic composition tools imbued with AI are fast becoming old hat. Scientists at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, a collaboration between MIT and IBM to jointly pursue AI techniques over the next decade, recently detailed a tool that lets users upload any photograph and edit the…
Researchers from Google AI (formerly Google Research) and Toyota Technological Institute of Chicago have created ALBERT, an AI model that achieves state-of-the-art results that exceed human performance. ALBERT now claims first place on major NLP performance leaderboards for benchmarks like GLUE and SQuAD 2.0, and high RACE performance score.
On the Stanford Question Answering Dataset benchmark…
Google Assistant voice controls come to Xbox One
September 26, 2019
When it launched alongside, one of the Xbox One’s main selling points was voice control, delivered via an upgraded Kinect unit. Kinect was quickly phased out, though, and Alexa and Cortana voice controls eventually served as a replacement. Now, Google Assistant users…
NVIDIA has created an AI-powered greenscreen for streamers
September 26, 2019
NVIDIA has unveiled the RTX Broadcast Engine, powered by the Tensor Cores on RTX GPUs, that can do live filters, greenscreening and other tricks for Twitch streamers. The most interesting feature is RTX Greenscreen, which can remove the background from Twitch streamers and…
Alibaba unveils its own AI chip for cloud computing
September 26, 2019
Apparently, Huawei isn’t the only Chinese mega-corporation that was developing its own AI chip. Alibaba has unveiled an in-house-designed AI chip called the Hanguang 800 a month after Huawei launched the Ascend 910. The company, mostly known for its e-commerce business, said the chip could significantly cut down on the time needed to finish machine learning tasks. For example: Alibaba-owned…
McDonald's is using Alexa and Google Assistant to hire new workers
September 25, 2019
McDonald’s has launched a new voice experience for both Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, but it’s not for hungry customers looking to order a couple of burgers. It’s called Apply Thru, and the company says it’s the world’s first…
MegaBots calls it quits, puts battle robots on eBay
September 25, 2019
The era of giant battle robots appears to be over… although you might have a chance to bring it back. MegaBots has gone bankrupt after once again running out of money, and it’s auctioning its 16-foot-tall Eagle Prime robot on eBay as part of the shutdown.
Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robot is now a gymnast
September 24, 2019
The latest footage from Boston Dynamics is, unsurprisingly, both impressive and terrifying. Over the past few years we’ve seen Atlas navigate uneven terrain and even jump around a parkour course. This is on another level, though. The bipedal robot does a handstand, rolls around and even does a few jumping twists — all without losing its balance.
A new workflow helps Atlas pull off…
