In the aftermath of the Brexit vote to leave, one of the Tweets that caught my eye was from founder and CEO of analyst firm HfS Research Phil Fersht (@pfersht), which simply said, "at least the British can stop worrying about robots taking their jobs. Just get rid of the jobs altogether…" While that may not be amusing as it plays out against our globalized economy, it demonstrates how this topic has taken hold of so many of us. About a year ago, I was asked to sit on a panel at the annual Constellation Research Connected Enterprise called "The Robots Are Here! The Future of HR Tech," to debate whether we're entering a dystopian existence where humans are the bottleneck to productivity and innovation or a world of augmented humanity and digital humanization. It's a fact that major economic shifts have led to both marginalization, the downside, and great opportunity, clearly the upside.

Finnish software and services company Tieto has become the first company registered on a Nordic stock exchange to promote an AI to a senior management position. Tieto made it's AI, called Alicia T., a member of the management team for its new data-driven business unit. The new business unit aims to develop new business models and services for customers based on the ever-increasing availability of data - and for that purpose aritificial intelligence may prove very useful. The idea isn't only to show off the machine as a symbolic figurehead for the business division, but also that Alicia will help the leadership group to see data-based solutions that might otherwise elude the team. In recognition of the advisory function, Alicia is considered a full-member and even has voting rights.

PRNewswire has reported on RAVN Systems, leading experts in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Search and Knowledge Management solutions, and Fireman & Company, the leading management consulting firm for law firms and corporate legal departments, announcing a strategic partnership to deliver revolutionary Artificial Intelligence (AI) and enterprise search technology to the North American legal market. This strategic partnership will provide law firms and corporate legal departments with the most advanced AI search platform on the market. Peter Wallqvist, CEO at RAVN Systems commented, "We are excited to collaborate with Joshua Fireman and his team and align our collective focus of transforming legal services through innovation. RAVN's search technology will provide firms and corporate clients with a radically enhanced Universal Search and Knowledge Management tool that exploits Artificial Intelligence to efficiently capture, find, manage and collaborate on their organisations' information estate. The technology's advanced features include Expertise Location, Clause Extraction and a Knowledge Graph to navigate links between knowledge types across the enterprise."

New York, Oct 19 (IANS) In a major breakthrough in the field of speech recognition, Microsoft researchers have created a technology that accurately recognises the words in a conversation like humans do. The team from Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research reported a speech recognition system that makes the same or fewer errors than professional transcriptionists. The researchers reported a word error rate (WER) of 5.9 percent, down from the 6.3 percent WER the team reported just last month. The 5.9 percent error rate is about equal to that of people who were asked to transcribe the same conversation, and it's the lowest ever recorded against the industry standard "Switchboard" speech recognition task. This is an historic achievement," said Xuedong Huang, the company's chief speech scientist in a Microsoft blog post. The milestone means that, for the first time, a computer can recognise the words in a conversation as well as a person would. In doing so, the team has beat a goal they set less than a year ago - and greatly exceeded everyone else's expectations as well. "Even five years ago, I wouldn't have thought we could have achieved this.

Artificial intelligence, or AI as it's commonly known, is one of the most talked about, and exciting, areas of technological research happening today. Thanks to its use of computing algorithms and machine learning to solve complex problems, it's changing the way we live and work – be it through the form of humorous chat bots or wonderfully helpful smart assistants. Because the potential applications of AI are so varied, there's a plethora of startups working with the technology in strange and innovative ways. Snips just happens to be one of them, and its aim is to make your life simpler through the addition of a personal and private AI. Founded in 2013, Snips is an app that uses AI to organise the information stored within your phone. It remembers everything you tell it and makes the important things in your life easier to find.

Despite its potentially widespread applications, creating a speech recognition software capable of cutting through the nuances and variations in the spoken word has been a task fraught with patchy success, at best. The aim many companies have striven toward is to create a software that can recognize the words in a conversation as well as a human would -- a key requisite for a truly immersive artificial intelligence experience. In a major breakthrough in this endeavor, Microsoft announced Tuesday that it had created a technology that enabled speech recognition systems to transcribe a conversation with the same error rate as their human counterparts. "We've reached human parity," Xuedong Huang, Microsoft's chief speech scientist, said in a statement. "This is an historic achievement."

Microsoft has made a major breakthrough in speech recognition, creating a technology that understands a conversation as well as a person does. In a paper published Monday, a team of researchers and engineers in Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research reported a speech recognition system that makes the same or fewer errors than professional transcriptionists. The researchers reported a word error rate (WER) of 5.9 percent, down from the 6.3 percent WER the team reported just last month. The 5.9 percent error rate is about equal to that of people who were asked to transcribe the same conversation, and it's the lowest ever recorded against the industry standard Switchboard speech recognition task.

Biren Gandhi sees Cisco as the torchbearer of drone digital disruption. The flying machines have become mainstream tools for everything from delivery services to video usage. So how can the networking giant--normally known for Internet services, solutions, software and hardware--compete in the unmanned aviation realm? As the world narrows in on artificial intelligence, machines and virtual reality, Cisco too pushes to participate in innovative technology-- and Gandhi is at the helm of this innovation, along with his Cisco "co-conspirators" Nico Darrow and Angelo Fienga. Known as "Cisco's Drone Specialist" but more formally titled Distinguished Strategist, Gandhi speaks at conferences like InterDrone, XPONENTIAL, The Commercial UAV Show, etc. about how the company is moving forward with drone security, collaboration, and infrastructure.

This is the year artificial intelligence came into its own for mainstream businesses, at least as a marketing feature. On Sunday, Salesforce.com, which sells online software for sales and marketing, announced it would be adding A.I. to its products. Its system, called Einstein, promises to provide insights into what sales leads to follow and what products to make next. Salesforce chose this date to pre-empt Oracle, the world's largest business software company, which on Sunday evening began its annual customer event in San Francisco. Oracle calls its product Oracle A.I. Elsewhere, General Electric is pushing its A.I. business, called Predix.

We now have a deep learning model that is able to deliver valuable results, but how can we apply it easily to new data where and when we need to?