AI Weekly: Voice is the killer interface

Author: Blaise Zerega / Source: VentureBeat

This week’s news reminds me how much fun it is to be surprised by technology. Bonjour, Snips! Yesterday, the Paris-based AI startup raised $13 million, on top of an earlier $8 million investment, for technology that let developers put a voice assistant on nearly any device.

Add this to recent advances from Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple Siri, and it’s obvious that voice is becoming the new interface much sooner than many people, including yours truly, ever anticipated.

These are exponential leaps forward in the steady progress from command-based interfaces to conversational ones. Instead of screens and devices, we’re now talking to smart speakers and smartphones. It’s as if the machines themselves are disappearing — the “thing” we’re conversing with is some crazy fantastic blend of artificial intelligence, super computer, bandwidth, and what have you, that we never see.

What’s more, the idea of a price war between the major smart speakers makers now looks more likely, especially if new, low-priced competitors enter the market. One day, the notion of having just one device, say an Amazon Echo, in your home, in, say the kitchen, will be as outdated as a rotary telephone.

For AI coverage, send news tips to Blair Hanley Frank and Khari Johnson, and guest post submissions to John Brandon — and be sure to bookmark our AI Channel.

Thanks for reading,
Blaise Zerega
Editor in Chief

P.S. Please enjoy this video of Julian Assange discussing “AI-controlled social media” at the Meltdown Festival, June 11, 2017.

Facebook hires Siri natural language understanding chief from Apple

Apple’s Siri team lost its head of natural language understanding this month. Rushin Shah left his post as a senior machine learning manager on Apple’s virtual assistant to join Facebook’s Applied Machine Learning team, where he’ll be working on natural language and dialog understanding, according to a LinkedIn post. Shah will be based out of […]