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Own a ‘smart speaker’? Your voice also transforms it into a fun gaming platform

USATODAY - Tech Top Stories

Coming soon to Alexa speakers, X2 Games and Atari founder Nolan Bushnell will introduce'St. If you own an Amazon Echo, Google Home or other "smart speaker," you're likely aware you can use your voice to play music, order a product, and control your smart home gadgets. But you might not know you can also use your voice to play games, whether you're home alone or with family or friends. "There has never been a more natural way to communicate with technology than using your voice," says Katherine Prescott, founder and editor of VoiceBrew, a digital media company dedicated to helping people get the most out of Alexa, with articles, blog posts, and email newsletters. What dog is the one for you?: How I Met My Dog will tell you RCA's 100th anniversary: How a Russian immigrant changed our communication methods forever Smart speaker usage is growing.


What is AI (Artificial Intelligence)? Security and ethical concerns -

#artificialintelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the model of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems. These processes include reasoning, learning and self-correction. The specific application of AI provides speech recognition, machine vision and expert systems. Artificial Intelligence can be categorized as either strong AI or weak AI. Strong AI is also called artificial general Intelligence.


Top 7 AI Platforms available for Your Business ELDFROG

#artificialintelligence

AI (Artificial intelligence) is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems. These processes include learning (the acquisition of information and rules for using the information), reasoning (using rules to reach approximate or definite conclusions) and self-correction. Particular applications of AI include expert systems, speech recognition and machine vision. If your business has some technical resources, it might be better to use an AI platform to build a custom service. Many platforms allow you to start work without any coding at all, and if you've some web development experience, it will help you to go even further. AI platform can be classified as: -- Weak AI which is generally meant for a particular task.


A difficulty ranking approach to personalization in E-learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The prevalence of e-learning systems and on-line courses has made educational material widely accessible to students of varying abilities and backgrounds. There is thus a growing need to accommodate for individual differences in e-learning systems. This paper presents an algorithm called EduRank for personalizing educational content to students that combines a collaborative filtering algorithm with voting methods. EduRank constructs a difficulty ranking for each student by aggregating the rankings of similar students using different aspects of their performance on common questions. These aspects include grades, number of retries, and time spent solving questions. It infers a difficulty ranking directly over the questions for each student, rather than ordering them according to the student's predicted score. The EduRank algorithm was tested on two data sets containing thousands of students and a million records. It was able to outperform the state-of-the-art ranking approaches as well as a domain expert. EduRank was used by students in a classroom activity, where a prior model was incorporated to predict the difficulty rankings of students with no prior history in the system. It was shown to lead students to solve more difficult questions than an ordering by a domain expert, without reducing their performance.


iOS Engineer, Proactive Intelligence - IoT BigData Jobs

#artificialintelligence

Contribute to a product that is redefining mobile computing. Create groundbreaking technology for large-scale systems, spoken language, big data, and artificial intelligence. And work with the people who created the intelligent assistant that helps millions of people get things done -- just by asking. In this role you'll work with a great small team to solve hard problems that improve the lives of millions customers. Knowledge of Apple's development APIs (UIKit, Cocoa Touch, Cocoa, CoreFoundation) Outstanding communication and presentation skills Description You will primarily be responsible for implementing features for the Siri user experience.


Apple contractors 'regularly hear confidential details' on Siri recordings

The Guardian

Apple contractors regularly hear confidential medical information, drug deals, and recordings of couples having sex, as part of their job providing quality control, or "grading", the company's Siri voice assistant, the Guardian has learned. Although Apple does not explicitly disclose it in its consumer-facing privacy documentation, a small proportion of Siri recordings are passed on to contractors working for the company around the world. They are tasked with grading the responses on a variety of factors, including whether the activation of the voice assistant was deliberate or accidental, whether the query was something Siri could be expected to help with and whether Siri's response was appropriate. Apple says the data "is used to help Siri and dictation … understand you better and recognise what you say". But the company does not explicitly state that that work is undertaken by humans who listen to the pseudonymised recordings.


Who ISN'T listening? Report claims Apple contractors often hear private conversations from Siri

Daily Mail - Science & tech

It's official: if you're using a voice-assistant -- pretty much any voice-assistant -- someone could be listening in. The Guardian reports that Apple has joined an ever-growing list of tech companies that listens in on commands uttered through its virtual voice-assistant. Snippets of audio, reports The Guardian, are sent to contractors who are responsible for listening and grading them for accuracy, including whether or not the command was accidental or whether its assistant, Siri, was able to complete the task. As is the case with other similar programs from Google and Amazon, however, a whistleblower says the program has inadvertently swept up audio data that most might find confidential. Those include, according to an unnamed source in the report, conversations between patients and doctors, sex, criminal activity, and official business talk.


Google pledges to give 100,000 Home Mini devices to people living with paralysis

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Google will give away 100,000 of its smart home device to those living with paralysis according to a blog post. The company announced that it will be sending its Google Home mini to people with physical disabilities in an effort to help improve their lives at home. According to Garrison Redd, an ambassador for the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation, who has been unable to walk for the past 20 years, the devices can make a huge difference for someone who relies on a wheelchair to move. 'When you're paralyzed, your home goes from being a place of comfort and security to a reminder of what you've lost,' wrote Redd in a blog post for Google. 'Light switches and thermostats are usually too high up on the wall and, if my phone falls on the floor, I may not be able to call a friend or family member if I need help.


The Women Leading the AI Revolution

#artificialintelligence

Many of today's consumer-focused AI are fashioned after women: Siri, Alexa, Cortana, just to name a few. Female voices are considered friendlier and more helpful, but consumer AI is also in a subservient role. In reality, women are adding so much more to the field of AI than their voices. Today, though only 18 percent of C-level positions in the artificial intelligence/machine learning space are filled by women, which is not an usual figure in the tech sphere, but that does not take into account all the influential women building companies centered around AI. According to some studies, only 13.5 percent of the machine learning field and fewer than 10 percent in AI are women, and while it's important to acknowledge the gender gap, one must also acknowledge the many chief scientists and researchers making great strides in machine learning and AI.


Hello, Brave New World!

NPR Technology

It can't be overstated how fundamentally different this paradigm for music curation is from what you're used to. To compare it to another example from around your time, Spotify's Daily Drive playlist wove audio snippets from news talk shows with personalized music recommendations. I recall the feature was heralded as innovative for combining multiple audio formats into a single interface, but it was still fundamentally limited in how it relied on metadata around past listening activity. In contrast, the music information retrieval (MIR) techniques used in YouNite draw on real-time and forward-looking predictions around both present physiological states and desired future emotional outcomes. Hope this all makes sense?