Microsoft have added a new aspect to their AI for Good Projects and have released a first-of-its-kind artificial intelligence model that will help combat the illicit trade of illegal animal trafficking – and it is being praised by everyone, including Prince William himself. Project SEEKER, as the project has been aptly named, was designed and trained to identify animals or animal products that are used in medicines. Illegal Wildlife Trafficking is a $23 Billion industry – it impacts well over 7000 different species and plants with one of the biggest transportation manners being that of storing animals in cargo or shipping them in planes and on boats. We saw a huge decrease in the number of trafficked animals during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when almost all countries had shut their borders! TechQuarters are a Gold Microsoft Partner and award-winning IT Managed Services Company in the UK – they have noted that this kind of technology will open up new doors and possibilities for all of us in the future. Project developers spent hundreds of hours uploading images of animals and animal parts and manually labelling them so that the AI model could learn to automatically identify these items – it is easily installed in luggage and cargo scanners at airports, border patrol sites, or shipping ports and will be able to automatically alert authorities if any illegal substance is detected.

Two of the minds behind Siri are set to unveil a new AI-powered digital assistant on Monday, May 9. Specifically, The Washington Post reports that Siri co-founders Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer will take the wraps off of Viv, an AI assistant said to be capable of handling much more complex tasks than its predecessor. Essentially, Viv will set itself apart from Siri by working with natural language to complete a complex series of tasks rather than taking one at a time. For example, you could ask Viv to make a restaurant reservation and buy movie tickets in one command, then Viv would carry out those tasks without sending you to an outside app. Viv could also react on the fly and make recommendations if, say, the movie is sold out. Comparatively, performing the same tasks with an AI assistant like Siri would require you to move between different apps with multiple commands. Of course, all of this requires some heavy integration with third-party services.