Recent advances in voice recognition technology, in the form of virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Cortana, are revolutionizing the way that humans interact with machines. But while Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have produced some of the most popular general speech recognition software available, it doesn't mean that smaller companies can't compete. A new voice AI platform called Voysis, headed by Ian Hodson, Google's former head of global text to speech efforts--responsible for powering things like Google Assistant, Google Maps, and Android apps--is giving enterprises an option for customizable voice recognition software to fit specific needs. Using Alexa, for instance, which is trained on general speech, makes it "difficult to get those tailored in a very good way to another entity's product line or intentions," said Hodson. "A furniture store might have 10,000 items in your inventory, but it's a very specific set of items and with specific pronunciations, descriptions and spellings."

A data-sharing deal between Google DeepMind and the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust was riddled with "inexcusable" mistakes, according to an academic paper published on Thursday. The "Google DeepMind and healthcare in an age of algorithms" paper -- coauthored by Cambridge University's Julia Powles and The Economist's Hal Hodson -- questions why DeepMind was given permission to process millions of NHS patient records so easily and without patient approval. "There remain many ongoing issues and it was important to document how the deal was set up, how it played out in public, and to try to caution against another deal from happening in this way in the future," Powles told Business Insider in Berlin the day before the paper was published. DeepMind and Royal Free say that the study "completely misrepresents the reality of how the NHS uses technology to process data" and that it contains "significant mistakes." Powles and Hodson said the accusations of misrepresentation and factual inaccuracy were unsubstantiated, and invited the parties to respond on the record in an open forum.

Many of the problems of recognition and interpretation encountered in archaeology have close parallels with classic artificial intelligence problems, notably those of scene analysis.