TechBooky

Plans concentrating on Artificial Intelligence (AI) are being used everywhere, with increasing discoveries in AI development . Companies and countries are investing huge sums of money in developing new AI technologies. Though it is not possible to list down all the popular AI trends for 2018, below are the top 7 ones who make the most difference when it comes to AI tech. Deep Learning Theory: Though not much is known about why and how deep neural networks have such great ability to learn and perform. But now, it appears like a new theory may change this fact. It suggests the information bottleneck principle is utilized in deep learning. This happens when a big amount of data is consumed all at once. The little less important data is ignored and compressed initially to process more important data. By better understanding how deep learning functions, researchers will be able to use it in several applications in a better way. Hybrid Learning Models: Such kind of model utilizes the stren...

Gboard is already very familiar with GIFs, stickers, and emoji, since you can search for them from within the keyboard. However, today’s update automatically surfaces relevant GIFs, stickers, and emoji without the need to search for them. According to Google’s blog post. Gboard will automatically use AI to suggest the aforementioned content. For example, when you type out a phrase like “Good morning,” the “G” logo on the top-left corner of the suggestions strip changes to a GIF button. Tapping the GIF button shows you relevant GIFs, stickers, and emoji. Google was spotted testing the new update with a small group of users back in September. It essentially makes it faster and easier to share your feelings in the form of stickers, GIFs, and emojis. The latest Gboard update also includes more than 40 new language varieties. It comes days after a beta version of Gboard for Android was spotted with a floating keyboard feature. That feature is designed to l...

What just happened? Have you ever found yourself wishing there was a way to keep track of certain key points you wanted to mention while writing a lengthy Word document? If so, Microsoft has you covered now - if you"re an Office 365 user, you can now enjoy this benefits. Microsoft has announced that it has released the new capability in beta designed to automatically search for texts in a document containing "todo:" or "<< insert something here >>". Users will then be able to view a complete list of to-dos and click on each item to go to the appropriate portion in that document. The to-do feature, is an AI-powered tool that allows users to easily pick up where they left off in a document. Microsoft says that most Word users add a placeholder in a document to mark an area they need to return to later on. This enables them to keep working without breaking their flow, but isn’t ideal for managing a document. The new AI-based tool automatically creates...

Wish there was a way to be alerted the second that banging album you’ve been anticipating drops? Now Alexa can help you stay up to date with your favourite bands and musicians. Over the weekend, Amazon Music announced the New Release Notifications feature , which lets you follow an artist and then get a notification every time they release a new song or album. The notification will appear on your Amazon Music mobile app or as a yellow light ring on your Amazon Echo device. How it works To follow an artist on your Echo device you can say “Alexa, follow <an artist> on Amazon Music” or saying “Alexa, let me know when <an artist> has new music” to an Alexa-enabled device within earshot. You don’t necessarily even need to know the name of the artist; when a tune’s playing via Alexa, saying “Alexa, follow this artist on Amazon Music” or “Alexa, let me know when this artist has a new album” will add the musical g...

Instagram is taking action against trolls and bullies. The social media giant has rolled out new machine learning tools that are able to "proactively detect" bullying in photos and captions. “While the majority of photos shared on Instagram are positive and bring people joy, occasionally a photo is shared that is unkind or unwelcome,” Instagram’s new lead Adam Mosseri wrote in a blog post . “We are now using machine learning technology to proactively detect bullying in photos and their captions and send them to our Community Operations team to review.” One of Instagram’s new tools is bullying detection in captions and photos. Any unkind posts that are detected through the new machine learning technology will be sent to Instagram’s Community Operations team for human review. Users will also be empowered to select the comments that appear during their live videos, meaning they can hide and filter out any bullying messages—This feature works ...

The Portal is a smooth new camcorder like device which has a screen that makes chats with family and friends look incredible. On Monday, Facebook launched the $200 Portal, the first customer gadget from social media giant. The bread toaster size video camera, alongside a bigger $350 version called Portal+, is a blend of a video camera and smart speaker. [xyz-ihs snippet="FB-Portal"] The device looks very much like the Amazon Echo Show and does just about what Facebook is trying to achieve with its Portal. That said, the new Portal uses the Amazon Alexa voice command and other artificial intelligence services like answering questions and playing a specific music for you from your playlist. The unique thing about Facebook"s gadget is the tech it uses to make the video calls look great. Consider it an individual cinematographer: A 12-megapixel camera — equal to most telephones — distinguishes the state of individuals inside its 140-degree field of view and dish and zooms to...

Looks like giving Google Assistant a redesigned UI wasn’t enough for Google this week, as it’s giving its digital assistant another feature to add to the roster. Google Assistant can now help you book a ride-hailing service and get a car sent your way, but it’ll still need some help at the end. You can start things off with your voice easily enough, and Google Assistant will show you the information from within the app itself, rather than forcing you to switch to Google Maps to show off the pertinent details.           Just say something like, “Hey Google, book a ride to” and inform the digital personal assistant of your destination. Once that’s done it will show you ride-hailing prices so you can compare before you summon a car. Those price estimations will show what Uber, Lyft, GO-JEK, Ola, Grab, and “many more” services, and the feature will show wait times for each of those options as well....

With lots of people who are fond of the social media platform, WhatsApp. The Pan-African Financial Institution, United Bank for Africa (UBA) has announced the commencement of its chat banker ‘Leo’ on its platform. Now customers who are users and lovers of the app can now can perform basic banking services including checking their balances on the go, transferring funds, paying bills, among other services.   The Group Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer, UBA, Mr. Kennedy Uzoka, who expressed excitement about the development remarked that the bank is continuously working in line with customers’ demand to ensure that banking services are made convenient and without stress. Read more: UBA Deploys The Service Of A Chat Bot Via Messenger According to a blog post by the company He also added: “This only goes to show that our resolve in continuing to deploy innovative solutions that place customers first, using cutting edge technology for their collectiv...

Google Assistant just got even smarter. At the IFA tech show in Berlin, Google announced that the Google Assistant is now bilingual, making it the first voice assistant to be able to seamlessly switch between two different languages. Starting today, Google Assistant"s new bilingual support should make it more useful in homes where family members speak two languages—meaning you can now speak to the Google Assistant (on phones and smart speakers) in any two of the following languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, or Japanese (more will be supported in the coming months). Users will have to select which two languages they want their Google Assistant to understand. For example, if your family speaks English and German, you can ask the Google Assistant questions in either of those two languages interchangeably. Also, For user who have Google Home and a Chromecast linked to your TV, you"ll now be able to see more visual results on the big screen. The Assistant now di...

If you’ve ever had an MRI, you know it can be a long, drawn-out, and very loud process. Given that you wouldn’t even be having an MRI unless you and your doctors were concerned about something, it can be stressful–not to mention claustrophobic–to be jammed into the machine’s chamber for up to an hour. Facebook and New York University (NYU) have announced a partnership in which they are exploring how artificial intelligence can be used to make MRI scans 10x faster—The “fast MRI” research partnership, unveiled on Monday, is between the Facebook AI Research (FAIR) group and the Department of Radiology in New York University School of Medicine. The aim of the project is to see if AI can be used to reconstruct MR images in new, faster ways. The NYU researchers began work on using AI to speed up MRIs in 2016. At around the same time, Facebook’s AI Research team (FAIR) was looking for ways to impact real-world AI applications. NYU’s ...

Google is putting its AI to work to make you a better writer. The company is finally adding a grammar check feature to Google Docs — one that will be able to address even complicated grammatical errors. The new feature was announced at the Google Cloud Next conference , alongside updates to its automated email-writing features. Google Docs, the company’s online word processing service, enables any Google account owner to create documents for free. The platform is fairly robust, offering many of the basic features needed for document creation and collaboration. How it works The most used extension spell-checking tool is Grammarly . Well, Grammarly is getting some competition in the form of a new machine learning-based grammar checker from Google that’s soon going live in Google Docs.  The new update which uses artificial intelligence to identify grammar issues and mistakes, such as using “a” instead of “an,” as well as more complex issues, s...

Google Duo is a simple video calling app that brings you closer to your friends and family with just a click away, —and it allows you leave a video message if the person you"re calling can"t pick up. In an update introduced by Google, Assistant will now be able to make video calls, including international ones on Google"s video chat mobile app "Duo". The feature would enable users to make video calls from their phones, contacts and messages apps using the mobile video chat app. As reported by Android Police .  "If you use the Google Assistant: You can start a "Duo" video call by saying or typing, "Video call (name)," Google wrote in a post. The update was released on the latest version of "Duo" for both, Android and iOS-based smartphones and tablets. Users using Android 8.0 and up would have to sync their "Duo" settings using the "Account Sync" option on their Google Assistant. The settings have started sh...

Tom Gruber, who served as head of Siri"s Advanced Development group and was one of Siri"s original co-founders, has left Apple. According to a reports by The Information —His departure from the company was confirmed by an Apple spokesperson, who told The Information that he was retiring to pursue personal interests in photography and ocean conservation. Gruber, along with Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer, co-founded Siri Inc, the company that created the original Siri app, which Apple purchased in 2010 for $200 million. Siri was introduced in the iPhone 4S the following year, with its then-unique combination of speech recognition and “assistant” features. The incredibility of Siri lasted just a few years, but Siri has since then lost its ground to rivals like Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant, till now is yet to be found.                                         ...

Surprising but let’s say is about time. As announced today, Facebook has acquired the team behind Bloomsbury AI, a London-based start-up, as a way of combating fake news on its platform, which was first reported by TechCrunch . Founded in 2015, Bloomsbury AI specialises in natural language processing technology, and has developed an AI called "Cape," which can read documents and then answer questions about their contents. Facebook said in its announcement. “Their expertise will strengthen Facebook"s efforts in natural language processing research, and help us further understand natural language and its applications." According to a post from the official Facebook Academics page , the company says Bloomsbury’s “expertise will strengthen Facebook’s efforts in natural language processing research, and help us further understand natural language and its applications.” In other words, as Facebook continues to hand more platform moderation duties over to a...

SAS urges organizations to embrace Analytics and Artificial Intelligence Lagos, Nigeria: 28 th June 2018 In a rapidly changing business environment, businesses are under pressure to not only comply with constantly changing regulations but also to modernize their processes and systems. The purpose is to help reduce compliance costs, improve efficiency and effectiveness, stay competitive and drive innovation whilst looking for better ways to serve their customers. Against this backdrop, businesses will become more successful based on how they use data, analytics and collaboration in the new analytics economy. This was the thrust of the conversations made at the SAS Road to Digital Transformation and Artificial Intelligence, AI Showcase in Lagos recently. Other topics treated at the forum include the path to digital transformation - how to prioritize data, analytics and automation processes, and using analytics to accelerate your organization’s path to value as well as demonstration...

Gmail has dozens of new features to help users manage their inbox, thanks to new Google updates. The search-engine giants have improved Gmail services, creating a number of new tricks to tidy up your emails. Google has simplified the basics of email management to make it easier to send and receive emails. The company announced an update to its Gmail app for iOS that lets users limit notifications to "high priority" emails only. The new feature uses Gmail"s machine learning and artificial capabilities to identify emails you may want to read first. Some people don"t get very much email each day, so things remain pretty manageable. However, if your inbox is regularly hammered all day long, especially by unimportant messages, the notifications it can produce are nothing short of infuriating. The Gmail team is building a very simple and obvious solution that will cut down on some of that notification spam. “Notifications are only useful if you have time to read them—and ...

Africa’s nascent artificial intelligence sector just got its biggest boost from Google which is opening its first Africa AI research center in Accra, Ghana’s capital. In the last few years, Google has made it clear that they are an AI forward company. Their software products have AI sprinkled over them like Google Photos, Google Assistant, Google Camera inside the Pixel and so much more. Google AI is the branch that deals with artificial intelligence research that would advance the status quo and be applied to products. They have research centres around the world and today, they have announced a new one that is a first for Africa. Today Google has announced that they have a Google AI research centre which will open later this year in Accra, Ghana. They will work together with top machine learning researchers and engineers in this new centre dedicated to AI research and its applications. The new centre will now join the other Google Ai research locations which include Beijin...

  Uber may be able to tell when you"ve had a few too many drinks. The ridesharing giant has explored identifying drunk passengers with artificial intelligence. According to a patent application filed by the company , Uber is planning to use machine learning to better understand the “state” of a passenger when they request a ride. The patent—which is pretty vague as to its purpose and full of a whole lot of technobabble describing how the system would theoretically work—lays out a system in which Uber could analyse how people typically interact with the app and determine if they are behaving in an “unusual manner,” whatever that might mean. The patent said: “The system receives the trip request from a user and generates a prediction about the current state of the user using the computer model. “To predict user state, the system compares data associated with the trip request to data about past trip requests submitted by the user. ...

Over the years, distraction from our smartphones when driving has been a major problem, and now it seem Apple wants to solve this problem to some extent. “Do Not Disturb”, a feature introduced as part of iOS 11, was introduced to help reduce the distraction from message notification and calls while a user’s is driving lesson during workout. Apple published a patent application on  Thursday to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for "Intelligent Digital Assistant for “ ending incoming calls”. The application is aimed at allowing Siri or any another digital assistant device fix the problem of distractions while driving by declining calls and explain in a message why users can pick accept the calls. According to the application, the process will happen when an incoming video or voice call is detected, during that process the Siri or digital assistant devices will try and gather as much information about the user"s location or situation whether he is on ...

Google News a real-time, “360 degree view” of news stories and topics. Announced as part of the Google I/O conference last week, the company made its plan known of the removal of the Google play newsstand app and replace it with Google News app . Google News app utilises real-time artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to analyse and organise breaking news. The new version of its News app is now available for iOS and Android devices in 127 countries. The app opens with a "For You" section that offers a brief overview and like other curation-based apps, it brings you a brief look at five stories based on your past reading interests; this is a combination of top headlines, local stories, and topics that Google has detected an interest in on your part. Using machine learning capabilities, the app helps analyse the headlines and puts stories about the same subject matter together into "newscasts." This helps you quickly get up to date about a particular stor...