Touchscreens and swipe gestures pose a challenge for the roughly 630 million people in the world with a cognitive disability. Executing these tasks requires coordinated motor movements that some with disabilities aren’t reliably able to make. And it usually involves the recalling of some piece of information (like an address or a phone number), a step those with severely impaired memory can’t…
After taking several years between updates to its popular Major headphones, Marshall has announced a new pair just one year after it came out with the Major III. The company’s new Major III Voice Bluetooth headphones add voice control through Google Assistant and a…
Rune has raised $2 million in funding in its effort to use artificial intelligence to help find friends for mobile gamers.
Rune is a Y Combinator accelerator grad, and it was built by two doctoral students who dropped out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Sanjay…
What's on TV this week: 'Mr. Robot'
October 2, 2019
This weekend Mr. Robot returns for its fourth and final season on USA, but it’s not the only thing worth watching. The Walking Dead is back for season number ten, while Netflix presents a new series Raising Dion, as well as new seasons of Big Mouth and Peaky Blinders. Fleabag star Phoebe Waller-Bridge takes her turn on Saturday Night Live, while HBO airs a comedy special from Gary Gulman.
It’s safe to say that Tesla’s self-driving efforts haven’t gone smoothly. It took the better part of a year for Smart Summon to arrive, and there’s not much time left to fulfill goals of full self-driving (on city streets) before the end of 2019.
From Alibaba and Baidu to Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, China and the United States produced virtually every one of the top consumer AI companies in the world today. That leaves Europe trailing behind the U.S. and China, even though Europe still has the largest community…
IBM’s AI generates high-quality voices from 5 minutes of talking
September 30, 2019
Training powerful text to speech models requires sufficiently powerful hardware. A recent study published by OpenAI drives the point home — it found that since 2012, the amount of compute used in the largest runs grew by more than 300,000 times. In pursuit of less demanding models, researchers at IBM developed a new lightweight and modular method for speech synthesis. They say it’s able to…
Google researchers train AI to distinguish 9 Indian languages
September 30, 2019
The world speaks thousands of languages — roughly 6,500, to be exact — and systems from the likes of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon become better at recognizing them each day. The trouble is, not all of those languages have large corpora available, which can make…
Even the tech expert from 'Mr. Robot' can’t figure out this iPhone hack
September 30, 2019
If your dad were the technical advisor for the realistic hacks on Mr. Robot and he lovingly micromanaged your gadgets, you’d probably feel pretty badass about the security of your personal devices. So when one of Marc Rogers’ kids had their iPhone pickpocketed at…
Google’s highly scalable AI can generate convincingly humanlike speech
September 30, 2019
A generative adversarial network (GAN) is a versatile AI architecture type that’s exceptionally well-suited to synthesizing images, videos, and text from limited data. But it’s not much been applied to the audio production domain owing to a number of design challenges, which is why Google and Imperial College London researchers set out to create a GAN-based text-to-speech system capable of…
