Get ready for the little person living inside your phone and speaker to sound a lot more life-like. Google believes it has reached a new milestone in the quest to make computer-generated speech indistinguishable from human speech with Tacotron 2, a system that trains neural networks to generate eerily natural-sounding speech from text, and they have the samples to prove it. In a research paper published earlier this month, though yet to be peer-reviewed, Google asserts that previous approaches to text-to-speech (TTS) systems have thus far failed to achieve a genuinely natural sound. Techniques such as concatenative synthesis, in which pre-recorded samples of speech are stitched together, and statistical parametric speech synthesis, Google says have been insufficient, explaining, "The audio produced by these systems often sounds muffled and unnatural compared to human speech." With Tacotron 2 (which is not the same as the world-ending super-weapon used by Lord Business), the company says it has incorporated ideas from its previous TTS systems, WaveNet and the first Tacotron, to reach a new level of fidelity.

I go to learn about and discuss all things wealthTech, and every year we see the bandwagon steer towards the same trends. This year especially – though certainly true of the last few years – we seem to have latched on to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). I see demos of some really cool technology. The question begs to be asked: is there really something here? Or, is this all sizzle and no steak?

There is not one but many definitions of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and its scope remains fluid and evolving. Some people even state that AI is everything that has not yet been done, referring to the observation that as the tools we use daily become increasingly sophisticated, tasks previously considered as requiring'intelligence' are now considered routine and get excluded from the AI definition. Think for example of a good spam filter, spell check or optical character recognition, all of which used to be considered revolutionary, but today don't impress people anymore. 'A constellation of technologies that extend human capabilities by sensing, comprehending, acting and learning – allowing people to do much more.' In other words, we put the focus on the ability of AI to complement and empower people instead of replace them. Therein lies the key: If you only look at AI from the perspective of a technology that'can do it all', it will fail and create problems within organizations and society.

WIRE)--Veritone, Inc. (NASDAQ:VERI), a leading provider of artificial intelligence (AI) insights and cognitive solutions, today announced the general availability of its Veritone Developer application. The application empowers developers of cognitive engines, applications and application programming interfaces (APIs) to bring new AI ideas to life through simple integration with the Veritone aiWARE platform. Veritone Developer is a self-service development environment that empowers developers to create, submit and deploy public and private applications and cognitive engines directly into the aiWARE architecture. After a successful limited-beta-release to a select group of partners, Veritone Developer is now publicly available as a unique resource for machine learning experts, application development firms, and system integrators. Veritone Developer supports RESTful and GraphQL API integrations as well as engine development in major categories of cognition, including: transcription, translation, face and object recognition, audio/video fingerprinting, optical character recognition (OCR), geolocation, transcoding, and logo recognition.

Snap a pic of a document, whiteboard, receipt or business card, and it'll be immediately digitized onto your device. Printed and handwritten text is automatically and accurately recognized using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tech.

Cloud content management company Box has unveiled Box Skills, a framework for applying machine learning tools such as computer vision, video indexing, and sentiment analysis to stored content. Box Skills will facilitate businesses to re-imagine the business processes considered as impractical to digitise or automate or too expensive. Audio Intelligence: Uses audio files to create and index a text transcript that can be easily searched and manipulated in a variety of use cases; powered by IBM Watson technology. Video Intelligence: Provides transcription, topic detection and detects people to allow users to quickly look up the information they need in a video; powered by Microsoft Cognitive Services. Image Intelligence: Detects individual objects and concepts in image files, captures text through optical character recognition (OCR), and automatically adds keyword labels to images to easily build metadata on image catalogues; powered by Google Cloud Platform. David Kenny, Senior Vice President, IBM Watson and Cloud Platform, said: "Box Skills is an extension of our strategic partnership with Box aimed at helping businesses work more efficiently, solve challenges and seize opportunities for innovation."

Task instruction quality is widely presumed to affect outcomes, such as accuracy, throughput, trust, and worker satisfaction. Best practices guides written by experienced requesters share their advice about how to craft task interfaces. However, there is little evidence of how specific task design attributes affect actual outcomes. This paper presents a set of studies that expose the relationship between three sets of measures: (a) workers’ perceptions of task quality, (b) adherence to popular best practices, and (c) actual outcomes when tasks are posted (including accuracy, throughput, trust, and worker satisfaction). These were investigated using collected task interfaces, along with a model task that we systematically mutated to test the effects of specific task design guidelines.

How can we make dividing bills easier when visiting a restaurant with friends or family? The answer is this app that uses machine learning for optical character recognition of the prices. It makes any calculator obsolete and there is also no need anymore to ask the waiter to split the bill for you at the cash register. With our app you can split any bill, not just from restaurants alone. So go ahead and have a go with our app when you organise your next party, have a lunch with colleagues, visit a fancy restaurant with some of your best friends, or ...

The rapid growth of technology is transforming businesses every day, and no technology is more poised to revolutionize nearly every industry in the next decade than artificial intelligence (AI). Since 1956, when it was introduced as an academic discipline, AI has generated both optimism and disappointment. However, it has been on a relatively upward projection since 2000, finding particular vigor in leveraging statistical approaches to machine learning, which in turn has rendered many previously used tools and schools of thought obsolete. As the field of AI continues to innovate, and machines and systems become more capable, technological solutions that used to be considered as futuristic AI, like optical character recognition, have become routine -- effectively losing their "AI" status. Other technologies yet to be conquered -- like driverless cars, and the artificial re-creation of human speech -- are still being developed as AI.

FARMERS can now zap their crops with a handheld scanner to instantly determine nutritional content, which could prove crucial in mitigating the effects of climate change on food quality. It also brings similar consumer gadgets a step closer – so we can find out what is in our food for ourselves. The device, called GrainSense, analyses wheat, oats, rye and barley by scanning a sample with various frequencies of near-infrared light. The amount of each type of light that is absorbed allows it to precisely determine the levels of protein, moisture, oil and carbohydrate in the grain. This technique has been used for decades in the lab, but this is the first time it has been available instantly on a handheld device.