VentureBeat sat down with Phil Libin, managing director at venture capital firm General Catalyst, to get his take on the state of the bot ecosystem. It was just a year ago that the former Evernote CEO joined General Catalyst as a partner. Since then, chatbots and conversational interfaces have roared into the technology mainstream, with hundreds of companies attracting more than 4 billion in funding to make thousands and thousands of bots and conversational UIs for platforms like Messenger, Slack, Alexa, and Allo, to name just a few. In April, Libin made his first investment in Begin, a stealth bot startup. And a few months later, Libin announced investments in Growbot and Butter.ai,

The market opportunity for artificial intelligence has been expanding rapidly, with analyst firm IDC predicting that the worldwide content analytics, discovery and cognitive systems software market will grow to US 9.2 billion in 2019. Automating IT and business processes for enterprises is cited by some as having a potential 5 – 7 trillion economic impact by 2025. IPsoft are one of the businesses on the front line of this new disruptive wave of technology and their solutions aim to transform business performance through the employment of'digital labor', most famously its cognitive agent Amelia. Amelia is capable of analyzing natural language, she understands context, applies logic, learns and resolves problems. Her declarative memory consists of both episodic memory and semantic memory, exactly the way human memory is organized.

Google-owned artificial intelligence company DeepMind presented a deep neural network that generates amazingly human-like speech. Called WaveNet, this AI makes a significant advancement over existing speech synthesizers. What's more, it can write pretty good classical music. DeepMind is a British company, previously known for creating machine-learning AI software that beat the world champion of the notoriously-intricate game Go. Machine learning allows computer systems to teach themselves and make predictions based on gathered data.

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Researchers from Karlsruhe Institute of Tech, MIT and University of Toronto published MovieQA, a dataset that contains 7702 reasoning questions and answers from 294 movies. Their innovative dataset and accuracy metrics provide a well-defined challenge for question/answer machine learning algorithms. The questions range from simpler'Who' did'What' to'Whom' that can be solved by computer vision alone, to'Why' and'How' something happened in the movie, questions that can only be solved by exploiting both the visual information and dialogs. MovieQA is unique in that it contains multiple sources of information – full-length movies, plot synopses, subtitles, scripts and DVS (a service that narrates moves scenes to the visually impaired). With the need to scale to large vocabulary data sets, they relied on a TITAN Black GPU for their overwhelming amount of training data.

Continuing our series of deep learning updates, we pulled together some of the awesome resources that have emerged since our last post on June 20th. Google's DeepMind partners with the National Health Service's Moorfields Eye Hopsital to apply machine learning to spot common eye diseases earlier. The goal is that this leads to a better understanding of eye disease, earlier detection, and treatment. The Harvard NLP and Visual Computing groups announce LSTMVis, a visual analysis tool for recurrent neural networks (RNNs).

Continuing our series of deep learning updates, we pulled together some of the awesome resources that have emerged since our last post on June 20th. In case you missed it, here's the June update, and here's the original set of 20 resources we outlined in April. As always, this list is not comprehensive, so let us know if there's something we should add, or if you're interested in discussing this area further. Google's DeepMind partners with the National Health Service's Moorfields Eye Hopsital to apply machine learning to spot common eye diseases earlier. The five-year research project will draw on one million anonymous eye scans which are held on Moorfields' patient database, with the aim to speed up the complex and time-consuming process of analyzing eye scans (news article).

We are assisting a top international company currently building a Machine Learning and Data Analytics team in Dublin source a number of Software Engineers with proven experience implementing and applying Machine Learning techniques and methodologies in a commercial environment. This is a fantastic opportunity for a Senior Software Engineers with expertise in Machine Learning and Cognitive Computing technologies join a new operation with huge expansion plans for 2016/17 and beyond. This is a fantastic opportunity to work inside a top international company utilising cutting edge tools and techniques.

In a recent announcement, researchers at Google's Britain-based DeepMind unit have revealed that they have developed a new artificial intelligence (AI) technology which has the capability to mimic the sound of human voice. The new AI technology developed by DeepMind researchers is called WaveNet. It marks the achievement of a new milestone in the company's AI project. According to DeepMind researchers, the breakthrough WaveNet technology can be described as a deep neural network which is capable of generating raw audio wave forms to produce speech. The technology can apparently outperform the currently-in-use Text-to-Speech systems by reducing the gap in human performance -- which could be demonstrated in an actual AI, that is, human conversation -- by up to 50 percent. Moreover, WaveNet - which can presently use only the English and Chinese languages - also boasts the ability to learn different voices and speech patterns to such an extent that it can not only simulate mouth movements and artificial breaths, but also accents, emotions, and language inflections.

Where did the "cyber" in "cyberspace" come from? Most people, when asked, will probably credit William Gibson, who famously introduced the term in his celebrated 1984 novel, Neuromancer. It came to him while watching some kids play early video games. Searching for a name for the virtual space in which they seemed immersed, he wrote "cyberspace" in his notepad. "As I stared at it in red Sharpie on a yellow legal pad," he later recalled, "my whole delight was that it meant absolutely nothing."