Artificial intelligence (AI) can detect loneliness with 94 per cent accuracy from a person's speech, a new scientific paper reports. Researchers in the US used several AI tools, including IBM Watson, to analyse transcripts of older adults interviewed about feelings of loneliness. By analysing words, phrases, and gaps of silence during the interviews, the AI assessed loneliness symptoms nearly as accurately as loneliness questionnaires completed by the participants themselves, which can be biased. It revealed that lonely individuals tend to have longer responses to direct questions about loneliness, and express more sadness in their answers. 'Most studies use either a direct question of "how often do you feel lonely", which can lead to biased responses due to stigma associated with loneliness,' said senior author Ellen Lee at UC San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine.

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The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is using machine learning to extract metadata from text, podcasts and other forms of media, making them easier to find via a new search engine. Machine learning engineer Gareth Seneque told the YOW! Data 2019 conference that the ABC moved out of beta in February this year with a new search engine based on technology from US startup Algolia (which also runs search for the likes of Twitch and Stripe). The search domain still sports beta labelling but is in full production use. "There are reasons for [the url] behind the scenes - stuff involving CMS migrations and the like that I won't detour into - but we're very much in the scaling up and out phase of things," Seneque said. But Seneque said user feedback on search was poor. "Specifically, content types were not supported, indexing speeds were slow stuff as the stuff would take a while to show up in the index, and the relevance of results was poor," he said.