NLP
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Hitting the Books: Voice-controlled AI copilots could lead to safer flights
With an AI riding shotgun, the pilots of tomorrow will have fewer minutia to split their attention between while in the air.
Why humans can't use natural language processing to speak with the animals
We’ve already got machine-learning and NLP that can translate speech into any number of languages. Surely adapting that process to animal calls shouldn't be that big of a stretch?
AI is already better at lip reading than we are
Humans are have never been particularly adept at lip reading, but that hasn't stopped us from training AI to do it with nearly 100 percent accuracy.
Google is taking reservations to talk to its supposedly-sentient chatbot
On Thursday, researchers at Google's AI division announced that interested users can register to explore the model as access increasingly becomes available.
Meta unleashes BlenderBot 3 upon the internet, its most competent chat AI to date
On Friday, Meta's AI Research division will see if its latest iteration of Blenderbot AI can stand up to the horrors of the interwebs with the public demo release of its 175 billion-parameter, Blenderbot 3.
Meta's latest AI can translate 200 languages in real time
Meta announced its first breakthrough, dubbed NLLB-200, can speak in 200 tongues -- including languages from across Asia and Africa, like Lao and Kamba.
Facebook releases its 'Blender' chatbot as an open-source project
Facebook has spent years training its Blender chatbot on 9.4 billion conversational parameters. Now the company is releasing it as an open-source project.
Google reportedly acquires natural language processing startup Wavii
Word that Google has snapped up natural language processing startup Wavii first came from TechCrunch, and now the Wall Street Journal is chiming in with its own sources claiming the deal has in fact been struck, and that an announcement is imminent. In its current form, Wavii parses a personalized news feed and distills text into a summary for the top stories, similar to Yahoo's recently-purchased Summly. TechCrunch reports that Apple and Google were locked in a bidding war for the outfit, but the web titan ultimately won with a bid in the neighborhood of $30 million. According to the WSJ, the fledgling firm's talent will join Page and Co.'s web search team, which means the language detection technology may bolster its Knowledge Graph, giving users better results (and direct answers) for their queries. As language recognition permeates Page and Co.'s projects, Google Now and Google Glass could potentially benefit from the acquisition as well. Mountain View has yet to acknowledge the reported purchase, but if the tea leaves are being read correctly, expect that to happen soon.
Computer scientists tackle the hard, long-lasting question of 'that's what she said'
Humor: it's what separates humans from machines, GlaDOS from HAL 9000, and even a good boss from a great boss. For millennia humor was seemingly unlearnable -- either you had it or you didn't -- but two University of Washington computer scientists have cracked part of the comedy code. They've developed an algorithm to find potential innuendos in everyday speech: a "that's what she said" detector. Their approach, dubbed "Double Entendre via Noun Transfer" (DeviaNT), uses a "sexiness" rating for nouns, adjectives, and verbs, while also analyzing the likelihood of similar combinations occurring in erotic literature. Higher values signal higher TWSS potential, and the researchers have successfully tested their program with user-generated content from websites like TWSSStories. Why is this useful, you ask? It's one more advance in natural-language processing, helping researchers codify the subtle workings of human language. Just imagine: one day, a softball like "I was trying all night, but I just could not get it in!" might receive the same "clever" response from your computer as from your juvenile friends. [Image via Isley Unruh]
