If Amazon has its way, companies will soon tap Amazon Web Services (AWS) en masse to create voices tailored to their brands. The Seattle tech giant today launched Brand Voices, a fully managed service within Amazon Polly, Amazon’s cloud service that converts text into lifelike speech, that pairs customers with Amazon engineers to build AI-generated voices representing certain personas.
As Amazon…
Kaskada raises $8 million to facilitate AI feature engineering
February 4, 2020
Feature engineering — the process of using domain knowledge to extract features from raw data — is essential to tuning machine learning performance. It’s also typically arduous and involves rewriting features before they’re deployed, which is why in 2018 Ben Chambers…
Labelbox raises $25 million to grow its data-labeling platform for AI model training
February 4, 2020
Labelbox today announced the close of a $25 million series B funding round to grow its platform that labels data needed to train AI systems.
The funding round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Google’s AI-focused Gradient Ventures fund, Kleiner…
BenchSci raises $22 million for AI-powered drug discovery tools
February 4, 2020
Assessing the health of pharmaceutical R&D by unearthing hidden patterns in procurement data is a task made simpler by AI. At least, that’s the pitch given by David Qixiang Chen, Elvis Wianda, Liran Belenzon, and Tom Leung, who cofounded BenchSci in 2015. The Toronto, Canada-based biotech company taps AI to run experiments that accelerate drug discovery with the aim of increasing the speed and…
Apple details AI to help voice assistants recognize hotwords and multilingual speakers
February 3, 2020
Speech recognition is an acute area of interest for Apple, whose cross-platform Siri virtual assistant is used by over 500 million customers worldwide. This past week, the tech giant published a series of preprint research papers investigating techniques to improve voice…
AI-formulated medicine to be tested on humans for the first time
February 3, 2020
A drug designed entirely by artificial intelligence is about to enter clinical human trials for the first time. The drug, which is intended to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder, was discovered using AI systems from Oxford-based biotech company Exscientia. While it would…
Improving a device’s signal might be as simple as increasing the number of antennas within the said device, according to new research. A team at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) claim they’ve managed to bolster connectivity with what they call RFocus, a software-controlled external “smart surface” that uses an array of more than 3,000 wireless…
Sequence-to-sequence AI models, which were introduced by Google in 2014, aim to map fixed-length input (usually text) with a fixed-length output where the length of the input and output might differ. They’re used in text-generating tasks including summarization…
Last year, we got to see coherent, multi-paragraph text generated by OpenAI’s GPT-2 model. This week, a new paper from Google AI showed that a chatbot based on a gigantic neural network and huge amounts of data can hold coherent conversations, maintaining context over…
AI Weekly: AI joins the fight against diseases like coronavirus
January 31, 2020
In light of the rising death toll from the coronavirus, which this week spread to the U.S. and was declared a health emergency by the World Health Organization (WHO), it’s worth looking at AI’s role in curbing the spread of other diseases. Algorithms have not only informed superior intervention and prevention strategies, they’ve helped optimize the allocation of resources to fight the spread…
