One question weget a lot is “what do you do, day to day?” Fair question, as this news briefing is simply a by-product of my team’s work. One part is: “commercialising cutting edge NLP research”, mostly focused on our own SaaS product, the Knowledge Network. Try it out here. Also, here’s a sneak peek of a recent project I’ve been running.
Three themes this week: China, creative writing, and customer care.
Investment in AI continues at a huge scale, and no less in China. As recent news highlighted (see The China Internet Report), China’s investment in AI continues to grow…
Health has come out as the number one sector globally for AI investment in a recent survey by CB Insights (followed by Financial Services and Retail).
We’re particularly excited about NHS advice being available on Alexa: it addresses a real problem of “digital exclusion”. A way to access government advice through hands-free voice computers is a wonderful development.
We’re in an age where it’s becoming easier every day to have conversations with technology, using our own language. And we want to do it: experiment after experiment also reveals that we tend to trust computers more than people — one more…
Learn about machine learning and neural networks in 30 seconds
If you are a business leader with the question “what is machine learning anyway?”, here’s a snippet from a half day business briefing we offer for leaders wanting to have a plain-English understanding of machine learning and neural networks.
Business problem: predict house sale price given its size.
Steps:
- Plot house price and size on a chart
- Draw a “best fit” line, and tweak it until it’s as close as possible to all the points
- That tweaking is machine learning!
- The calculation used for the line is the predictor! …
Air St Capital released a technical research overview of the state of AI for 2019. One of the NLP highlights we like is about GLUE, a benchmark created just last year to foster competition against researchers into diversity and quality of NLP algorithms.
However, progress towards human-level targets was so rapid that a new benchmark has already been created! SuperGLUE sets even more ambitious goals for the rest of 2019 and beyond.
How is this relevant for businesses? …
The march into the age of voice computing continues with a stack of real world stories of how Voice is impacting our day to day lives.
Included are three more CogX 2019 conversational AI sessions covering general business, consumer, entertainment, and marketing.
Speaking of marketing we also found a new case study on a solar panel company that has had great success with conversational marketing.
Podcast of the week is Professor Tom Mitchell from Carnegie-Mellon talking about the future of AI and conversational machine learning.
We’ve got more on this below, along with a great case study, inspiring research, and…
CogX 2019 was an epic adventure getting to meet so many leaders in the conversational AI community.
To you all, a huge thank you from me and the rest of the CognitionX team for your contributions!
With over 500 speakers across 200+ sessions and 10 stages and more than 17,000 registered attendees, it was networking heaven: particularly because the festival spread over 63 acres (25 ha) there were cafes and bars galore to meet up and chat in, rain or shine.
For those who couldn’t make it, never fear! Everything was recorded and over the next few weeks we’ll be…
As part of the larger CogX London 2019 Festival of AI and emerging tech, we had over 38 confirmed senior leader NLP practitioners from a wide range of backgrounds talking about the wide-ranging impact of AI on speech and text.
Look at this small sample of some of the speakers:
Check out selected bios of the leaders from above:
- Aakrit Vaish, CEO & Co-founder from Haptik (Indian conversational AI)
- Akemi Tsunagawa, CEO & Founder from Bespoke (Asian travel & hospitality)
- Catherine Breslin, Solutions Architect from CobaltSpeech (Ex-Amazon speech researcher)
- Laura Harrison, Snr Product Manager, BBC Research & Development from BBC…
In the news we have:
- 💡An update on the world’s biggest conversational AI platform no one knows about
- 📚How AI is helping students learn
- 🤓Hear yourself speak another language you don’t actually know
- ✍Create English poems with AI
- 💬Voice cloning: can you tell the difference?
Smarter Conversations
Xiaoice gains further commercial traction
Microsoft said on Thursday that its flagship AI platform Xiaoice (“shi-OW-ice”) has gained commercial traction in sectors like voice, painting and writing, with its chatbot attracting 120 million active users on a monthly basis and 50 billion chats worldwide.
Read more
Google IO, Facebook F8 & Microsoft Build: we sifted through it all. We saw the vision piece for Microsoft’s Cortana, but will get excited when it launches. Google’s “camera first” experience is the highlight for us.
New technology research from us on AI speech and text analysis technology!
The really exciting news, though, is from here at CognitionX! We’re very proud to announce the latest version of our report “AI and its impact on speech and text”.
This volume is a deep dive into AI for text and speech: scanning 80+ technologies, we distilled this down to 35 to evaluate.
…
Technology is only useful when we can use it. For millions of people around the world, computers today can be incomprehensible and stressful, putting them out of reach, and leaving them “digitally excluded”. The promise of conversational AI is making technology more accessible: saying what you want in your own words, with all the vagueness and contradictions that come with it.
Looking ahead, is voice computing the ultimate interface we want? For some today, even spoken words are an obstacle, and research this week from the University of California shows promising progress towards reading words you’re trying to say directly…
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