Yactraq's machine learning driven audio mining offering makes custom vocabulary based speech analytics affordable for any organization, including SMB's and enterprise business unit's. Yactraq has been selected in a Gartner Cool Vendor (Smart Machines) 2016 among the first 20 companies to be showcased by IBM Watson's Cognitive Gallery and is an IP for Defense partner of Intellectual Ventures, the world's largest patent bank. Q: You've developed a breakthrough artificial intelligence platform for audio-mining and speech analytics; can you give us more insights into your technology? A: Beyond basic functionality offered by legacy audio-mining systems, Yactraq's OmniTraq audio mining product offers revolutionary machine learning driven capabilities that enable our clients to detect customer sentiment and monitor service quality in new and powerful ways, across a range of verticals. OmniTraq can be viewed as an analytics, reporting and search layer that depends on two key technology platforms.

Two recent accidents involving Tesla's Autopilot system may raise questions about how computer systems based on learning should be validated and investigated when something goes wrong. A fatal Tesla accident in Florida last month occurred when a Model S controlled by Autopilot crashed into a truck that the automated system failed to spot. Tesla tells drivers to pay attention to the road while using Autopilot, and explains in a disclaimer that the system may struggle in bright sunlight. Today the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it was investigating another accident in Pennsylvania last week where a Model X hit the barriers on both sides of a highway and overturned. The driver said his car was operating in Autopilot mode at the time.

Facebook's recent chatbot announcement about delivering ecommerce to the service's extensive user base has put artificial intelligence into the spotlight again. For years, software design has traditionally consisted of three fields, but there may soon be a fourth. Joining UX, UI, and graphic and interaction design is an idea known as "consciousness design" that will emerge as A.I. assistants grow in popularity. Amazon Echo and other A.I. assistants are among the pioneers of virtually "interface-less" experiences that make consciousness design central to product success. The idea is not so much to offer a simple search that delivers less-than-desired results, which is what Facebook bots basically do, but rather to offer a real customized experience that harnesses artificial intelligence to power the coming revolution.

Deftr, legal tech company, and Y Combinator Fellowship recipient, today announced the launch of the first AI-powered tool that helps professionals diagram intricate corporate structures. The new product reads text as it is typed in real time, then automatically turns that text into a shareable, interactive graphic illustrating a corporate structure or transaction. Named for the dynamic tax ledger used by the Ottoman Empire, Deftr helps legal and professional service firms focus on high-level, strategic work by leveraging artificial intelligence to automate manual work. From tax law and IRS guidance to corporate structuring and financial regulations, we enable users to navigate legal complexity and understand its practical consequences intuitively, simply, and cheaply. For hundreds of years the Swiss watch had been considered to be the most accurate, trust-worthy and well-designed way of telling the time – the best way to convey that crucial information to a wearer.

The world's first beer brewed with the help of artificial intelligence is now on sale. Four beers have been created, with each recipe altered based on customer feedback received by an algorithm. The system is hidden behind a Facebook Messenger bot, which takes feedback from customers and sends it onto human brewers who change recipes accordingly. IntelligentX, the company behind the beers, said the use of AI would help brewers receive and test customer feedback "more quickly than ever before". Codes printed on the bottles direct people towards the bot, which then asks a series of questions.

Dallas police used a robot to kill a shooting suspect after 5 police officers were shot dead. Some are calling this tactic a first. Dallas police officers comfort each other in honor of the officers who were killed in a massive shootout Thursday. NEW YORK--When Dallas police detonated a "bomb robot" Thursday night to take down a sniper suspect, it was believed to be the first time a robot was used by law enforcement to kill a human being in the U.S. Dallas police chief David Brown explained in a press conference that "other options would have exposed our officers to grave danger." The action raises ethical questions about the role of robots in warfare, or in this case, police work, especially given continuing breakthroughs in machine learning and artificial intelligence.

According to a report in The Information, Houston reiterated this notion at the annual Allen & Co. Sun Valley Conference this week, saying machine learning capabilities that enable more sophisticated data analysis and automated predictive behavior is "something you sprinkle on products to make them better as opposed to a new platform or product." He pointed out that hiring machine learning experts has become "more important" as a result, and they'll play bigger roles as software like Dropbox seeks ways to automate a lot of functionalities such as notifications and messages in the future, the report said. Houston's comment is in line with the trend in the broader business software landscape. Salesforce, for example, has been doubling down on its machine learning capabilities by acquiring a bunch of artificial-intelligence startups lately. Its CEO, Marc Benioff, once said: "This will be the huge shift going forward, which is that everybody wants systems that are smarter, everybody wants systems that are more predictive."

In an effort to apply data-driven insights to one of the most fundamental aspects of running a health care system, UPMC announced today that it has formed Pensiamo, an independent company that aims to help hospitals improve supply chain performance through a comprehensive source-to-pay offering, including cognitive analytics with IBM Watson Health technologies. IBM (NYSE:IBM) is a minority owner of Pensiamo. Supply chain costs are the second-largest and fastest-growing expense behind labor costs for health care providers [1]. The Institute of Medicine estimates that nearly one-third of health care spending is waste [2]. In today's dynamic environment, providers face mounting pressure to improve the effectiveness of patient care while controlling costs.

Your smartphone is about to get even smarter. As artificial intelligence and machine learning become all the more influential across the tech industry, tech giant Google has just made moves to improve its own AI capabilities by purchasing Moodstocks, a French startup that is particularly adept at helping phones recognize objects. Soon, you may be able to simply point your mobile device at whatever strikes your fancy, and have your phone tell you what it is (and perhaps tell you a bit about it). In a blog post announcement on Wednesday morning, Vincent Simonet, the head of Google France's R&D Center noted that a number of Google services already employ machine learning "to make them simpler and more useful in everyday life," including Smart Reply Inbox and Google Translate. And while Google has already "made great strides in terms of visual recognition," Simonet writes, as you can currently search for a term in Google Images and be presented with pretty decent image results, Simonet notes "there is still much to do in this area."

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