ELSA, an app whose name stands for "English Language Speech Assistant" (and not the popular Disney character!), Unlike other courses that focus mainly on teaching grammar and vocabulary, ELSA uses artificial intelligence and speech recognition technology to help language learners with their pronunciation. The $3.2 million pre-A round of funding was led by Monk's Hill Ventures, a firm that invests in post-seed stage startups in Southeast Asia. Monk's Hill founder and partner, Peng T. Ong, is joining ELSA's board. The San Francisco-based startup was originally founded in 2015 by Stanford grad Vu Van, ELSA CEO, and Dr. Xavier Anguera, whose background is in speech recognition and A.I. technologies. It debuted at SXSW in March 2016, where it later won the SXSWedu launch competition.

Apple may have gotten a head start on virtual assistants when Siri arrived on the iPhone 4s back in 2011. But rivals Amazon and Google have a big lead when it comes to smart assistants for your home, thanks to their Amazon Echo and Google Home devices. Not to be left out, Apple is entering the voice-activated home assistant arena with the HomePod, a Siri-enabled smart speaker that's available now for $349. Apple is hoping to make the HomePod stand out by positioning it as high-end audio gear with artificial intelligence, rather than a simple home assistant. The HomePod largely succeeds in that regard, but it's not without a few drawbacks.

In this article, I discuss six steps of User Experience (UX) research for chatbots and how these steps fit into the overall chatbot design process. If you are new to chatbots or want to learn more about them, please read my previous article on Medium. This is a scene from one of my favorite shows, Mad Men. In this scene, advertising executives are observing women who are trying on lipstick. Observing the women is giving the researchers valuable insight into the appeal of the lipstick.

Emma Watson jokes she needs a proofreader after a tattoo she debuted had a glaring grammatical error. Emma Watson joked she needed a proofreader after she debuted some new ink at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party that contained a glaring grammatical error. The "Harry Potter" star showed off a tattoo that read "Times Up" on her arm -- clearly missing the apostrophe for the organization Time's Up. Watson's tattoo was apparently a sign of support for the movement but social media users quickly pointed out the phrase was missing an apostrophe. At first, it was not immediately clear if Watson's tattoo was real or temporary.

Up to a dozen assignment expressions per TC definition sounds reasonable. In practice it depends on the layer types. There are basically two scaling limiters: compilation and especially autotuning time grows very fast as a function of a number of expressions; the amount of exploitable parallelism may decrease with the increasing number of inter-dependent operations. One of the goals of TC is to make it easy to define new layers and look at practically achieved performance. It should be as easy as moving the line between two TC defs and changing input/output tensor lists.

Music streaming giant Spotify is cracking down on users who employ apps to bypass restrictions and access a modified version of its premium services without paying. The Swedish company, which last week filed for a public listing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, has begun emailing listeners it believes to be using illegal software saying it has "detected abnormal activity" and warning that their accounts have been deactivated and will not be restored until the offending programmes have been uninstalled. "If we detect repeated use of unauthorised apps in violation of our terms, we reserve all rights including suspending or terminating your account," non-paying subscribers are cautioned. The free version of Spotify has 88m subscribers but inserts audio adverts every three tracks and ensures songs can only be played on shuffle mode, conditions the premium service removes at a cost of £9.99 a month. The apps in question do not provide the high-quality streaming a premium account would offer but do allow users to sidestep the adverts and restrictions that many find annoying.

Tumblr has been banned in Indonesia for providing people with access to pornographic content. The communications ministry said the block – which means nobody in the country can access the blogging platform – came after complaints about hundreds of accounts that provided pornography. The country has stepped up efforts to police the kind of content available online. It has been trying to stem a rise in hoax stories and hate speech, and anti-pornography laws pushed by Islamic parties in the country have led tens of thousands of adult websites to be taken offline. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph.

Kiwi startup Thematic uses machine learning technology to make sense of customer feedback forms. One of its customers is Sky TV. When you see Artificial Intelligence in the news, the topic is typically robots taking over our jobs or the dangers of super-intelligent computers. You don't see Elon Musk or Bill Gates opining on how AI is improving the way we do data analytics, for example. But Kiwi startup Thematic is doing exactly that. It's using machine learning technology to make sense of customer feedback forms.

Even if you don't care for the actual song, the music video for Hardcore Anal Hydrogen's track Jean-Pierre is a visual feast, taking advantage of several recent breakthroughs in artificial-intelligent image processing that's quickly gone from creating nightmares, to revolutionizing how modern visual effects are created. The behind-the-scenes processes that went into making this music video are just as fascinating as its visuals, so Hardcore Anal Hydrogen shared a lengthy breakdown of all the tools they used, including AI software like Deep Dream, Neural Style Transfer where artistic styles can be copied from other pieces, and Optical Flow, which creates seamless transitions between the processed frames.

Apple planted its HomePod smart speaker deep inside a walled garden: You must have an Apple-branded mobile device just to set it up, and you can pretty much use it only with Apple's own services if you want voice control for music. The company then adds insult to injury by leaving its older iPhones, iPads, and iPods outside that garden wall. Unless you're an ardent Apple fan who upgrades to new iOS devices with relative frequency, you won't even be able to set up a HomePod. If you own an iPhone, iPad, or iPod model that Apple essentially rendered obsolete last fall when it established the hardware requirements for iOS 11, you're out of luck. You can stream music from various devices to a HomePod using AirPlay, but not until you've set up the speaker using an iOS device running iOS 11 or higher.