AppTek, a leader of automatic speech recognition (ASR), machine learning and artificial intelligence, today announces the newest mobile application addition to its Talk2Me product suite: Talk2Me Mobile. The speech-to-speech translation app, now available for free on iOS and Android markets, is used for instantaneous bi-directional Spanish/English and Arabic/English translations. In addition to live speech-to-speech translation, the app supports the ability to record, transcribe and archive content for future offline use. Whether for customer service calls, interviews, conference calls, web conferences or peer-to-peer conversations, Talk2Me converts audio and video assets into searchable, actionable data to help organizations draw comprehensive insights and transform the way people and businesses operate. "Our advances in speech technology, machine learning and artificial intelligence are lowering the barrier for people and businesses to effectively navigate, retrieve and transact across multiple languages," stated AppTek's CEO, Adam Sutherland.

This article is part of an MIT SMR initiative exploring how technology is reshaping the practice of management. The paradox of automation: Earlier this year, Facebook exorcised those pesky human editors who were introducing political bias into its Trending news list and left the job to algorithms. Now, reports Caitlin Dewey in The Washington Post, the Trending news isn't biased, but some of it is fake. Turns out the algorithms can't tell a real news story from a hoax. Facebook says it can improve its algorithms, but errors of judgment aren't the only pitfall in transferring human tasks to machines.

The people who study artificial intelligence for a living say the technology should not make us fear for our lives. This is the gist of the first in a series of reports from a Stanford University team about the effect AI will have over the next century. "The frightening, futurist portrayals of Artificial Intelligence that dominate films and novels, and shape the popular imagination," the report reads, "are fictional." The report focused on how AI might affect the typical American city in 2030. The most sweeping changes laid out were on the transportation front, as self-driving cars are expected to become more commonplace.

Amazon.com Inc.'s own video store will no longer have the starring role on the company's Fire TV streaming devices. Software updates coming this year will give movies and TV shows from Netflix, HBO and other competitors equal prominence on the devices' home screens. The approach is similar to one Apple Inc. took when it refreshed its Apple TV device last year. Amazon's Fire TV has offered solid performance at reasonable prices, but its home screen has been cluttered with Amazon products -- whether to rent, to buy or offered at no extra charge through Amazon's 99-a-year Prime program. That's made it tough to find video from competing providers without turning to a voice-search feature that, until recently, excluded Netflix.

"The Silicon Review 50 Smartest Companies of the Year 2016 program identifies the companies transforming the way we work via cutting-edge technology. These companies are leading the seismic shifts that today's company leaders need to be thinking about before it's too late. We selected WorkCompass because of its unique application of artificial intelligence to improve performance appraisal, its revenue growth, customer reviews and domain influence," said Manish Pandey, Editor-in-Chief of The Silicon Review Magazine. "We are honored to be recognized by The Silicon Review Magazine as the one of the 50 Smartest Companies of the Year 2016," said Denis Coleman, Founder and CEO at WorkCompass. "In 2012, I left my job to found WorkCompass. I wanted to transform performance appraisal into an ongoing process about coaching and mentoring staff to achieve their full potential. I'm incredibly proud of what we have achieved so far at WorkCompass".

The UK government's plans to check whether people are old enough to watch pornography might include creating a database of everyone's viewing habits. The Government has recently been looking to introduce new checks to ensure that adult content can only be viewed by those over 18. To do that, it will introduce age verification schemes, and sites that don't implement them will be rendered inaccessible from within the UK. But the mechanism involved in doing so could create an entire database of the UK's porn viewing habits, according to the Open Rights Group. Doing so will create a vulnerable set of information that could expose anyone, according to the group. The robot developed by Seed Solutions sings and dances to the music during the Japan Robot Week 2016 at Tokyo Big Sight.

Figuring out how much a business trip will cost can be a hassle. Employees are often put in the position of figuring out how to get somewhere, and once they get there, they don't have an incentive to keep their spending to a minimum. A new startup called TravelBank is aiming to help by providing a predictive budget for a trip, based on when someone is traveling and where they're going. After that, it helps them document their spending and file an expense report that shows how much money they've spent against their budget. More than just helping employees capture expenses, TravelBank is focused on helping to change their behavior so they spend less money. Companies that adopt TravelBank for expense reporting can elect to give employees who spend less than the predicted budget half of what they saved.

Amazon's filing of a patent on voice-control "pocket drone" technology demonstrates that the company is seeking to develop the work it has done in voice recognition applications and virtual assistant further by bringing it into the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) market. Voice commands for drones have been in development for years. Even in 2010, hobbyists were able to adapt drones to take simple directional commands to navigate pre-mapped areas. Now, basic systems are sold for under 100 online and in stores. And it is possible to modify Amazon Echo through a ground station to deliver commands to commercially sold quadcopters, as demonstrated by a proof-of-concept initiative on hackster.io in February using the Alexa virtual assistant.

This post is authored by Sachin Chouksey, Principal Software Engineering Manager, and Darwin Schweitzer, Senior Program Manager, at Microsoft. Building analytics solutions can consume a lot of time. Customers who wish to build intelligent solutions on Microsoft's advanced analytics platform today, for instance, need to navigate through a multitude of options, thanks to the broad array of services available as part of the Cortana Intelligence Suite. This buffet of options could present a learning curve for newer customers who may not be sure where to start, or what the optimal architecture might be, or how to glue different services together. To address the above challenge, we offer Cortana Intelligence Solutions, a set of pre-built solutions that are based on commonly encountered design patterns and which customers can quickly deploy and test.

Researchers at Microsoft have published details of new speech recognition technology that they say transcribes conversational speech as well as a human does. "We've reached human parity," says Microsoft's chief speech scientist Xuedong Huang in a statement. "This is an historic achievement." The system's word error rate is reported to be 5.9 percent, which Microsoft says is "about equal" to professional transcriptionists asked to work on speech taken from the same Switchboard corpus of conversations. It uses neural language models that group similar words together, allowing for efficient generalization. Microsoft plans to use the technology in Cortana, its personal voice assistant for Windows and the Xbox One, as well as speech-to-text transcription software.