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Crunch Network
How to unmask AI
Millions of people engage with artificial intelligence (AI) in some form every day — most of them unwittingly. It’s at our fingertips through applications people from all over the world use regularly. That’s why it’s more important than ever to launch, and sustain, a global effort to improve the transparency of AI in order to shed light on the technology. Read More
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Can a dreaming AI fix low res digital photos in the edit?
Let’s Enhance is an Estonia-based startup that’s using a so called ‘hallucinating AI’ deep neural network to power a freemium photo upscaling service. Find out what happened when we fed it some photos for printing… Read More
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Crunch Network
Choosing the best language to build your AI chatbot
Which language is the best for your chatbot? No, this is not about whether you want your virtual agent to understand English slang, the subjunctive tense in Spanish or even the dozens of ways to say “I” in Japanese. In fact, the programming language you build your bot with is as important as the human language it understands. But how do you differentiate between them? Read More
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Ooma acquires AI-powered video camera platform Butterfleye for its home security service
Ooma, the company that’s probably still best known for its VoIP platform, today announced that it has acquired Butterfleye, an AI-powered video camera and security platform that produces a smart security camera for home and business use. Ooma plans to integrate Butterfleye’s camera into its Ooma Home security solution, but the company will also continue to sell the camera under… Read More
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Google’s Tacotron 2 simplifies the process of teaching an AI to speak
Creating convincing artificial speech is a hot pursuit right now, with Google arguably in the lead. The company may have leapt ahead again with the announcement today of Tacotron 2, a new method for training a neural network to produce realistic speech from text that requires almost no grammatical expertise. Read More
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YouTube: More AI can fix AI-generated ‘bubbles of hate’
Facebook, YouTube and Twitter faced another online hate crime grilling today by UK parliamentarians visibly frustrated at their continued failures to apply their own community guidelines and take down reported hate speech. Read More
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Facebook’s facial recognition now finds photos you’re untagged in
Facebook wants to make sure you know about and control the photos of you people upload, even if they don’t tag you. So today, Facebook launched a new facial recognition feature called Photo Review that will alert you when your face shows up in newly posted photos so you can tag yourself, leave it be, ask the uploader to take the photo down, or report it to Facebook. The feature should… Read More
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DigitalGenius raises $14.75 million Series A for AI-based customer service solution
When DigitalGenius participated in the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield competition in New York City in 2015, there weren’t a lot of companies working on AI and machine learning. Today, it’s become much more commonplace, and the company announced a $14.75 million Series A. Global Founders Capital led the round. MMC Ventures, Paua Ventures and several other unnamed new investors… Read More
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Carnegie Mellon’s ‘Superhuman AI’ bests leading Texas Hold’em poker pros
A new paper published by Science today details how Libratus, an AI developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon’s computer science department, managed to take on and defeat top industry professionals at one of the most challenging forms of poker: No-limit Texas Hold’em. Yes, the same variant of poker that swept the nation during the heady days of the early to mid-aughts. This is… Read More
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Horizons Ventures backs AI startup Fano Labs in first Hong Kong investment
Horizons Ventures, the VC firm founded by Hong Kong’s richest man Li Ka-Shing, has made a rare early-stage investment after it backed AI startup Fano Labs. Horizons has invested in the likes of Facebook, Razer, Slack, Improbable, Spotify and more, and now it is putting undisclosed money into Fano Labs, which recently graduated AI accelerator program Zeroth. This deal also marks the… Read More
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Finnish autonomous car goes for a leisurely cruise in the driving snow
It’s one thing for an autonomous car to strut its stuff on a smooth, warm California tarmac, and quite another to do so on the frozen winter mix of northern Finland. Martti, a self-driving vehicle system homegrown in Finland, demonstrated just this in a record-setting drive along a treacherous (to normal drivers) Laplandish road. Read More
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With $10M in new funding, Huddly launches its smart GO camera for video conferencing
Huddly has built a smart camera that only has one mission: make your video meetings more productive. Now for the most part, you probably don’t think much about what camera you use for your video conferences. They are pretty much all the same, after all. But Norway-based Huddly thinks its smart wide-angle GO camera, which is now shipping for $499 through its resellers and which will… Read More
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Andrew Ng’s Landing.ai wants to bring artificial intelligence to the manufacturing industry, starting with Foxconn
AI pioneer Andrew Ng is probably best known for his work on the Google Brain project and for leading Baidu’s AI group. After leaving Baidu earlier this year, it wasn’t quite clear what exactly Ng was up to, but today he announced the launch of Landing.ai, a new startup that focuses on bringing artificial intelligence to the manufacturing industry. Read More
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Microsoft looks to make Bing results smarter with new AI-powered features and Reddit partnership
At a special AI-focused event today in San Francisco, Microsoft announced a number of feature updates to Bing that it hopes will make results smarter by leveraging the company’s AI research, as well as a new partnership with Reddit. Read More
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Microsoft makes Azure Bot Service generally available for developers
Microsoft introduced the Azure Bot Framework more than two years ago and companies have been building chatbots for a variety of scenarios ever since. Today, the company made generally available the Microsoft Azure Bot Service and Microsoft Cognitive Language Understanding service (known as LUIS). Read More
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Nvidia and construction giant Komatsu partner on AI for job site safety
Nvidia is teaming up with Komatsu, one of the largest manufacturers of heavy equipment for construction and mining in the world, to deploy AI at worksites across these industries in order to promote safety and increase efficiency. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced the partnership at GTC Japan today, and described how it’ll make use of Nvidia GPU hardware to provide virtual… Read More
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Commerce platform iZettle raises $47M at a $950M valuation
iZettle — the commerce platform based out of Stockholm that competes against companies like Square, Paypal and SumUp to provide card transactions using smartphones and tablets as well as related accounting services — has raised another €40 million ($47 million) as it approaches a $1 billion valuation. CEO and co-founder Jacob de Geer told TechCrunch the money will go towards… Read More
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Google is opening a China-based research lab focused on artificial intelligence
Google has officially announced that it is opening an AI center in Beijing, China. The confirmation comes after months of speculation fueled by a major push to hire AI talent inside the country. Google’s search engine is blocked in China, but the company still has hundreds of staff in China which work on its international services. In reference to that workforce, Alphabet chairman… Read More
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New York City moves to establish algorithm-monitoring task force
New York City may soon gain a task force dedicated to monitoring the fairness of algorithms used by municipal agencies. Formed from experts in automated systems and representatives of groups affected by those systems, it would be responsible for closely examining algorithms in use by the city and making recommendations on how to improve accountability and avoid bias. Read More
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