Facebook is rolling out a new feature that will automatically describe the content of photos to blind and visually impaired users. Called automatic alternative text, the feature uses artificial intelligence to identify visual content and provide a description for people using screen readers. While scrolling through Facebook, blind and visually impaired users will hear the name of the person followed by the word "photo" when they scroll past an image post by a user. Automatic alt text will then describe a list of themes of the image, such as "three people, smiling, outdoors" or "two people, smiling, sunglasses, sky, tree, outdoor". According to Facebook, more than two million photos are shared on social media every day, yet as content becomes more visual, many blind and visually impaired users are left feeling excluded.

Facebook is using AI to help describe images posted by users. Facebook's iOS app is using object recognition technology to give blind people an audio breakdown of what's going on in photos posted on the social network. The new accessibility feature, rolling out today, could be a major improvement on existing screen readers, which largely focus on text. Until now, when blind users were checking their Facebook newsfeed and came across an image, they would only hear the word "photo" and the name of the person who shared it, which left the user still dependent on friends and family to interpret an image. To improve the experience for blind people, Facebook has used its vast trove of user images to train a deep neural network that drives a computer vision system built to recognise objects in images.

Australia's biggest pizza chain is now trying to take their operation to the next level by having any pizza ordered ready in three minutes and delivered in ten. The company is hoping to cut baking and delivery times by more than half in a trial scheme using high-speed cooking technology and military-grade delivery robots, the Sydney Morning Herald reports. Dominos chief executive Don Meij has called the innovative move Project 3-10 - pizza ready to take away in three minutes, and at your door in 10. Domino's Australia has been working with start-up company Marathon Robotics to create the world's first autonomous delivery vehicle - a robot that delivers pizza to your doorstep Meij knows the enormity of the task at hand and said making fresh pizza from scratch in three minutes will mean new ovens that blast heat in several directions. The latest technology has already been used to halve cooking times to four minutes, and Meij reckons that the goal of 10-minute deliveries in Australia could come to fruition within three years.

Browse through your Facebook News Feed and you'll see photos play a prominent part, meaning visually impaired users are missing out on a lot of updates from their friends. Now Facebook's engineers have harnessed the power of an artificial intelligence network to describe these pictures to blind or partially blind users. Facebook is calling the system "automatic alternative text" and it's based on a neural network primed with billions of parameters and millions of examples. Such neural networks – vast, complex databases designed to mimic the human brain as closely as possible – are playing an increasingly important role in modern computing. The AI software doesn't actually "see" the picture, but it can compare the objects in it with its vast internal database of similar photos and make an educated guess about what's being shown.

In an effort to improve the social networking experience for users with visual impairments, Facebook has introduced a new feature in its iOS app to help them'see' photos. With the help of AI, the app automatically generates a description of each photo a user comes across. When they're using a screen reader on iOS, they'll be able to hear a list of items in the pictures, such as "Image may contain three people, smiling, outdoors." Get your company on stage at TNW Europe. The descriptions, called Automatic Alternative Text, are generated as image alt text.

Superfast quantum computers could transform the world of finance, advocates say. In a world where how fast you can assimilate and analyse data then act on it, makes the difference between profit and loss, computing speed is key. This is why banks, insurance firms, and hedge funds invest millions on technology to give them an edge when trading, and to offset human error. Quantum computers, that owe more to nuclear quantum mechanics than electronics, promise to be exponentially more powerful than traditional computers, holding out the tantalising prospect of near-perfect trading strategies and highly accurate forecasting and risk assessments. "Financial services is a data-rich environment," says Kevin Hanley, director of design at the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS).

Similarity metrics are a core component of many information retrieval and machine learning systems. In this work we propose a method capable of learning a similarity metric from data equipped with a binary relation. By considering only the similarity constraints, and initially ignoring the features, we are able to learn target vectors for each instance using one of several appropriately designed loss functions. A regression model can then be constructed that maps novel feature vectors to the same target vector space, resulting in a feature extractor that computes vectors for which a predefined metric is a meaningful measure of similarity. We present results on both multiclass and multi-label classification datasets that demonstrate considerably faster convergence, as well as higher accuracy on the majority of the intrinsic evaluation tasks and all extrinsic evaluation tasks.

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The world's first social robot went on show at the South by Southwest (SXSW) function in Austin on Saturday. JIBO has been specifically designed to serve in the home, offering various useful functions which accommodate to a domestic setting, including home security, storytelling and entertainment. Commenting on the robot's qualities, software developer Jonathan Ross said that "JIBO is a social robot for the home he can recognise you by your face by your voice" adding that "he can understand what you are saying and it can talk back to you." He went on to explain that humans "are hard wired to be responsive to social interactions. So by having a piece of hardware that actually acts like a person and can acknowledge you and can have a social presence, we can tap into that."

Today, Facebook has apologised for a Safety Check error that led to people around the world being texted in the wake of the Sunday's bombing in Lahore, Japan's Hitomi X-ray satellite has lost communication with Earth, Microsoft has issued a formal explanation for the actions of its short-lived machine learning chatbot, Tay, and more. Get WIRED Awake sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning by 8am. Click here to sign up to the WIRED Awake newsletter. In the wake of a suicide bombing that left at least 69 people dead in the Pakistani city of Lahore on Sunday, Facebook has apologised for an error in its Safety Check disaster response system that saw people around the world being asked to check in as safe (The Guardian). Users in areas as geographically diverse as Australia, Egypt and Belgium received text messages asking if they'd been affected by the explosion, without any information on where the incident had occurred.