Today, Baidu launched their own phone voice assistant "Baidu voice assistant Baidu claims it as the first apply the depth neural network (DNN) to speech recognition products in China, it reduces recognition error rate by 25%.Similar to other voice assistants, Baidu voice assistant can be roughly divided into the function of the phone calls, information querying and voice communication. Users can use voice to make phone call, send SMS and set the alarm etc. Similarly, Baidu voice assistant supports nearby information queries, such as weather, flight, travel routes and nearby restaurants. Baidu ...

Recently, Microsoft Research published a demo video on YouTube that demonstrated simultaneously translating English speech to Chinese speech with Microsoft's new research achievement. The result is quite impressive, it has large improvement compared to previous speech recognition systems. It's a big breakthrough of speech recognition.In this demo, Microsoft Chief Research Officer Rick Rashid demonstrates a speech recognition breakthrough.First when he speaks, the screen will display what he is saying in English, this is amazing already, isn't it? Then at the end of the demo, the real impressiv...

On October 14, 2011, Apple introduced the new iPhone 4S. One of its major new features was Siri, a personal assistant application. Siri uses a natural language processing technology to interact with the user.Interestingly, Apple explained that Siri works by sending data to a remote server (that’s probably why Siri only works over 3G or WiFi). As soon as we could put our hands on the new iPhone 4S, we decided to have a sneak peek at how it really works.Today, we managed to crack open Siri’s protocol. As a result, we are able to use Siri’s recognition engine from a...

Machine learning algorithms have a much better chance of being widely adopted if they are implemented in some easy-to-use code. There are several important concerns associated with machine learning which stress programming languages on the ease-of-use vs. speed frontier.Speed The rate at which data sources are growing seems to be outstripping the rate at which computational power is growing, so it is important that we be able to eak out every bit of computational power. Garbage collected languages (java, ocaml, perl and python) often have several issues here.Garbage co...

Will AIs find humans interesting, enjoyable, and worthy of companionship? My guess: the smarter and more autonomous they become the more the answer will become NO. There are practical reasons for AIs to want to understand humans: The AIs will want to protect themselves from all threats, including human threads. The AIs will also want to get more resources (e.g. energy, raw materials for fabrication of additional computing power). The extent that humans control access to resources AIs will want to trade with them unless the AIs decide they can take the resources by force.But why should AIs find...

Artificial General Intelligence(AGI) has long been a topic of fascination and concern for technology leaders, with some seeing it as humanity's ultimate tool, while others view it as an existential threat. This clash of perspectives was on full display during the acquisition of DeepMind by Google in 2014, as two tech titans, Elon Musk and Larry Page, found themselves on opposite sides of the debate. While Page saw AGI as a necessary and desirable step in humanity's evolution, Musk was more wary of its potential to destroy humanity. Their differing perspectives set the stage for a fascinating c...

AN APOCRYPHAL tale is told about Henry Ford II showing Walter Reuther, the veteran leader of the United Automobile Workers, around a newly automated car plant. “Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues,” gibed the boss of Ford Motor Company. Without skipping a beat, Reuther replied, “Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?”Whether the exchange was true or not is irrelevant. The point was that any increase in productivity required a corresponding increase in the number of consumers capable of buying the product. The original Hen...

Performing manual, repetitive tasks enrages me. I used to think this was a corollary of being a programmer, but I’ve come to suspect (or hope) that this behaviour is inherent in being human.But being able to hack together scripts simply makes it much easier to go from a state of rage to a basic solution in a very small amount of time. As a side point, this is one of the reasons that teaching the basics of programming in schools is so important. It’s hard to think of any job which wouldn’t benefit from a few simple scripts to perform more automation.When we’re h...