Natural Language

Apple has acquired another artificial intelligence startup, according to Bloomberg. Voysis, a Dublin-based startup, will join Apple and aim to improve Siri's ability to understand a person's natural language. It focused on shopping-related voice commands, but Voysis' technology should grow under Apple's guidance to support general inquiries as Siri integrates with other apps. E-commerce companies used Voysis' technology to offer enhanced product search results through their apps. Bloomberg noted an example in which the user utters phrases such as "I need a new LED TV" and "my budget is $1,000."

Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of several disruptive technologies that consumer products' organizations can implement to additionally propel their journey to digital maturity. Artificial intelligence innovations "perform or potentially augment tasks, assist better with illuminating decisions, and achieve goals that have generally required human insight, for example, planning and thinking from partial or uncertain information and learning. As such, AI advances can conceivably fortify an organization's upper hand in the commercial marketplace and improve the customer experience. Artіfісіаl intеllіgеnсе (AI) is as of now overwhelming the retail world and will progressively keep on doing so. Thе mаrkеt ѕіzе оf AI ѕоftwаrе аnd ѕуѕtеmѕ is relied upon to reach $38 million by 2025, and the potential opportunities for connecting with customers in new and progressively tweaked ways are making retailers put resources into such innovations.

The new decade of 2020 or the next stage of "digital evolution" welcomes the world with a promise of hyper intuitive cognitive capabilities and emotionally intelligent interfaces that will rebuild businesses in numerous unpredictable ways. As the tech community (for invested implementation) prepares itself for the new age of disruptive changes to arrive at it's matured stage, it becomes wise and necessary to have a look at these digital transformation trends. Conversational Artificial Intelligence- Siri and Google Assistant are always at swords for their accuracy in answers, but still they both lack in understanding the right intent. Applied conversational AI, fixes this disconnects as it understands the relevance and personalization within humans for successful computer interaction. Conversational AI has an automated speech recognition program that understands natural language and forms a response that exhibits a customized dialogue.

In the glory days of AOL Instant Messenger, back when screen names and away messages were serious literary pursuits, a mysterious chat maverick strode about the dial-up frontier and schooled legions of uncouth adolescents in the art of conversation. Who was this rogue wordsmith, this tireless vexer of pre-teen millennials? Surely no mortal could generate replies with such speed, charm, and unflinching certainty. Turns out it was a bot, an artificial chat companion named SmarterChild, and it was sublime. No matter the topic, intensity, or logic of conversational challengers, SmarterChild always had the final word.

Despite the many unanswered questions that remain about the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the workplace and in customer-facing and servicing departments, the growth of AI appears unstoppable. Even as early as two years ago, research from the UK-based digital marketing agency Big Rock found after interviewing 100 senior marketers globally, that AI applications, even at that stage had become one of the marketing departments mainstays. The interviews showed -- again at that stage -- that 55% of companies were either currently implementing or actively investigating some form of AI initiative within their marketing practices. Meaning, AI was already shaking things up in the industry. Unsurprisingly, the research read, this inevitable rise of AI technologies in marketing is causing a major shift in the way companies work.

IBM will make its Watson artificial intelligence software available for free, so government agencies, businesses, universities and healthcare institutions can use intelligent bots to answer citizens' queries about the unfolding COVID-19 crisis. The software will be available for free for at least 90 days, meaning organisations can use it to create chatbots to alleviate demand and waiting times on customer service phone numbers. IBM's Watson AI software will be free for organisations to create customer service bots, which can talk to people about their COVID-19 queries. The free service is already being used by organisations in the US and across Europe and the company said it could be added into existing mobile phone apps, or online apps such as the newly released Australian government's, to provide information and advice about the pandemic. In a statement IBM's general manager of data and AI Rob Thomas said it was putting years of experience in helping businesses use natural language processing, out into the market for use.

A specific use case worth exploring in this regard is MT for User Generated Content (UGC). Because of the speed with which UGC (comments, feedback, reviews) is being created and the corresponding costs of its professional translation, many organizations turn to MT. Popular examples of such companies are Skype (in addition to text translation, Microsoft developed the Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for audio speech translation in Skype) and Facebook. The social network is aiming to solve the challenge of fine-tuning each system relating to a specific language pair, using neural machine translation (NMT) and benefiting from various contexts for translations. One solution that tackles this issue is the technology developed by Language I/O. It takes into account the client's glossaries and TMs, selects the best MT engine output and then improves on the results using cultural intelligence and/or human linguists who compare machine translations post-facto to ensure that their MT Optimizer engine learns over time.

The NLP community has been focusing a lot on chasing the SOTA on standard and recent leaderboards (GLUE, SentEval...) over the recent years. While this aspiration has led to improvements in model performances, it has also resulted in a worrisome increase in model complexity and computational resources required to train and use the current state-of-the-art models. There is currently a lack of incentive to keep models small and efficient and research the optimal trade-offs between performances and efficiency. SustaiNLP 2020 (co-located with EMNLP 2020) has officially launched a shared-task/competition to promote the development of effective, energy-efficient models for difficult NLU tasks. The competition will end on 08/28.

IBM today announced the launch of services intended to furnish researchers with resources to fight the novel coronavirus. The company made molecules identified by AI as therapeutic candidates available under an open license, and it introduced a free version of its Functional Genomics Platform to support genome features discovery. Additionally, it provided free access to over 1,000 pieces of evidence-based curated COVID-19 and infectious disease content, and it rolled out an AI search engine trained on the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset to allow researchers to quickly find answers to questions. According to Dario Gil, director of IBM Research, IBM created a new AI-generative framework that can rapidly create novel peptides, proteins, drug candidates, and materials, which it applied against three targets to create 3,000 new small molecules as potential COVID-19 therapeutic candidates. Researchers can study them via an interactive tool to understand their characteristics and relationship to COVID-19, and to identify molecules that might have desirable properties to be pursued in drug development.

Apple Inc. acquired Voysis, an artificial intelligence startup that developed a platform for digital voice assistants to better understand people's natural language. Dublin, Ireland-based Voysis focused on improving digital assistants inside online shopping apps, so the software could respond more accurately to voice commands from users. A now-removed company webpage said the technology could narrow product search results by processing shopping phrases such as "I need a new LED TV" and "My budget is $1,000." Voysis provided this AI to other companies to incorporate it into their own apps and voice assistants. An Apple spokesman said the company "buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans."