SAN FRANCISCO: Building on the success of its first-generation AI platform, Infosys Mana and its Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solution, AssistEdge, Infosys on Thursday launched'Infosys Nia', the next-generation Artificial Intelligence (AI) Platform for businesses. Infosys Nia converges the big data/analytics, machine learning, knowledge management and cognitive automation capabilities of Mana; end-to-end RPA capabilities of AssistEdge; advanced, high-performance and scalable machine learning capabilities of Skytree; and optical character recognition (OCR), natural language processing (NLP) capabilities and infrastructure management services. "Nia takes our purposeful approach to AI, one in which technology serves to amplify people and empowers them to work in new ways, to new heights," Vishal Sikka, Chief Executive Officer at Infosys, said in a statement. "When we bring this together with our unmatched ability to educate and train in AI techniques and emerging technologies, we now have the platform, the services and the skills, to deliver new unprecedented value to our clients," he added. Infosys Nia, tackles business problems such as forecasting revenues, forecasting what products need to be built, understanding customer behaviour, understanding the content of contracts and legal documents, understanding compliance, and fraud.

A device that can read people's minds by detecting their brainwaves has been developed in a breakthrough that could eventually enable people with "locked-in syndrome" to communicate. The system was only partially effective with a 90 per cent success rate when trying to recognise numbers from zero to nine and a 61 per cent rate for single syllables in Japanese, the researchers said. But, nonetheless, a statement about the research issued by the Toyohashi University of Technology in Japan said it showed that an effective device to read people's thoughts and relay them to others was possible in the "near future". They even suggested an "easily operated" device with a smartphone app could be ready in just five years. An electroencephalogram (EEG) was used to monitor people's brain waves while they spoke.

If you want to know whether you're at risk of Alzheimer's disease, taking this test could help you. Those unable to tell which character is the odd one out could well be at risk of the devastating illness. Known as Greebles, the little purple characters have been designed by scientists in their ongoing quest for a cure. A study found those at genetic risk of the disease struggle to distinguish a subtle difference in one of the images. But they may be unaware of their likelihood as they are still able to detect minor changes in people's faces, objects and scenes.

James Bedsol interviewed Ray Kurzweil, one of the world's leading minds on artificial intelligence, technology and futurism, in his Google office in Mountain View, CA, February 15, 2017. Kurzweil is one of the world's leading minds on artificial intelligence, technology and futurism. He is the author of five national best-selling books, including "The Singularity is Near" and "How to Create a Mind." Raymond "Ray" Kurzweil is an American author, computer scientist, inventor and futurist. Aside from futurology, he is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments.

This post was done in partnership with The Wirecutter, a buyer's guide to the best technology. When readers choose to buy The Wirecutter's independently chosen editorial picks, it may earn affiliate commissions that support its work. After putting in more than 100 hours for research and hands-on testing since 2013, we think the Epson ES-300W is the best portable document scanner for digitizing documents without taking up half of a desktop. It combines scan speeds usually found on full-size scanners with extremely accurate text recognition. And thanks to its built-in Wi-Fi and battery, you can use it almost anywhere--even with a phone or tablet. The reason for buying a portable document scanner is fairly straightforward.

You can't just assume that when an application reads each letter of a sentence that the output will make sense. Amazon Polly provides speech synthesis functionality that overcomes those challenges, allowing you to focus on building applications that use text-to-speech instead of addressing interpretation challenges. Amazon Polly turns text into lifelike speech. It lets you create applications that talk naturally, enabling you to build entirely new categories of speech-enabled products. Amazon Polly is an Amazon AI service that uses advanced deep learning technologies to synthesize speech that sounds like a human voice.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence exhibited by machines. In computer science, an ideal "intelligent" machine is a flexible rational agent that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of success at some goal. Colloquially, the term "artificial intelligence" is applied when a machine mimics "cognitive" functions that humans associate with other human minds, such as "learning" and "problem solving". As machines become increasingly capable, mental facilities once thought to require intelligence are removed from the definition. For example, optical character recognition is no longer perceived as an exemplar of "artificial intelligence", having become a routine technology.

Baidu Research presents Deep Voice, a production-quality text-to-speech system constructed entirely from deep neural networks. The biggest obstacle to building such a system thus far has been the speed of audio synthesis – previous approaches have taken minutes or hours to generate only a few seconds of speech. We solve this challenge and show that we can do audio synthesis in real-time, which amounts to an up to 400X speedup over previous WaveNet inference implementations. Synthesizing artificial human speech from text, commonly known as text-to-speech (TTS), is an essential component in many applications such as speech-enabled devices, navigation systems, and accessibility for the visually-impaired. Fundamentally, it allows human-technology interaction without requiring visual interfaces.

Many accountants are concerned about how artificial intelligence (AI) will impact their role within a company. Although computers are increasingly being taught to act like humans, and changes are being seen in the accounting industry, there are many benefits to advancements in technology. Here are some ways AI is affecting the accounting industry and what they may mean for you. AI is steadily taking over repetitive bookkeeping and process-driven tasks, such as data entry and transaction coding. For example, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) scans invoices.

The purpose of this project is to provide instructions for teaching the Artificial Intelligence topic of supervised machine learning for the task of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) at various levels of a student’s undergraduate curriculum, such as basic knowledge, novice, and intermediate. The levels vary from beginner with a slight background in computing and computer science to intermediate with a better understanding of computer science fundamentals and algorithms.