As part of the podcasting arms race between tech giant, Spotify has acquired Podz, an AI podcast discovery service for an undisclosed amount of money. Podz generates (or generated) short audio clips that populated a Instagram Stories-style timeline users could flip through to find podcasts they were likely to enjoy listening to.
Apple recently hired ex-Google machine learning scientiest Samy Bengio, making him the latest artificial intelligence expert to jump ship for Cupertino.
iOS 14’s built-in pornographic content blocker stymies searches that include the word “Asian,” according to a computer science student.
This means searches for “Asian food” or “Asian countries” are blocked if the adult content filters are enabled. Similar blocks aren’t in place for search terms including “black,” “white,” “Arab,” “French” and other national or racial descriptors.
For people with non-standard speech — such as those who have experienced strokes, neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s, or developmental disorders — communicating with an AI assistant like Amazon’s Alexa isn’t quite as seamless as it is for many.
With that in mind, a speech recognition startup for atypical speech, called Voiceitt, has developed an accessibility app for iOS that improves Alexa. Here’s how it works.
Becoming a better writer requires feedback. But not everyone has room in their life for writing workshops and deep dives into literature. If you want to improve your writing quickly and easily, you need this web-based tool that uses machine learning to polish your prose.
Apple has launched a new artificial intelligence and machine learning residency program for people from other STEM disciplines wanting to “dip their toe” into the world of cutting edge machine learning.
Michael Rennaker, manager of Apple in Research Academia (ARIA), announced the new initiative on Twitter. The program seeks experts in fields like design, linguistics, neuroscience, and psychology whose interests may cross over with AI.
Apple is using machine learning technology in more and more of its features, John Giannandrea, the company’s senior vice president for machine learning and AI strategy, reveals in a new interview with Ars Technica.
Giannandrea, who joined Apple from a job at Google, said “there are increasingly fewer and fewer places in iOS where we’re not using machine learning.” This stands in strong contrast to a few years ago — and even the point at which Giannandrea landed his Apple job.
Apple purchased Inductiv, a Canadian company that focused on using artificial intelligence to clean up data. They created HoloClean, which was designed to get useful predictions from “noisy, incomplete, and erroneous data.”
The employees of Inductiv joined the team developing Siri, Apple’s voice-driven AI assistant, according to Bloomberg.
When it comes to artificial intelligence (AI), Apple wants to have its cake and eat it, too. That is to say that it wants cutting edge data-driven machine learning on its devices, without violating its own user privacy pledge.
And you know what? It’s managing to pull it off — as the company’s latest AI startup acquisition underlines.
Today’s machine learning AI technologies frequently rely on the free flow of user data. That puts Apple in a tough spot.
While it wants to stay on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence, it doesn’t want to do anything to get in the way of its privacy-first approach to technology. Fortunately, there’s a way around that issue.
