"Connected to other part," my iPhone says to me as I stand somewhere in London's Soho, trying to decipher the letter on the top of a bus stop. "Hello?" says an American woman, reminding me of Scarlett Johansson's disembodied artificially intelligent character from the sci-fi film Her. "Hey, er … can you give me a hand by reading the letter on the bus stop?" "Sure … can you move your phone a bit more up, and to the left … Ya! I thank her, end the session, pull up Citymapper and navigate my way onto the 453 going to New Cross. I have a little bit of vision, but only enough to see motion and movement. I am using an app called Be My Eyes, an app that connects blind and visually impaired people to sighted volunteers via a remote video connection. Through the phone's camera, the blind person is able to show the sighted individual what they are looking at in the real world, allowing the volunteer to assist them with any of their vision-related problems. I began to lose my sight in the summer of 2013 to a rare genetic mitochondrial disease called Leber's hereditary optic neuropathy and was soon registered blind. I consequently found myself relying on an assortment of assistive technologies to do the simplest of tasks. Be My Eyes has just over 35,000 visually-impaired users registered for the app and over half a million volunteers. Whenever a visually impaired user requests assistance a sighted volunteer receives a notification and a video connection is established. Jose Ranola, a 55-year-old from the Philippines who works in construction and has retinitis pigmentosa, said: "I use it to help me identify medicine and read printed materials and also to describe places and objects." He adds: "All my experiences were good.

Already, as of 2010, a quarter of Americans (24%) had posted product reviews or comments online, and 78% of Internet users had gone online for product research. But those are ancient stats. More recently, BrightLocal found in 2016 that 91% of consumers regularly or occasionally read online reviews, with 47% taking sentiment of local-business reviews -- the tonality of a review's text -- into account in purchasing decisions. Breaking out the figures, 74% of consumers say that positive reviews make them trust a local business more and 60% say that negative reviews make them not want to use a business, according to BrightLocal. So reviews are important, and the feelings expressed are key.

New Delhi: In order to become a frontrunner in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), India should take the lead in establishing a legal infrastructure on its application, a study said here on Thursday. According to a recent Assocham-PwC joint study titled "Leveraging artificial intelligence and robotics for sustainable growth", an early public sector interest could trigger a spurt of activity in the AI field in India, instead of waiting for technology to reach a level where regulatory intervention becomes necessary. The study said a range of applications for AI techniques in large-scale public endeavours like "Make in India", "Skill India" and others could range from crop insurance schemes, tax fraud detection, detecting subsidy leakage and security strategy. "If investments are made in the two initiatives without due cognisance of how Industry 4.0 (the next industrial revolution driven by robotic automation) may evolve with respect to demand for workforce size and skill sets, there is a possibility of ending up with capital-intensive infrastructures and assets that fall short of being optimised for automated operations and a large workforce skilled in areas growing beyond the need for manual intervention only," it added. Information technology (IT), manufacturing, agriculture and forestry are certain sectors that are expected to experience shrinkage of employment demand as robotic systems and machine learning algorithms take up several tasks, the study said.

Today we can collect lots and lots of performance data. We build beautiful dashboards and even have fancy query languages to access and transform the data. Still performance data is a secret language only a couple of people understand. The more business becomes digital the more stakeholders are interested in this data including how it relates to business. Some of these people have never used a monitoring tool before.

It's come a long ways from 300 baud modems and original IBM PCs. Ransomware Stops Car Factory, Phones Spy on Activists and 198M Voters' Info Leak WannaCry continues to cause problems while some question ... Lawmakers: How Many Cyber Threat Centers Does the Government Need? Congress questions HHS' cyber threat center and other things they did ... White House Artifacts to Be Digitized Using Amazon Web Services The White House Historical Association is building a virtual tour app for ... GSA Seeks Blockchain Solutions The technology would help speed up proposal review. How Not to Win an AI Arms Race With China A lawmaker's proposal to curb Chinese investment in U.S. artificial-intelligence firms has more ... The world's youngest nation has canceled independence day for the second year in a row 5:33 AM ET

The tests overseen by METI saw two four-seater electric carts navigate roads fitted with the required routing technology near hotels and tourist facilities in Chatan on the west coast of Okinawa Island. Further trials will involve driverless microbuses traveling short distances in other regions, according to the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, which conducted Monday's tests with other firms. Self-driving vehicles "can be utilized in less-populated areas and tourist sites. We are using these experiments to assess their safety," said Shin Kato, an official from the institute. In a joint effort with such firms as Yamaha Motor Co. and Hitachi Ltd., the institute will conduct more tests to evaluate safety issues while investigating ways to reduce waiting times for people using such services, the institute said.

A Tokyo-based venture firm has started accepting orders for a laundry-folding robot to be priced at around ¥2 million. Seven Dreamers Laboratories Inc. said the refrigerator-size robot named "Laundroid" uses image analysis and artificial intelligence to recognizes the shape and type of clothing and then folds clothes with its built-in arms accordingly. The model is 2.2 meters high, 87 cm high and 63 cm in depth. Its surface includes tempered glass on the front and wooden panels on the sides, giving it the appearance of a piece of furniture. All users have to do is throw dry clothes into a opened drawer in the lowest part of the machine and the robot will do the rest.

AI-driven bots that interact with customers to find what they're looking for are increasingly delivering the goods for businesses and consumers alike. Thanks to their ability to respond instantly and around the clock, they can offer a competitive advantage, while simultaneously helping to lower staffing costs. Their interactivity means they can provide valuable information to potential or existing customers on demand, 24/7. By finding out what customers are looking for, businesses can adjust their more valuable support resources to prioritize more lucrative or complicated tasks. Gartner predicts that 85% of all customer interaction will need no human input by 2020 and chatbots are beginning to move beyond customer service and into marketing.

We've another of those pieces shouting that artificial intelligence is going to overturn the world and thus we need more taxes, more government and even, in this argument from Kai-Fu Lee, more colonialism. It's not going to work out like this of course, it's just not going to work out like this at all. For Lee's supposition is that AI is going to increase economic inequality. In fact, there's no way that they can work that way--it just isn't true that the owners of a new technology get all the money. Secondly, even if they did, real wages for the rest of us would be more than doubling every year. That's just not a problem, is it?

DALIAN, China--(BUSINESS WIRE)--New research from Accenture (NYSE:ACN) reveals that artificial intelligence (AI) could accelerate China's economic growth rate from 6.3 percent to 7.9 percent by 2035, by transforming the nature of work and opening new sources of value and growth. The report, titled "How Artificial Intelligence Can Drive China's Growth," explores new insights into AI and its impact on China's economy. Based on analysis and modeling by Accenture Research, in collaboration with Frontier Economics, there is dramatic impact on China's growth when AI is added as a completely new factor of production to the economic growth model. "China has already made great leaps in the development of AI and our research shows that it has the potential to be a powerful remedy for slowing growth," said Chuan Neo Chong, Accenture Greater China Chairwoman. "However, as with any catalyst, it is important to remember the challenges and the risk of unintended consequences. Stakeholders must prepare themselves intellectually, technologically, politically, ethically and socially for the promise of AI."