The company hopes doing so will let any developer deliver captions for long-form conversations. The source code is available now on GitHub. Google released Live Transcribe in February. The tool uses machine learning algorithms to turn audio into real-time captions. Unlike Android's upcoming Live Caption feature, Live Transcribe is a full-screen experience, uses your smartphone's microphone (or an external microphone), and relies on the Google Cloud Speech API.

On paper, it's a great time to be on a dating app. In the seven years since Tinder's entrance on to the dating scene in 2012, it has gone from fringe novelty to romantic ubiquity; within two years of launching, it was seeing 1bn swipes a day. Other apps have similarly impressive stats: in 2018, Bumble's global brand director revealed it had more than 26 million users and a confirmed 20,000 marriages. It's a far cry from the considerably less optimistic response Tinder received when it launched. Many hailed it as the end of romance itself.

The 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals said Thursday that Facebook users in Illinois can sue the company over its use of facial recognition technology. The 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals said Thursday that Facebook users in Illinois can sue the company over its use of facial recognition technology. A U.S. court has ruled that Facebook users in Illinois can sue the company over face recognition technology, meaning a class action can move forward. The 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals issued its ruling on Thursday. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, it's the first decision by a U.S. appellate court to directly address privacy concerns posed by facial recognition technology.

Somewhat unceremoniously, Facebook this week provided an update on its brain-computer interface project, preliminary plans for which it unveiled at its F8 developer conference in 2017. In a paper published in the journal Nature Communications, a team of scientists at the University of California, San Francisco backed by Facebook Reality Labs -- Facebook's Pittsburgh-based division devoted to augmented reality and virtual reality R&D -- described a prototypical system capable of reading and decoding study subjects' brain activity while they speak. It's impressive no matter how you slice it: The researchers managed to make out full, spoken words and phrases in real time. Study participants (who were prepping for epilepsy surgery) had a patch of electrodes placed on the surface of their brains, which employed a technique called electrocorticography (ECoG) -- the direct recording of electrical potentials associated with activity from the cerebral cortex -- to derive rich insights. A set of machine learning algorithms equipped with phonological speech models learned to decode specific speech sounds from the data and to distinguish between questions and responses.

Facial recognition technology has spread prodigiously. Google, Microsoft, Apple and others have built it into apps to compile albums of people who hang out together. It verifies who you are at airports and is the latest biometric to unlock your mobile phone where facial recognition apps abound. Need to confirm your identity for a £1,000 bank transfer? Just look into the camera.

In his brilliant, provocative 1966 essay, The Prospects of Recording, Glenn Gould proposed elevating – pardon the pun – elevator music from pernicious drone to enriching ear training. In his view, the ubiquitous presence of background sound could subversively train listeners to be sensitive to the building blocks, structural forms and hidden meanings of music, turning the art form into the universal language of the emotions that it was destined to be. In a not-unrelated development, Gould had somewhat recently traded the concert hall for the recording studio, an act echoed by The Beatles' release in 1967 of Sgt. Peppers' Lonely Hearts Club Band, an album conceived and produced in a multi-track recording studio and never meant to be played in concert. And while Gould's dream of a transformative elevator music never quite panned out, it is clear that from the 1940s through the '60s -- from Les Paul and Mary Ford's pioneering use of overdubs in How High the Moon, to the birth of rock and roll with Chuck Berry's "Maybellene" in 1955, and on to Schaeffer, Stockhausen, Gould, The Beatles and many more -- a totally new art form, enabled by magnetic tape recording and processing, was born.

With a new feature, Tinder says it wants to make the swiping experience safer for its LGBTQ users traveling and living in certain countries. On Wednesday, the dating app introduced a new safety update dubbed "Traveler Alert" that will warn users who have identified themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and/or queer when they enter a country that could criminalize them for being out. The app plans to use the locations from users' devices to determine if there is a threat to the user's safety, where users can opt to have their profile hidden during their stay or make their profile public again. The caveat being that if a user decides to have their profile public, their sexual preference or gender identity will no longer be disclosed on the app until they return to a location where the user is deemed safer to disclose their identity. In the statement, Tinder says they developed the feature so that users "can take extra caution and do not unknowingly place themselves in danger for simply being themselves."

Artificial intelligence could one day be used to tailor education to the needs of each individual child.Credit: Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe/Getty People produce more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day. Businesses are harnessing these riches using artificial intelligence (AI) to add trillions of dollars in value to goods and services each year. Amazon dispatches items it anticipates customers will buy to regional hubs before they are purchased. Thanks to the vast extractive might of Google and Facebook, every bakery and bicycle shop is the beneficiary of personalized targeted advertising. But governments have been slow to apply AI to hone their policies and services.

Dozens of databases of people's faces are being compiled without their knowledge by companies and researchers, with many of the images then being shared around the world, in what has become a vast ecosystem fueling the spread of facial recognition technology. The databases are pulled together with images from social networks, photo websites, dating services like OkCupid and cameras placed in restaurants and on college quads. While there is no precise count of the data sets, privacy activists have pinpointed repositories that were built by Microsoft, Stanford University and others, with one holding over 10 million images while another had more than two million. The face compilations are being driven by the race to create leading-edge facial recognition systems. This technology learns how to identify people by analyzing as many digital pictures as possible using "neural networks," which are complex mathematical systems that require vast amounts of data to build pattern recognition.

"Alexa's responses are protected by the First Amendment" Big tech would really like you to engage with their products using your voice. Firms like Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL), Apple (NASDAQ:APPL), and Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) have collectively spent tens of billions of dollars perfecting the technology that allows their gadgets to listen attentively for your voice, understand your commands, and respond obediently. A recent survey by market research firm SUMO Heavy has found that approximately 30% of US adults are active users of voice assistants. As far as the device type, the bulk (49%), use voice assistants with their smartphone, followed by smart speaker, and then PC. Those that do use voice assistants on their smartphone tend to be iPhone users.