The San Francisco-based company debuted a digital brand studio this week that lets clients customize their own digital person by choosing from a set of realistic CGI avatars and uploading conversational trees with natural language processing systems from Google or IBM. Founded by Academy Award-winning visual effects engineer Mark Sagar and entrepreneur Greg Cross at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, Soul Machines is part of a small but growing scene of startups exploring how life-like human avatars can be put to use in business contexts, whether as virtual influencers, extensions of celebrity personalities or for interpersonal interaction practice. "The objective here is not to replace people, it's to really focus on things that are very, very difficult for organizations to deliver, like infinitely scalable customer interactions or infinitely scalable customer support at a completely different level of economics," Cross said. The company has raised $47.5 million to date from investors including Hong Kong-based Horizon Ventures and Salesforce's venture capital arm. It has already worked with a select set of clients on customer support avatars, including a digital customer service rep for Air New Zealand named Sophie, a car salesperson named Sarah for Mercedes-Benz and a virtual financial advisor named Jamie for Australia and New Zealand Banking Group.

Every major tech company is dedicating resources to breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. Personal assistants like Siri and Alexa have made AI a part of our daily lives. Meanwhile, revolutionary breakthroughs like self-driving cars may not be the norm, but are certainly within reach. As the big guys scramble to infuse their products with artificial intelligence, other companies are hard at work developing their own intelligent technology and services. Here are 30 artificial intelligence companies, according to Forbes, you should know.

Developer communities are one of the best ways to get updated with all the newest technologies and tools in the tech space. With the rise in demand for machine learning and data science among the organisations, enthusiasts are either choosing their ML journey from scratch or switching their roles. Joining the machine learning communities, one can have several benefits, including sharing tools and support, answering queries, mentorship, code reviews and much more. In this article, we list down 7 best machine learning developers communities an ML enthusiast must join. About: With a total of 1,070,309 members, the Reddit Machine Learning Community is one of the largest communities that is meant for industry professionals and is focused on practical aspects of building artificial intelligence systems.

India's national Artificial Intelligence website has been launched today. The website was launched by Union Minister for Electronics and IT, Law and Justice and Communications Ravi Shankar Prasad and has been jointly developed by the Ministry of Electronics and IT and IT Industry. National e-Governance Division of Ministry of Electronics and IT and NASSCOM from the IT industry will jointly run this portal. A National Program for the youth, "Responsible AI for Youth" was also launched today. The aim of this program is to give the young students of the country a platform and empower them with appropriate new age tech mind-set, relevant AI skill-sets and access to required AI tool-sets to make them digitally ready for the future.

Google has responded to European Commissions white paper on artificial intelligence (AI) on how to regulate and accelerate the adoption of responsible and ethical AI. In February this year, the European Commission launched a consultation on Artificial Intelligence and asked citizens and stakeholders to provide their feedback by June 14. Google said on Friday that it supports the Commission's plans to help businesses develop the AI skills they need to thrive in the new digital economy. "Next month, we'll contribute to those efforts by extending our machine learning check-up tool to 11 European countries to help small businesses implement AI and grow their businesses," the tech giant said in a statement. Google Cloud already works closely with scores of businesses across Europe to help them innovate using AI.

Each month, Future Tense Fiction--a series of short stories from Future Tense and Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination about how technology and science will change our lives--publishes a story on a theme. The evening before you sign and take delivery of your son, you call Charlie and tell him you think you've made a huge mistake. "Let me come on over and split a few with you," he says. "I haven't seen the fire pit yet." Charlie--a short, compact man with green eyes and a shaved head whom you met when he delivered groceries the first few weeks you were housebound--brings over a six-pack. You walk out into the complex's community garden together. It used to be a parking lot, and the path through the mushroom gardens under the solar panels is still faded gray asphalt and leftover white lines. You're careful with your right foot; you still haven't gotten used to the way your prosthetic moves. You and Sienna from 4B have a fire pit and stone circle dug out in your combined lots, and she's grown a privacy wall of rosebushes that surround the relaxing space. Charlie sits on one of the cedar benches as you fiddle with twigs to make a fire. This beats the awkwardness of sitting down to talk right away. Your parents didn't raise you to be direct about feelings. Neither did the army, nor the warehouse you drove a forklift in. Charlie will, if you let him. Making a fire gives you a moment to sort out all your feelings. Or maybe it just gives you an excuse to delay talking about them.

The author of Robots Are People Too responds to Tobias Buckell's "Scar Tissue." "Scar Tissue" is an emotionally resonant tale about healing through robot rearing--but it was only half of the story about Rob's creator, Advent Robotics. What we read was the part Cory could see: Rob as a growing child, nurtured by Cory. But in the story, Tobias Buckell offers us a little hint about everything happening at Advent: "Every time [Advent's robots] get on that charger, they're not just powering up their onboard battery--they're taking in their experiences and uploading data to our servers to have it examined." That's the part that worries me, as artificial intelligence applications may be able to leverage the data to manipulate Cory and other people--just as technology, PR, and marketing companies try to do in our lives today.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said India is facing a "long battle" ahead in its efforts to defeat the pandemic as the country set a new record for daily coronavirus infections. United States President Donald Trump has said the US is "terminating" its relationship with the World Health Organization (WHO), saying the agency has not made coronavirus reforms. The WHO and 37 countries launched the COVID-19 Technology Access Pool, an alliance aimed at making coronavirus vaccines, tests, treatments and other technologies available to all countries. More than 5.9 million cases of coronavirus have been confirmed around the world, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. Some 365,000 people have died, while more than 2.4 million have recovered.

Microsoft is to replace dozens of contract journalists on its MSN website and use automated systems to select news stories, US and UK media report. The curating of stories from news organisations and selection of headlines and pictures for the MSN site is currently done by journalists. Artificial intelligence will perform these news production tasks, sources told the Seattle Times. Microsoft said it was part of an evaluation of its business. The US tech giant said in a statement: "Like all companies, we evaluate our business on a regular basis. This can result in increased investment in some places and, from time to time, redeployment in others. These decisions are not the result of the current pandemic."

A plaintiff in the lawsuit is the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, a nonprofit that advocates for the rights of survivors of sexual violence and exploitation. The group's legal director, Mallory Littlejohn, said Clearview's technology makes survivors fear being tracked by abusers.