Category: AI

Microsoft researchers have announced a new application that uses artificial intelligence to ape a person’s voice with just seconds of training. The model of the voice can then be used for text-to-speech applications.

The application called VALL-E can be used to synthesize high-quality personalized speech with only a three-second enrollment recording of a speaker as an acoustic prompt, the researchers wrote in a paper published online on arXiv, a free distribution service and an open-access archive for scholarly articles.

There are programs now that can cut and paste speech into an audio stream, and that speech is converted into a speaker’s voice from typed text. However, the program must be trained to emulate a person’s voice, which can take an hour or more.

“One of the standout things about this model is it does that in a matter of seconds. That’s very impressive,” Ross Rubin, the principal analyst at Reticle Research, a consumer technology advisory firm in New York City, told TechNewsWorld.

According to the researchers, VALL-E significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art text-to-speech (TTS) systems in both speech naturalness and speaker similarity.

Moreover, VALL-E can preserve a speaker’s emotions and acoustic environment. So if a speech sample were recorded over a phone, for example, the text using that voice would sound like it was being read through a phone.

Continue reading… “Microsoft’s New AI Can Simulate Anyone’s Voice From a 3-Second Sample”

A team of scientists has developed a new tool to map out the planets

By Cheyenne R. Ubiera

A TEAM of scientists has developed a new open-source tool, powered by artificial intelligence, to map out the planets. 

Researchers from Constructor University in Bremen, Germany, the University of Padua, and the University of Bologna from Italy came together for the project.

The goal was to change the way planetary landforms are mapped out as the current system is a multi-step process that is extremely time-consuming, such as the case of mapping surfaces on Mars.

The team found that using deep-learning techniques using artificial neural networks to analyze data sets could improve the production process.

It also allowed for the creation of an open-source, ready-to-use, and highly customizable tool for planetary mapping.

“We were interested in designing a simple, out-of-the-box tool that can be customized and used by many,” said Giacomo Nodjoumi, who was involved in the project.

Continue reading… “Artificial intelligence to map all planets and could change our plans for Moon and Mars”

Microsoft ChatGPT does more than just act as a search and learn information dynamic ⁠— it claims to be able to create what you want, in seconds.

By Brian McGleenon

Microsoft (MSFT) is going all in on ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) technology that could power a new search engine that could disrupt the dominance of Google (GOOG).

News site Semafor reported on Tuesday that Microsoft is investing $10bn (£8.2bn) in OpenAI, the artificial intelligence firm that launched the AI generative tool ChatGPT in November 2022.

This will value the San Francisco-based firm at $29bn, and industry analysts say that Google should pay close attention to the deal.

Microsoft spends billions of dollars every year to try to compete with Google’s search engine dominance, but with comparatively low user interaction on Bing they have failed for over a decade.

Microsoft has so far failed to replicate the algorithm that powers Google search but if they incorporate the AI generating power of ChatGPT into Bing, or a new search engine, this could be “a game changer”, an industry commentator has suggested.

Web3 for enterprise expert Filippo Chisari told Yahoo Finance UK: “I believe Microsoft are most likely looking to build a search engine that will give them a competitive advantage over others.

Continue reading… “Microsoft’s ChatGPT investment could create ‘game-changer’ AI search engine”

The CEO of DoNotPay, Joshua Browder, introduced the A.I lawyer to the world on his Twitter. In his tweet, he shared a screen recording of the futuristic technology at work. 

Technology is taking over the world at a lightning-fast speed. If you are impressed by self-driving cars, brace yourself for an AI-powered robot lawyer. The impressive world’s first-ever robot lawyer will represent a client in an actual court. The CEO of DoNotPay, Joshua Browder, introduced the A.I lawyer to the world on his Twitter. In his tweet, he shared a screen recording of the futuristic technology at work. Browder mentioned that this clip showed DoNotPay’s ChatGPT bot talking to the Comcast Chat. This was the first ever Comcast bill negotiated. It is meant to save DoNotPay’s engineers $120 per year on Internet bills. This service will be publicly available soon. It will work on online forms, chat, and email. Browder also mentioned that the A.I is not perfect yet, saying that it is a bit too polite. But it will be improved before launch. Check it out here:

Watching the bot going at it in the clip was both entertaining and impressive for social media users. They were laughing over the A.I trying to get the final ‘thank you’ in, totally understanding what Joshua Browder meant when he tweeted it was “a bit too polite”. A social media user wrote, “For a second I thought there’d be this infinite loop when the agent said ‘You are very welcome’ and GPT said ‘Thank you again’.”

Continue reading… “World’s First Robot Lawyer to Defend Human in Speeding Ticket Case in US”

Karen Levy, author of the book “Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance,” says AI tech is becoming common in trucking, to the dismay of truckers

Trucking can be dangerous job – long, often tedious hours behind the wheel, the unpredictability of the weather and of course, other drivers.

And yet, trucking is an essential part of supply chain. 72% of the nation’s freight gets from point A to point B in a truck, according to the American Trucking Associations.

Most of those holiday gifts you might be enjoying right now got to you on a truck. So truck drivers are an essential part of our economy.

The companies that hire and manage those drivers have started bringing a lot more technology into big rigs, including artificial intelligence and sometimes automation.

Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams spoke with Karen Levy, author of “Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance” about how these tools are being used in the industry. 

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Continue reading… “How AI is disrupting the trucking sector”

The company’s image synthesis technology can realize an AI human that is complete in non-verbal parts such as lip-syncing, movements, and facial expressions.

By Sahil Pawar

Seoul-based Deep Brain AI launched a paid service called Re;memory for those who would like to speak again with their deceased loved ones, even if it is just virtually. 

When a loved one dies, a family is often left with only digital memories such as photos and videos. However, these are only one-way modes of communication where one can see or hear their loved ones but cannot interact back with them.

DeepBrain AI takes this trove of information and a pre-interview to put together a private virtual meeting in their studio where one can have unfinished conversations with their loved ones.

Continue reading… “Seoul-based Deep Brain AI launches paid service to speak to the dead “

Examples of protein complexes modeled by AF2Complex residing between the inner and outer membranes of E. coli.

by Audra Davidson

Though it is a cornerstone of virtually every process that occurs in living organisms, the proper folding and transport of biological proteins is a notoriously difficult and time-consuming process to experimentally study.

In a new paper published in eLife, researchers in the School of Biological Sciences and the School of Computer Science have shown that AF2Complex may be able to lend a hand.

Building on the models of DeepMind’s AlphaFold 2, a machine learning tool able to predict the detailed three-dimensional structures of individual proteins, AF2Complex—short for AlphaFold 2 Complex—is a deep learning tool designed to predict the physical interactions of multiple proteins. With these predictions, AF2Complex is able to calculate which proteins are likely to interact with each other to form functional complexes in unprecedented detail.

“We essentially conduct computational experiments that try to figure out the atomic details of supercomplexes (large interacting groups of proteins) important to biological functions,” explained Jeffrey Skolnick, Regents’ Professor and Mary and Maisie Gibson Chair in the School of Biological Sciences, and one of the corresponding authors of the study. With AF2Complex, which was developed last year by the same research team, it’s “like using a computational microscope powered by deep learning and supercomputing.”

In their latest study, the researchers used this “computational microscope” to examine a complicated protein synthesis and transport pathway, hoping to clarify how proteins in the pathway interact to ultimately transport a newly synthesized protein from the interior to the outer membrane of the bacteria—and identify players that experiments might have missed. Insights into this pathway may identify new targets for antibiotic and therapeutic design while providing a foundation for using AF2Complex to computationally expedite this type of biology research as a whole.

Continue reading… “Deep learning tool’s ‘computational microscope’ predicts protein interactions, potential paths to new antibiotics”

Big construction projects are notorious for delays and running over budget. An Israeli company says it has a high tech solution to get everything back on track. 

At a hospital construction project in England, project manager Bruce Preston says he is juggling millions of pieces to help the nearly $200 million project take shape. “We have 2,300 rooms and spaces that we need to keep track of to know exactly what’s going on in everyone one of those spaces.”

Tracking progress is usually done by hand. But on this job, a 360-degree camera attached to a hard hat is capturing every inch of the site using artificial intelligence to compare the images to the building’s blueprints. Preston points to a computer screen to show how it works, saying, “it’ll tell you green if it’s all done and orange where there’s work still to do.” 

Tech firm Buildots says their AI system catches mistakes before they become a costly problem. “How many times does the industry lose money because it finds out way down the line that we missed something?” asks Buildots Co-founder Aviv Leibovici.

Construction is estimated to be a $10 trillion industry worldwide, and a report from McKinsey Global Institute, a management consulting company, says about $1.6 trillion are wasted every year by productivity problems.

Continue reading… “ISRAELI COMPANY USES AI TO FIND MISTAKES DURING BUILDING CONSTRUCTION”

By Kyle Wiggers

Signaling its interest in text-generating AI systems like ChatGPT, Quora this week launched a platform called Poe that lets people ask questions, get instant answers and have a back-and-forth dialogue with AI chatbots.

Short for “Platform for Open Exploration,” Poe — which is invite-only and currently only available on iOS — is “designed to be a place where people can easily interact with a number of different AI agents,” a Quora spokesperson told TechCrunch via text message.

“We have learned a lot about building consumer internet products over the last 12 years building and operating Quora. And we are specifically experienced in serving people who are looking for knowledge,” the spokesperson said. “We believe much of what we’ve learned can be applied to this new domain where people are interfacing with large language models.”

Poe, then, isn’t an attempt to build a ChatGPT-like AI model from scratch. ChatGPT — which has an aptitude for answering questions on topics ranging from poetry to coding — has been the subject of controversy for its ability to sometimes give answers that sound convincing but aren’t factually true. Earlier this month, Q&A coding site Stack Overflow temporarily banned users from sharing content generated by ChatGPT, saying the AI made it too easy for users to generate responses and flood the site with dubious answers.

Continue reading… “Quora launches Poe, a way to talk to AI chatbots like ChatGPT”

By Meghmala Chowdhury

Riffusion was developed by Seth Forsgren and Hayk Martiros as a side project. It stores audio in sonograms, which are two-dimensional images. Riffusion, an AI model that makes music from text prompts by constructing a visual representation of sound and converting it to audio for playback, was launched on Thursday by a couple of IT enthusiasts. It applies visual latent diffusion to sound processing in a novel manner using a fine-tuned version of the Stable Diffusion 1.5 image synthesis model. The X-axis in a sonogram depicts time (the left-to-right order in which the frequencies are played), and the Y-axis is the frequency of the sounds.

The color of each pixel in the image, meanwhile, shows the volume of the sound at that specific instant in time. A sonogram can be processed using stable diffusion because it is a sort of image. With the help of examples of sonograms that were connected to descriptions of the sounds or musical genres they represented, Forsgren and Martiros trained a unique Stable Diffusion model. With this knowledge, Riffusion can produce fresh music on demand based on text prompts that specify the genre of music or sound you like, such as “jazz,” “rock,” or even keystrokes on a keyboard. Riffusion creates the sonogram image, converts it to sound using Torchaudio, and then plays it back as audio.

Continue reading… “With the help of visual sonograms, Riffusion’s AI creates music from text“

Hive, the productivity platform provider, announced the public release of HiveMind that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to automatically create a project plan in a matter of seconds.

As Artificial Intelligence models are increasingly being integrated into content and note-taking platforms, Hive is pioneering the usage of the models’ capacity for continuous learning and logical decision-making based on in-depth data.

Modeled on six years of successful customer projects, HiveMind automatically sets out the steps to accomplish any goal, expediting project planning and execution. It has the ability to create project tasks based on simple suggestions, set next steps from received emails and reply based on the inbound email’s content.

“Today, superior performance in the marketplace comes from the depth of data you possess, and the ability to apply it quickly,” said John Furneaux, Hive co-founder and CEO. “HiveMind places the wealth of collective wisdom and team experience at our customers’ fingertips. It can play a vital role in training staff better, acquiring new skills and improving decision making.”

In addition to increasing efficiencies in project planning, HiveMind can speed up market research by providing facts, statistics, competitive intelligence and new ideas for brainstorms without having to reference internet searches. Hive customers reported experiencing immediate benefits when using HiveMind.

Continue reading… “Hive Launches HiveMind to Supercharge Project Planning with AI”

DoNotPay is also taking on parking tickets and corporations.

 

By Claire Goforth

A company is working towards making history and saving drivers money in the process. Whether it works is anyone’s guess, but DoNotPay claims it is building artificial intelligence designed to represent people in traffic court.

The company’s chief executive officer tweeted about their ambitious plan on Monday.

“We want to build a @donotpay bot that listens to the court hearing via your AirPods and whispers what to say with GPT-3 and LLMs,” Joshua Browder wrote. “We just want to experiment and will pay the ticket, even if you lose!” He asked anyone with an upcoming hearing on a speeding ticket to send him a direct message.

(Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, or GPT-3, is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to emulate text written by humans in response to a prompt; LLMs is an acronym for large language models, an algorithm that also uses deep learning to understand written language.)

Using artificial intelligence (AI) to whisper in people’s ears during a court hearing is a novel idea, but it could also run afoul of laws prohibiting practicing law without a license and other court rules. People wasted no time pointing these issues out.

“Sounds like practicing law without a license…?” wrote a Twitter user who describes themself as an attorney.

Continue reading… “‘World’s first robot lawyer’: DoNotPay wants to build an AI to help people fight traffic tickets”