Scientists at Oxford say they've invented an artificial intelligence system that can lip-read better than humans. The system, which has been trained on thousands of hours of BBC News programmes, has been developed in collaboration with Google's DeepMind AI division. "Watch, Attend and Spell", as the system has been called, can now watch silent speech and get about 50% of the words correct. That may not sound too impressive - but when the researchers supplied the same clips to professional lip-readers, they got only 12% of words right. Joon Son Chung, a doctoral student at Oxford University's Department of Engineering, explained to me just how challenging a task this is.

During Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last Month Google told the BBC that its Google Home device would launch in the UK sometime before June. However, it's looking likely the smart speaker will launch sooner rather than later, with reports indicating that Google has invited members of the press to attend a launch event on 28th March where they will get to "meet the newest members of our family".

Even as social and political scientists struggle to understand the impact of the internet and the social media platforms it has spawned on human societies around the world, a vast new communication revolution is about to burst on humanity within five to 10 years. This upcoming revolution will surpass in its impact on Homo sapiens all revolutions in human communications except perhaps the very first revolution, which was the evolution of verbal communication among our earliest ancestors. This barely acknowledged revolution, which is likely to change the entire course of human history in a few short decades, is the rise of Artificial Intelligence-enabled, fully fluent live audio translation of conversations between humans of all ethnicities. We are not just talking about the literal translation of English or French into Russian or Chinese, but the translation of the subtle meanings wrapped in cultural allegories that even fluent but non-native speakers of a language often miss. This means that armed with nothing more than an Artificial Intelligence, or AI, audio translation app on a mobile phone, an American tourist could enter a farmer's market in Turkey or Germany and, not only haggle over prices, but laugh and joke with a local fruit seller as if he was Turkish or German. Wait another decade and he will be able to do the same thing in China.

Nintendo is doubling production of the Nintendo Switch, as fans struggle to buy the consoles weeks after it was launched. The console originally launched at the beginning of this month. But even on that release date, it wasn't really possible to buy it – all the pre-orders had been snapped up in advance and people were left waiting for weeks. That trend has continued in the weeks since, with consoles occasionally arriving on retailers like Argos and the Nintendo official store but quickly being bought. Even big websites like Amazon don't have much stock, leaving people waiting until the end of the month.

Two people have died after mysterious ghost calls flooded the 911 emergency dispatch system in Dallas, Texas. Six-month-old Brandon Alex passed away on Saturday after falling out of his bed. His babysitter found him unconscious but still breathing and called 911 three times, but was repeated placed on hold and eventually hung up after failing to get through for more than 30 minutes, reports Dallas News. The youngster was taken to hospital by his mother, Bridget Alex, but didn't regain consciousness. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

Top professional poker players have been beaten by AI bots at no-limits hold' em. A complex variant of poker is the latest game to be mastered by artificial intelligence (AI). And it has been conquered not once, but twice, by two rival bots developed by separate research teams. Both algorithms plays a'no limits' two-player version of Texas Hold'Em. And each has in recent months hit a crucial AI milestone: they have beaten human professional players. The game first fell in December to DeepStack, developed by computer scientists at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, with collaborators from Charles University and the Czech Technical University in Prague.

For Silicon Valley, the headline was sweet nectar: Google DeepMind, the world's hottest artificial intelligence lab, embraces the blockchain, the endlessly fascinating idea at the heart of the bitcoin digital currency. The lab's re-imagining of the blockchain has very little to do with AI--or the blockchain, for that matter. If you want AI crossed with the blockchain, try wrapping your head around Numerai, the world's strangest hedge fund. To DeepMind's credit, its new project depends less on trendy ideas than an apparent desire to solve a real problem in the real world--one that involves the most private and personal information. That may not sound sexy, but it matters. As more and more medical data goes digital, the system would ensure that as a hospital shares patient records, they stay private, accurate, and tamper-free.

Automakers and suppliers gave widely differing timelines for the introduction of self-driving vehicles on Thursday, showing the uncertainties surrounding the technology as well as a split between cautious established players and bullish new entrants. Chipmaker Nvidia, facing direct competition with the world's top chipmaker after Intel's $15 billion deal to buy autonomous driving technology firm Mobileye this week, gave the most optimistic predictions. Chief Executive Jen-Hsun Huang forecast carmakers may speed up their plans given technological advances and that fully self-driving cars could be on the road by 2025. "Because of deep learning, because of AI computing, we've really supercharged our roadmap to autonomous vehicles," he said in a keynote speech to the Bosch Connected World conference in Berlin. Germany's Bosch, however, the world's biggest automotive supplier, gave a timetable as much as six years longer to get to the final stage before fully autonomous vehicles, and declined even to forecast when a totally self-driving car might take to the streets.

When applied to the S&P 500 constituents from 1992 to 2015, their stock selections generated annual returns in the double digits -- whereas the highest profits were made at times of financial turmoil. In March 2016, South Korean Lee Sedol, one of the best Go players in the world, lost to the AlphaGo computer program. It was a milestone in the history of artificial intelligence because up to that point the Asian board game had been considered too complex for computers. Behind successes such as this are programs that are modelled on biological systems and are constructed in a form similar to neural networks so that they can independently extract relationships from millions of data points. 'Artificial neural networks are primarily applied to problems, where solutions cannot be formulated with explicit rules,' explains Dr. Christopher Krauss of the Chair for Statistics and Econometrics at FAU. 'Image and speech recognition are typical fields of application, such as Apple's Siri.

It's clear that artificial intelligence (AI) is already one of the defining trends in fintech in 2017 and an increasingly popular buzz word in the industry. Businesses are gradually understanding the importance and benefits of machine-learning technology. Self-made billionaire Mark Cuban has boldly claimed that the "the world's first trillionaire will be an AI entrepreneur." He goes on to say that faster computer processers and large data sets have the ability to push AI into a wealth of industries and services. We have access to more data today than ever before, and with the increase of solution-finding apps that help consumers find patterns in their habits, businesses and start-ups, the bars are now high for the fintech industry.