SoundHound has raised a big $100M round to take on Alexa and Google Assistant

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As SoundHound looks to leverage its ten-plus years of experience and data to create a voice recognition tool that companies can bake into any platform, it’s raising another big $100 million round of funding to try to make its Houndify platform a third neutral option compared to Alexa and Google Assistant.

While Amazon works to get developers to adopt Alexa, SoundHound has been collecting data since it started as an early mobile app for the iPhone and Android devices. That’s given it more than a decade of data to work with as it tries to build a robust audio recognition engine and tie it into a system with dozens of different queries and options that it can tie to those sounds. The result was always a better SoundHound app, but it’s increasingly started to try to open up that technology to developers and show it’s more powerful (and accurate) than the rest of the voice assistants on the market — and get them to use it in their services.

Continue reading… “SoundHound has raised a big $100M round to take on Alexa and Google Assistant”

Google exec issues warning over future of AI

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Google co-founder Sergey Brin sent the message in a letter to Alphabet shareholders (Source: Getty)

One of Google’s top execs and president of Alphabet Sergey Brin has raised concerns about the AI revolution in a letter to Alphabet’s shareholders.

In his annual letter sent to shareholders of Google umbrella organisation Alphabet yesterday, Brin said that “new questions and responsibilities” had been raised about the potential of AI.

Continue reading… “Google exec issues warning over future of AI”

1 out of 5 US homes with wifi now have a smart speaker like the Amazon Echo

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Smart speakers have been a hot ticket item in recent years. Products by Amazon, Google and Apple, which allow consumers to play music, order food and get news just by talking to the device, have already experienced a surprisingly strong adoption in the US market.

This chart by Statista which is based on comScore data, shows that 20% of homeowners with wifi have at least one active smart speaker. That percentage will be inching up as well, if the past few months are any indication of the device’s steadily increasing adoption rate.

Via Business Insider 

Google researchers have developed an augmented reality microscope for detecting cancer

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Augmented reality might not be able to cure cancer (yet), but when combined with a machine learning algorithm, it can help doctors diagnose the disease.

Researchers at Google have developed an augmented reality microscope (ARM) that takes real-time data from a neural network trained to detect cancerous cells and displays it in the field of view of the pathologist viewing the images.

Continue reading… “Google researchers have developed an augmented reality microscope for detecting cancer”

Tech giants like Google and Alibaba are working to save endangered species

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Black markets have been using popular social apps and platforms to ply their illicit trade.

Google, eBay and other technology leaders are aiming to protect the world’s animals. Why? In a widely unregulated social-media world, many tech platforms have become a haven for the wildlife black market, a $20 billion industry.

Continue reading… “Tech giants like Google and Alibaba are working to save endangered species”

Tim Berners-Lee: we must regulate tech firms to prevent ‘weaponised’ web

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Tim Berners-Lee: ‘What was once a rich selection of blogs and websites has been compressed under the powerful weight of a few dominant platforms.’

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, has called for large technology firms to be regulated to prevent the web from being “weaponised at scale”.

The web can be weaponised – and we can’t count on big tech to stop it

Continue reading… “Tim Berners-Lee: we must regulate tech firms to prevent ‘weaponised’ web”

Platform power is crushing the web, warns Berners-Lee

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On the 29th birthday of the world wide web, its inventor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has sounded a fresh warning about threats to the web as a force for good, adding his voice to growing concerns about big tech’s impact on competition and society.

The web’s creator argues that the “powerful weight of a few dominant” tech platforms is having a deleterious impact by concentrating power in the hands of gatekeepers that gain “control over which ideas and opinions are seen and shared”.

Continue reading… “Platform power is crushing the web, warns Berners-Lee”

An AI accurately guessed voters race and voting record by counting cars on Google street view

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A robust, timely census is vital to democracy. Censuses sketch the changing face of our nation by charting both political and demographic shifts, including changes in wealth and neighborhood transitions. Most crucially, they influence how resources and political power are doled out: Cities use census data to set budgets and the Constitution mandates a national census to apportion congressional seats. But taking a census is both expensive and slow—the annual American Community Survey (ACS) represents data collected over a five-year period, creating one hell of a lag. A team of Stanford AI researchers believe we can use computer vision to speed up the process, a radical approach to a centuries-old practice.

Continue reading… “An AI accurately guessed voters race and voting record by counting cars on Google street view”

Google’s artificial intelligence built an AI that outperforms any made by humans

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Google’s AutoML project, designed to make AI build other AIs, has now developed a computer vision system that vastly outperforms state-of-the-art-models. The project could improve how autonomous vehicles and next-generation AI robots “see.”

Continue reading… “Google’s artificial intelligence built an AI that outperforms any made by humans”

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