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Category: business – Page 239

Microsoft has purchased startup company Semantic Machines in an effort to make artificial intelligence bots sound more human. The Berkeley, California-based business focuses on contextual understanding of conversation.

Previously, the firm has worked with Apple on speech recognition technology for Siri. Semanitc Machines is lead by professor Dan Klein of UC Berkeley and professor Percy Liang of Standford University in addition to Apple’s former chief speech scientist Larry Gillick.

Microsoft has been working on speech recognition and natural language processing for nearly two decades now. As Cortana has gained a more prominent role in recent years, Redmond is aiming to improve the accuracy and fluency of its assistant.

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Government officials, business leaders and academics attending China’s second World Intelligence Congress, abbreviated WIC 2018, envisioned people’s liberation from labor with the help of artificial intelligence.

With the theme “The Age of Intelligence: New Progress, New Trends, New Efforts,” the three-day event began in north China’s Tianjin municipality on Wednesday.

Lin Nianxiu, deputy director of China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), said at the opening of the congress that the aspirations to make machines more intelligent and liberate human beings from as much labor as possible have been major impetuses driving worldwide technological advances and industrial innovation.

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Groundwater being pumped from a highland aquifer, only to be whisked away in tankers and sold in little plastic bottles by a multinational corporation – it’s a difficult concept for a small farming town to swallow.

Just ask the residents of Stanley, Victoria, whose four-year court battle to stop a farmer bottling local groundwater for Japanese beverage giant Asahi ended in failure last month. They were left with a A$90,000 bill for legal costs.

Locals have clashed with the bottled water industry in many parts of the world, including the United States and Canada, and perhaps most famously in the French spa town of Vittel, where residents have accused Nestlé of selling so much of their water to the rest of the world that they barely have enough left for themselves.

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Pichai’s challenge is to find a way of reconciling Google’s dovish roots with its future. Having spent more than a decade developing the industry’s most formidable arsenal of AI research and abilities, Google is keen to wed those advances to its fast-growing cloud-computing business. Rivals are rushing to cut deals with the government, which spends billions of dollars a year on all things cloud. No government entity spends more on such technology than the military. Medin and Alphabet director Schmidt, who both sit on the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board, have pushed Google to work with the government on counter-terrorism, cybersecurity, telecommunications and more.

To win in the business of cloud computing, the company tiptoes into the business of war. Some staff fear it’s a first step toward autonomous killing machines.

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With Google’s I/O developer conference kicking off later today, Google is setting the scene for what it expects to be one of the big themes of the event: artificial intelligence. Today, the company rebranded the whole of its Google Research division as Google AI, with the old Google Research site now directing to a newly expanded Google AI site.

Google has over the years worked on a wide variety of other computing pursuits beyond AI, and all of that content will continue to exist within that new site, the company said. But the move signals how Google has increasingly focused a lot of its R&D on breaking new ground across the many facets of AI specifically, from technologies like computer vision, natural language processing, and neural networks, through to applications across virtually any and every business that Google currently and potentially touches, such as video, search and mobile apps, but also healthcare, automotive applications and other verticals.

That’s not just Google reflecting how the wider world of tech is evolving; it’s also a measure of how much Google has influenced it.

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Artificial intelligence has the potential to create trillions of dollars of value across the economy—if business leaders work to understand what AI can and cannot do.

In this episode of the McKinsey Podcast, McKinsey Global Institute partner Michael Chui and MGI chairman and director James Manyika speak with McKinsey Publishing’s David Schwartz about the cutting edge of artificial intelligence.

David Schwartz: Hello, and welcome to the McKinsey Podcast. I’m David Schwartz with McKinsey Publishing. Today, we’re going to be journeying to the frontiers of artificial intelligence. We’ll touch on what AI’s impact could be across multiple industries and functions. We’ll also explore limitations that, at least for now, stand in the way.

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1. Predictive analytics

Imagine being able to project a customer’s worth as soon as he buys your service. Sounds impossible, right? Well, in the course of our AI-as-triage work, we helped a leading online registry predict the lifetime value of its patrons within a few days of sign-up with 90 percent accuracy. Now, the registry can make more informed decisions about its customer service, delivering as much value as possible to its most loyal users.

Of course, creating a predictive solution requires a complete record of your customer interactions. Building this database takes time, but many of the necessary components are available off the shelf. Even if predictive analytics are a way off for your business, start collecting customer data now so you’ll have it when you decide to tap into AI.

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