A study published last Monday, heralded as an historic achievement by Microsoft, details a new speech recognition technology that's able to transcribe conversational speech as well as humans -- or at least, as best as professional human transcriptionists (which is better than most humans). The technology scored a word error rate (WER) of 5.9%, which was lower than the 6.3% WER reported just last month. "[I]t's the lowest ever recorded against the industry standard Switchboard speech recognition task," Microsoft reports. The rate is the same as (or even lower than) the human professional transcriptionists who transcribed the same conversation. "We've reached human parity," says Xuedong Huang, Microsoft's chief speech scientist.

GM Wants IBM's Watson AI To Sell You Stuff While You Drive GM's Infotainment Systems Are About to Get Watson's Artificial Intelligence Artificial Intelligence: Computer Says Yes! Stay up-to-date on the topics you care about. We'll send you an email alert whenever a news article matches your alert term. It's free, and you can add new alerts at any time.

Using Artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning technology, a team of researchers has predicted outcomes in judicial decisions at the European Court of Human Rights (EctHR) with 79 per cent accuracy. The AI method, developed by researchers from University College London (UCL), University of Sheffield and US-based University of Pennsylvania is the first to predict the outcomes of a major international court by automatically analysing case text using a machine learning algorithm. "We don't see AI replacing judges or lawyers but we think they will find it useful for rapidly identifying patterns in cases that lead to certain outcomes," said Nikolaos Aletras, who led the study at UCL's computer science department. "It could also be a valuable tool for highlighting which cases are most likely to be violations of the European Convention on Human Rights," Aletras added. In developing the method, the team found that judgements by the ECtHR are highly correlated to non-legal facts rather than directly legal arguments, suggesting that judges of the Court are'realists' rather than'formalists'.

Soon, police officers won't need to pull you over if you're caught texting while driving. The machine vision technology company Movidius has teamed up with the Chinese security camera maker Hikvision to create smart cameras that can catch behavior such as leaving a suspicious package in a public place, driving while distracted by mobile devices, and break ins. Advanced visual analytics will also allow cameras to identify car models and detect seat belts. The partnership will debut a new line of cameras with higher accuracy than traditional computing techniques in China this week. Both search giant Google and the world's leading drone manufacturer DJI have relied on Movidius to enhance spatial awareness in virtual reality and engineer the sense and avoid features inside drones respectively.

Researchers were able to predict the results of human rights cases with 79 percent accuracy by using artificial intelligence to analyze the factual sections of published human rights judgments. The study, published in PeerJ Computer Science, found that the outcomes were best predicted by analyzing the "circumstances" section of a case--which includes factual background--along with the topics covered by the case and the language used, according to a press release. Publications covering the findings include the Wall Street Journal Law Blog, Law.com The researchers examined 584 cases before the European Court of Human Rights with a machine-learning algorithm. They found that the court's judgments were highly correlated to facts rather than legal arguments.

How to get people interested in art? How to expose permanent-collection works that sit in storage? These are questions art museums constantly ponder. Recently, Tate Britain asked another one: How can artificial intelligence help? It put the question to anyone who wanted to compete for the 2016 IK Prize, which promotes the use of digital technology in the exploration of art at Tate Britain or on the Tate website.

Before you ever see a package dropped onto your doorstep from the sky, drones are going to force us to wrestle with some thorny questions about privacy. New rules from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration for the commercial use of unmanned aircraft lighter than 55 pounds have opened the door to what could be a massive industry. It's much bigger than delivery drones, which are not yet practical or legal in the U.S. First we'll see more drones doing things like surveying real estate and inspecting infrastructure such as roofs, high bridges, cell towers, power lines, and wind turbines. But our new drone reality has privacy advocates spooked: low-cost vehicles and sensors are likely to spur widespread adoption of a technology that can be used for persistent aerial surveillance, and bad actors could exploit gaps in existing privacy laws. It's also not clear which government entities, if any, are responsible for addressing drone-related privacy concerns.

Stripe, the startup that lets websites and mobile apps implement payment services through its API and a few lines of code, is today adding in another new feature as it continues to build out its platform with more tools. It is now going to help prevent fraud on Stripe transactions, through a new service called Radar. Radar is being rolled out globally as part of Stripe's primary payments service, meaning companies that use Stripe's API for payments do not need to pay extra or do anything in particular to turn it on. That may change down the line if and when Stripe -- which has now raised around $300 million and is valued at around $5 billion -- begins to add in more features and decides to monetise the service separately. "This is an area of active development and there is a long list of things we want to do," said John Collison, Stripe's co-founder and president, in an interview. "We haven't ruled out [launching it as a separate service] but want to see how people use it and what works and what doesn't first."

Slack's attempts at small talk are about to get a whole lot better - it's just been announced the cloud-based workplace messaging system will incorporate IBM Watson's smarts to its own bots, and those built by its ever-growing pool of outside developers. The coworking platform, which has just reached four million daily active users, was designed as a means for better collaboration and communication at work. However, it has opened up its software to outside businesses, leading to a directory of more than 400 Slack-related apps. These add-ons provide Slack tools like lists, or bots tailored for specific purposes. Slack's mission to'kill email': firm invests in 11 new startups in just seven months There is even an entire section dedicated to health, as WIRED writer Rowland Manthorpe discovered when he sought out a therapist from TalkLife Connect on the platform.

As if quantum computing wasn't mind-bending enough, one of D-Wave Systems' founders is now pursuing another futuristic idea: using artificial intelligence and high-tech exoskeleton suits to allow humans--and, at least according to one description of the technology, monkeys--to control and train an army of intelligent robots. Geordie Rose is a cofounder and chief technology officer of D-Wave, the Canadian company selling machines that it claims exploit quantum mechanical effects to solve certain problems hundreds of millions times faster than traditional computers. Now an IEEE Spectrum investigation has discovered that Rose is also CEO of Kindred Systems (aka Kindred AI), a stealthy startup he founded with others in 2014 dedicated to delivering advanced teleoperated and autonomous robots. The goal is making programming robots faster and less costly–and possibly revolutionize the world of work. Kindred has so far received well over US $10 million in funding, according to Data Collective, the venture capital firm that led one of the rounds.