A North-East fintech company is using artificial intelligence (AI) and speech recognition software to allow users to discuss their financial accounts with their phone. Darlington-based MyFirmsApp creates custom app platforms for accountants and has recently secured the right to use next generation AI platform, Amazon Lex. The software will allow the company to build apps with'human-like intelligence' that can see, hear, speak, understand and interact with the world around them. The new tech will allow accountants and their customers to have a conversational experience when using their app. CEO Joel Oliver believes that being able to create chat bots using Amazon Lex will help accountants carry out simple tasks and allow them to become more productive.

Microsoft's new Artificial Intelligence and Research Group announced that its Microsoft Cognitive Services includes now 25 tools forming the backbone for Cortana digital assistant and the Skype Translator. According to Hot Hardware, two of the new APIs created by the company's new Artificial Intelligence and Research Group are the Content Moderator and Bing Speech. Bing Speech is capable of both converting text to speech and translating speech into text. Microsoft's speech recognition technology uses language and acoustic models to in order to distinguish between similar-sounding words and to customize its services for a specific language. In order to narrow the focus of the recognition engine, a Custom Speech Service lets developers supply their own data.

An Introduction to'Machine Learning' -- I came across this article and thought it was worth a share, the original article was surrounded in adverts and difficult to read, so I make no apologies for plagiarizing it! I have kept the original link at the bottom of the article, enjoy . . . The concept that a computer program can learn and adapt to new data without human interference. Machine learning is a field of artificial intelligence that keeps a computer's built-in algorithms current regardless of changes in the worldwide economy. If you would like to try your first Machine Learning Experiment -- take a look at this easy walkthrough https://t.co/JHwAShjRgj

Ever have a hard time understanding a road sign in another country? Computer vision startup Mapillary thinks it has a solution. You know how Google hopes to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful?" Swedish startup Mapillary wants to do the same thing with the world's road signs. As it turns out, from warnings about polar bears to alerts concerning "invisible cows," there are some pretty darn unusual roadside messages you'll come across as you travel the globe.

Ahmed Elgoni felt like he'd struck gold. The 24-year-old video game developer from South Africa had in November secured a ticket to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco -- a cultural mecca for anyone who wants to make video games. A sponsor would cover the cost of his round-trip flight from Cape Town. Just two weeks ago, he received his visa to enter the U.S. Then President Trump signed an executive order banning refugees and travelers from seven countries. Elgoni grew up in South Africa, but he was born in Sudan -- one of the countries listed as part of the travel ban. As a dual citizen, he now doesn't know if he can attend GDC, which runs from Feb. 27 to March 3. "No one's sure of what's happening," he said.

The machine-learned smarts that enable Microsoft's Skype Translator, Bing and Cortana to accomplish tasks such as translating conversations, compiling knowledge and understanding the intent of spoken words are increasingly finding their way into third-party applications that people use every day. These advances in the democratization of artificial intelligence are coming in part from Microsoft Cognitive Services, a collection of 25 tools that allow developers to add features such as emotion and sentiment detection, vision and speech recognition, and language understanding to their applications with zero expertise in machine learning. "Cognitive Services is about taking all of the machine learning and AI smarts that we have in this company and exposing them to developers through easy-to-use APIs, so that they don't have to invent the technology themselves," said Mike Seltzer, a principal researcher in the Speech and Dialog Research Group at Microsoft's research lab in Redmond, Washington. "In most cases, it takes a ton of time, a ton of data, a ton of expertise, and a ton of compute to build a state-of-the-art machine-learned model," he explained. Take one of the tools that deals with speech recognition, for example.

The concept that a computer program can learn and adapt to new data without human interference. Machine learning is a field of artificial intelligence that keeps a computer's built-in algorithms current regardless of changes in the worldwide economy. Various sectors of the economy are dealing with huge amounts of data available in different formats from disparate sources. The enormous amount of data, known as Big Data, is becoming easily available and accessible due to the progressive use of technology. Companies and governments realize the huge insights that can be gained from tapping into big data but lack the resources and time required to comb through its wealth of information.

This is an image of the Zaamenkomst panel: one of the best remaining exemplars of rock art from the San people of Southern Africa. As soon as you see it, you are inevitably herded, like the eland in the scene, through a series of thoughts. Does it have a meaning? Why are the eland running? What do the white lines coming from the mouths of the humans and animals signify? What event is unfolding in this scene?

An Introduction to'Machine Learning' -- I came across this article and thought it was worth a share, the original article was surrounded in adverts and difficult to read, so I make no apologies for plagiarizing it! I have kept the original link at the bottom of the article, enjoy . . . The concept that a computer program can learn and adapt to new data without human interference. Machine learning is a field of artificial intelligence that keeps a computer's built-in algorithms current regardless of changes in the worldwide economy. Various sectors of the economy are dealing with huge amounts of data available in different formats from disparate sources.

In order to compare and analyse open data across cities, standard representations or ontologies have to be created. This paper defines a shelter ontology that includes concepts of shelters, slums, households and homelessness. The design of the ontology is based upon the data requirements of ISO 37120. ISO 37120 defines 100 indicators to measure and compare city performance. There are three shelter-themed indicators defined, namely 15.1 Percentage of city population living in slums, 15.2 Number of homeless per 100 000 population, and 15.3 Percentage of households that exist without registered legal titles. This ontology enables both the representation of the ISO 37120 Shelter theme indicators' definitions, and a city's indicator values and supporting data. This enables the analysis of city indicators by intelligent agents.