AI & Robotics

Google Assistant is officially available for all English-speaking Waze users in the United States. Waze announced the rollout last week after making the feature available in limited test runs earlier this year. The integration will give users the opportunity to ask Google Assistant to perform commands while on the road without requiring the driver to take their hands off the wheel into interact…

Can artificial intelligence evolve and become more sophisticated when put in a competitive world, similar to how life on Earth evolved through competition and natural selection? That’s a question the researchers at OpenAI have been trying to answer through its experiments, including its most recent one that pitted AI agents against each other in nearly 500 million rounds of hide-and-seek.

AI’s ability to predict threats to your health could soon include deadly heart conditions. Researchers at MIT’s CSAIL have developed a machine learning system, RiskCardio, that can estimate the risk of death due to cardiovascular issues that block or reduce blood flow. All it needs is a 15-minute ECG reading — from there, it gauges the danger based on the sets of consecutive…

Fast food is about to get even faster. McDonald announced today that it is buying the voice tech startup Apprente so it can automate its drive-thru menu. The Mountain View-based company specializes in building voice-based agents that can take orders in multiple languages and accents. The fast food giant has been testing Apprente’s technology in several locations and expects it will allow for…