Microsoft has made a major breakthrough in speech recognition, creating a technology that recognizes the words in 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. "We've reached human parity," said Xuedong Huang, the company's chief speech scientist.

Yseop is a global enterprise software company with offices in New York, London, Paris, Dallas, and Lyon. Its enterprise customers are mainly in the global Fortune 1000, and on a daily basis, 50,000 end users employ Yseop. Yseop has led the international technology scene and has quickly been recognised by artificial intelligence and business intelligence leaders thanks to its innovative solutions that translate data analysis into written insight. Yseop has a unique, patented system, which is the only self-service software on the market that can reason and clearly express conclusions in multiple languages, in real-time. Yseop's software turns data into narrative in English, French, German, and Spanish, all at the speed of thousands of pages per second.

Well, it seems Apple's virtual assistant will be moving in that direction with the hiring of Apple's first ever director of A.I. research. So who is this new director? And what does Apple hope to accomplish? So who is this famed new director of A.I. research? So why did Apple select him as the director?

This blog post covers 50% of what I'm going to be talking about at this year's Museums Computer Group conference at the Wellcome Trust in London, held on the 19th of October. The follow-up post will go live on the 20th - you can sign up here to be notified. I'll examine each one - it'll be interesting to see what you think. Artificial intelligence, as a concept, has been around for a long time. From Hephaestus building the "fighting machines of the gods" to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, humans have thought about and created stories around our desire to replace the mighty gods with ourselves for several thousand years.

BENGALURU: Freshdesk, a cloud-based customer service software provider, has acquired Chatimity, a social chat platform based on artificial intelligence used for integrating chat within mobile apps. Chatimity is the company's sixth acquisition in the past 12 months. Founded by former Google employees, Tarkeshwar Thakur and Aravind Murthy in 2011, Chatimity platform is a Bengaluru-based startup. "Chat will play an important role in the future of communication for customer service but scaling that infrastructure continues to be a challenge," said Girish Mathrubootham, Founder and chief executive of Freshdesk. "With their focus on artificial intelligence and chatbots, the Chatimity team, now part of Freshdesk, has already started to create a scalable customer engagement chat platform that is future ready."

THE RISE OF ARTIFICIAL intelligence has inspired both fascination and fear of the world to come. Some tech prophets envision a "singularity," in which advances in AI trigger drastic technological growth, while others imagine that autonomous machines will someday turn on their creators and destroy us. But when you're engaged in the science of machine intelligence, you understand that this is a false set of choices shaped by a misleading phrase. The term "artificial intelligence" was coined in 1955 to convey the concept of general intelligence: the notion that all human cognition stems from one or more underlying algorithms, and that by programming computers to think in the same way, we could create autonomous systems modeled on the human brain. At the same time, other researchers were taking a different approach.

Researchers at Sony's computer science laboratory in Paris recently put out a set of pop songs composed by an AI system, which scans songs from a database to compose entirely new pieces in certain musical styles. The final results were, unexpectedly, fairly catchy tunes. Expanding that idea, Sony CSL now wants to use its system of machine-learning algorithms--which is named Flow Machines, and has been in development since 2012--to write and publish entire albums. Using an algorithm to write songs "makes all the elements of experimentation easier, which otherwise would have been too time-consuming or meticulous," says the lab's director and artificial intelligence expert François Pashet. Does a music-making AI violate the intimacy and emotion of the songwriting process?

Back row, left to right: Wayne Xiong, Geoffrey Zweig, Frank Seide. In December 2015, Microsoft Chief Scientist of Speech Xuedong Huang told Business Insider that "in the next four to five years, computers will be as good as humans" at understanding the words that come out of your mouth. Less than a year later, and Microsoft just set a record with the announcement of a system that can transcribe the contents of a phone call with "the same or fewer errors" than real actual human professionals trained in transcription. It's a huge milestone for speech recognition, even as gadgets like Amazon Echo and Apple's Airpods prove that voice is going to play a big role in the future of technology. And by Huang's standard, that's mission accomplished.

Position yourself for growth in 2017--join us live at the Entrepreneur 360 Conference in Long Beach, Calif. on Nov. 16. We're all growing familiar with the ways in which automation, big data, AI and machine learning are slowly replacing human jobs. While the general tone up until now has been somewhat negative toward this sort of change, there is a growing number of entrepreneurs who have looked at the landscape and been prompted to think differently about the issue. Will Lee, founder and CEO of Verlocal, an online marketplace for freelancers, says, "AI is going to take most of our jobs... but it won't be the end of the world." Lee, an Artificial Intelligence expert who studied at Stanford, created Verlocal to teach and assist people in monetizing their passions to prepare for this shift in employment.

ADM: Tell us a bit about Affectiva, and the company's SDKsPitre: We are an MIT Media Lab spin-off and consider ourselves the pioneers of Emotion AI. We coined the term and are now defining this category, which is essentially the next frontier of artificial intelligence.We live in a world full of hyper-connected devices, smart technology, advanced AI systems -- lots of IQ, but no EQ -- these technologies are not able to adapt to human emotion. I think that is a problem: it not only affects how we interact with technology, but also how humans communicate with each other as more and more of these interactions take place in a digital context. Consequently, we are on a mission to bring emotional intelligence to the digital world, thereby humanizing technology. Our software measures emotions through facial expressions, unobtrusively, using a standard webcam or device camera.