Tag: AI NextCon

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Amazon widens Alexa AI assistant’s repertoire

Amazon Echo and Alexa
Amazon is getting ready to expand the range of features available in third-party skills for its Alexa AI voice assistant. (Amazon via YouTube)

G’day, Alexa: Amazon’s digital voice assistant is getting an Australian accent for its Down Under debut this week, but there’s more in store for users around the world.

Thanks to SSML, or speech synthesis markup language, Alexa developers can already make an Amazon Echo or other voice-controlled device whisper, or speak faster or slower, or speak with a super-cheery voice. And Alexa’s users can change her speaking style to British English, or German, or Japanese.

Like Google’s AI assistant, Alexa can now associate voices with specific people: Users can follow the instructions in the Alexa mobile app to train devices so that they distinguish your voice from others.

Outside developers will be getting access to that feature, known as the Your Voice API. That means voice identification could soon be popping up in third-party skills, said Nikko Strom, a senior principal scientist at Amazon and founding member of the Alexa team.

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ClusterOne will build its AI platform in Seattle

Oren Etzioni
Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, asks attendees at the AI NextCon conference in Bellevue, Wash., to raise their hands if they think artificial intelligence will someday pose a threat to humanity. Some put their hands up. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

A California-based AI startup called ClusterOne is moving its headquarters to Seattle to become the latest venture to benefit from the incubator program at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

“Allen AI makes a lot of sense for us, because they have the best researchers in AI,” ClusterOne co-founder and CEO Mohsen Hejrati told GeekWire. “They are investors and incubators, but more importantly, they are great partners in research … the best partners we could get.”

First word of the team-up came today from Oren Etzioni, the institute’s CEO, during the AI NextCon conference in Bellevue, Wash.

“Today, we’re just announcing for the first time that a company called ClusterOne, which was founded by some ex-Google folks in California — they’re moving to Seattle, joining our incubator,” Etzioni told the crowd.

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Microsoft puts AI into software seamlessly

Microsoft's Steve Guggenheimer
Steve Guggenheimer, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for AI business, talks about the company’s approach at the AI NextCon conference in Bellevue, Wash. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

BELLEVUE, Wash. — Don’t expect Microsoft’s consumer software to hype its artificial-intelligence features. For the most part, the AI smarts are under the hood.

“If you do a good job infusing AI into your products, your customers don’t know you’ve done that. The products just work better,” Steve Guggenheimer, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for AI business, told attendees at the AI NextCon conference here today. “You don’t actually go do a bunch of advertising and say, ‘Office, Now With AI!’ That’s not how it works.”

But rest assured, it’s there.

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