AI & Robotics

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…

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 search for a news topic will now see an article carousel at the top of the results page. When there are multiple stories…

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 — in places like Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Tel Aviv, and Zurich — will begin with about half a dozen AI researchers…

Some AI systems achieve goals in challenging environments by drawing on representations of the world informed by past experiences. They generalize these to novel situations, enabling them to complete tasks even in settings they haven’t encountered before. As it turns out, reinforcement learning — a training technique that employs rewards to drive software policies toward goals — is…