Huawei has announced the Kirin 980 mobile processor, which promises a considerable increase in speed and efficiency over not only the old Kirin 970, but the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 as well.
The Google Assistant just got more useful for multilingual families. Starting today, you’ll be able to set up two languages in the Google Home app and the Assistant on your phone and Google Home will then happily react to your commands in both English and Spanish, for example.
Today’s announcement doesn’t exactly come as a surprise, given that Google announced at its I/O developer conference earlier this year that it was working on this feature. It’s nice to see that this year, Google is rolling out its I/O announcements well before next year’s event. That hasn’t always been the case in the past.
Currently, the Assistant is only bilingual and it still has a few languages to learn. But for the time being, you’ll be able to set up any language pair that includes English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Japanese. More pairs are coming in the future and Google also says it is working on trilingual support, too.
Google tells me this feature will work with all Assistant surfaces that support the languages you have selected. That’s basically all phones and smart speakers with the Assistant, but not the new smart displays, as they only support English right now.
While this may sound like an easy feature to implement, Google notes this was a multi-year effort. To build a system like this, you have to be able to identify multiple languages, understand them and then make sure you present the right experience to the user. And you have to do all of this within a few seconds.
Google says its language identification model (LangID) can now distinguish between 2,000 language pairs. With that in place, the company’s researchers then had to build a system that could turn spoken queries into actionable results in all supported languages. “When the user stops speaking, the model has not only determined what language was being spoken, but also what was said,” Google’s VP Johan Schalkwyk and Google Speech engineer Lopez Moreno write in today’s announcement. “Of course, this process requires a sophisticated architecture that comes with an increased processing cost and the possibility of introducing unnecessary latency.”
If you are in Germany, France or the U.K., you’ll now also be able to use the bilingual assistant on a Google Home Max. That high-end version of the Google Home family is going on sale in those countries today.
In addition, Google also today announced that a number of new devices will soon support the Assistant, including the tado° thermostats, a number of new security and smart home hubs (though not, of course, Amazon’s own Ring Alarm), smart bulbs and appliances, including the iRobot Roomba 980, 896 and 676 vacuums. Who wants to have to push a button on a vacuum, after all.
Artificial intelligence is proving to be a very capable tool when it comes to manipulating videos of people. Face-swapping deepfakes have been the most visible example, but new applications are being found every day. The latest? Call it deepfakes for dancing. It uses AI to read someone’s dance moves and copy them on to a target body.
The actual science here was done by a quartet of researchers from UC Berkley. As they describe in a paper posted on arXiV, their system is comprised of a number of discrete steps. First, a video of the target is recorded, and a sub-program turns their movements into a stick figure. (Quite of a lot of video is needed to get a good-quality transfer: around 20 minutes of footage at 120 frames per second.)...
We all know Tim Burton for his special dark and gothic style, but apart from his Batman movies (1989, 1992,) I’ve never seen the man create art that focuses on superheroes. But now, thanks to artist Andrew Tarusov, we now know what superheroes would look like when drawn using the style of “The Nightmare Before Christmas.) Check it out!
And here’s a video presenting some of the artist’s Disney-themed work:
Ever felt like you needed to have so much control over the Universe that with a swift snap of your fingers, you could wipe out half it’s population (dated that guy once…)? Well now you can. thanks to this amazing electronic, articulated Infinity gauntlet! Let your inner Thanos rage out while you imagine your ennemies being vaporized into thin air!
-Articulated fingers with fist-lock display mode
-Movie-inspired sound effects
-Pulsating stone glow light effects
-Premium roleplay articulated electronic fist
-Collector-inspired attention to detail
[Avengers Marvel Legends Series Infinity Gauntlet Articulated Electronic Fist]
ModiFace, la société de réalité augmentée et d'intelligence artificielle récemment acquise par le groupe L'Oréal, annonce une collaboration de long terme avec Facebook afin de créer de nouvelles expériences de réalité augmentée intégrées dans "Facebook Camera".
Elon Musk is unraveling before our very eyes. The sleepless nights he’s spent at the Tesla Gigafactory operating woefully behind schedule; his rather unpredictable behavior on Twitter that’s brought him, and his company, under federal scrutiny. It’s all making the CEO of one of the world’s most innovative car companies more of a liability than an asset.
Musk is giving us a better picture of the toll this has all taken on him. In a recent interview with the New York Times, Musk was frequently “choked up” when he told reporters about how his personal life has suffered because of his (admittedly ambitious) work. “There were times when I didn’t leave the factory for three or four days — days when I didn’t go outside,” he tells reporters over an hour long call. “This has really come at the expense of seeing my kids. And seeing friends.” And he’s still not getting enough sleep. “It is often a choice of no sleep or Ambien.”
The interview comes after a very rough couple of weeks for both Musk and his electric car company. To recap, Musk tweeted about plans for taking Tesla private at $420 a share (about a 20 percent bump over stock prices at the time), with “funding secured.”
That funding was supposed to come from a Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund, but Reuters revealed that the funding was anything but secure — the Saudis have “shown no interest so far in financing Tesla Inc,” despite acquiring a 5 percent stake earlier this year.
To add to Musk’s troubles, his rash tweets — that even surprised the company’s board and made stocks go crazy before they were frozen — landed him in hot water with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which is formally investigating whether Musk manipulated markets illegally.
Musk, though, pointed to a single source of all his suffering:it’s the short sellers. You may have heard of “buy low, sell high.” In short-selling, you are reversing this approach in day trading — you sell high and buy low. You borrow shares through a broker to sell high, then buying them back after the stock price falls. It only works when a company’s stock falls, though. So short-sellers only benefit when the company — and Musk himself — fails.
In his Times interview, Musk says he’s been suffering “at least a few months of extreme torture from the short-sellers, who are desperately pushing a narrative that will possibly result in Tesla’s destruction.”
Short-sellers have long been a thorn in Musk’s side. It’s not clear why they’re bothering Musk now more than before, but it might be because Tesla’s difficult year (Model 3 production delays and Model X crash that has dropped stock prices since March) made more short-sellers turn to Tesla, or because Musk’s own activities (say, a positive quarterly earnings call) have cost the short-sellers huge sums. And his often emotional response to short-sellers hasn’t encouraged them to back off.
Musk isn’t taking their attacks sitting down, though. Taking Tesla private would finally put an end to short-sellers — you can’t freely sell and buy private company stock — and allow Musk to finally get some much needed sleep.
But it’s not clear that Tesla will privatize anytime soon, and it won’t be easy if it does happen — the sheer uncertainty and SEC investigation are bound to scare off investors.
One way to pull it off? Hiring number two executive who could take some of that pressure off of his shoulders. An unstable Musk who “alternated between laughter and tears” might not be the most attractive to investors. But an even-keeled, level-headed, well-rested number two could help Musk.
While Musk says there’s “no active search right now” according to the interview, Tesla has tried to poach high-ranking executives in the past, including Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg.
For now, it looks like Musk is staying in his job, despite speculation earlier this year that he’d be ousted (and, apparently, his own desire to leave): “If you have anyone who can do a better job, please let me know. They can have the job. Is there someone who can do the job better? They can have the reins right now,” Musk tells the Times.
But there are other ways Musk could rest easier at night. He could care less about those pesky short-sellers. Or he could heed the Tesla board and stop tweeting.
Humans already find it unnerving enough when extremely alien-looking robots are kicked and interfered with, so one can only imagine how much worse it will be when they make unbroken eye contact and mirror your expressions while you heap abuse on them. This is the future we have selected.
The Simulative Emotional Expression Robot, or SEER, was on display at SIGGRAPH here in Vancouver, and it’s definitely an experience. The robot, a creation of Takayuki Todo, is a small humanoid head and neck that responds to the nearest person by making eye contact and imitating their expression.
It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s pretty complex to execute well, which, despite a few glitches, SEER managed to do.
At present it alternates between two modes: imitative and eye contact. Both, of course, rely on a nearby (or, one can imagine, built-in) camera that recognizes and tracks the features of your face in real time.
In imitative mode the positions of the viewer’s eyebrows and eyelids, and the position of their head, are mirrored by SEER. It’s not perfect — it occasionally freaks out or vibrates because of noisy face data — but when it worked it managed rather a good version of what I was giving it. Real humans are more expressive, naturally, but this little face with its creepily realistic eyes plunged deeply into the uncanny valley and nearly climbed the far side.
Eye contact mode has the robot moving on its own while, as you might guess, making uninterrupted eye contact with whoever is nearest. It’s a bit creepy, but not in the way that some robots are — when you’re looked at by inadequately modeled faces, it just feels like bad VFX. In this case it was more the surprising amount of empathy you suddenly feel for this little machine.
That’s largely due to the delicate, childlike, neutral sculpting of the face and highly realistic eyes. If an Amazon Echo had those eyes, you’d never forget it was listening to everything you say. You might even tell it your problems.
This is just an art project for now, but the tech behind it is definitely the kind of thing you can expect to be integrated with virtual assistants and the like in the near future. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad one I guess we’ll find out together.
Imgur user doomhandle build this gigantic ISD Tyrant Star Destroyer using approximately 35,000 Lego bricks! This thing is over 56 inches (1.4m) long and weighs about 70 lbs (32kg.) You can see a comparison between doomhandle’s model and the original ISD LEGO Tyrant set (75055) above.
Here’s a video walkthrough showing off the ship’s interior levels, crew, etc.:
A Florida-based startup has started taking pre-orders for its new smart pantry, the WePlenish Java Smart Container, which can automatically order snacks and coffee when supplies start to run low.
Deepen the bond you have with your canine companion with this dog thoughts translator device. It analyzes animal thought patterns to translate their brain activity into human language. It’s mostly thoughts of eating cat poop and chasing squirrels though.
Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro makes robots in Osaka. His latest robot, Ibuki, is one for the nightmare catalog: It’s a robotic 10-year-old boy that can move on little tank treads and has a soft rubbery face and hands.
The robot has complete vision routes that can scan for faces and it has a sort of half-track system for moving around. It has “involuntary” motions like blinking and little head bobs but is little more than a proof-of-concept right now, especially considering its weird robo-skull is transparent.
“An Intelligent Robot Infrastructure is an interaction-based infrastructure. By interacting with robots, people can establish nonverbal communications with the artificial systems. That is, the purpose of a robot is to exist as a partner and to have valuable interactions with people,” wrote Ishiguro. “Our objective is to develop technologies for the new generation information infrastructures based on Computer Vision, Robotics and Artificial Intelligence.”
Ishiguro is a roboticist who plays on the borders of humanity. He made a literal copy of himself in 2010. His current robots are even more realistic, and Ibuki’s questing face and delicate hands are really very cool. That said, expect those soft rubber hands to one day close around your throat when the robots rise up to take back what is theirs. Good luck, humans!
If you’re totally stumped on a page of Where’s Waldo and ready to file a missing persons report, you’re in luck. Now there’s a robot called There’s Waldo that’ll find him for you, complete with a silicone hand that points him out.
Built by creative agency Redpepper, There’s Waldo zeroes in and finds Waldo with a sniper-like accuracy. The metal robotic arm is a Raspberry Pi-controlled uArm Swift Pro which is equipped with a Vision Camera Kit that allows for facial recognition. The camera takes a photo of the page, which then uses OpenCV to find the possible Waldo faces in the photo. The faces are then sent to be analyzed by Google’s AutoML Vision service, which has been trained on photos of Waldo. If the robot determines a match with 95...
Ever wished for a pair of extra arms, a third leg, or a sixth finger on each hand? Check out this list of amazing robo-prosthetics which promise to take your multitasking to the next level.
Peut-être avez vous déjà vu des vidéos de gens dansant et chantant n'importe où, sur une musique bien connue. C'est ce que proposait le service Musical.ly. Au passé, parce que le service a disparu !
Do you want to share your life with a virtual character? If so, then your dream has taken one step closer to reality thanks to Gatebox. Like Alexa, it will control your smart home; but the character that lives inside the Gatebox has the ability to recognize, interact, and even celebrate with you.
2018 marks the 50th anniversary of Stanley Kubrick’s classic science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey. To commemorate the occasion, Master Replicas Group has opened preorders for its replica of the film’s iconic computer HAL-9000.
The company announced earlier this year that it would produce the replica, which would also double as a speaker. At the time, Master Replicas Group CEO Steve Dymszo told The Verge that the prop would use Amazon’s Echo technology to turn it into a functional virtual assistant, and the company would begin taking preorders in April, with shipping occurring this fall. That timeline seems to have slipped: Master Replicas Group says that it redesigned the entire device several months ago. With preorders starting...
An Alpha Black Lotus game card just sold on eBay for $88,000, proving that collectible game cards from Magic: The Gathering continue to appreciate in value. The card's scarcity and Gem Mint condition led to its record-breaking sale price.
Magic Leap just updated its developer documentation and a host of new details and imagery are being spread around on Reddit and Twitter, sharing more specifics on how the company’s Lumin OS will look like on their upcoming Magic Leap One device.
It’s mostly a large heaping of nitty-gritty details, but we also get a more prescient view into how Magic Leap sees interactions with their product looking and the directions that developers are being encouraged to move in. Worth noting off the bat that these gifs/images appear to be mock-ups or screenshots rather than images shot directly through Magic Leap tech.
Alright, first, this is what the Magic Leap One home screen will apparently look like, it’s worth noting that it appears that Magic Leap will have some of its own stock apps on the device, which was completely expected but they haven’t discussed much about.
Also worth noting is that Magic Leap’s operating system by and large looks like most other operating systems, they seem to be well aware that flat interfaces are way easier to navigate so you’re not going to be engaging with 3D assets just for the sake of doing so.
Here’s a look at a media gallery app on Magic Leap One.
Here’s a look at an avatar system.
The company seems to be distinguishing between two basic app types for developers: immersive apps and landscape apps. Landscape apps like what you see in the image above, appear to be Magic Leap’s version of 2D where interfaces are mostly flat but have some depth and live inside a box called a prism that fits spatially into your environment. It seems that you’ll be able to have several of these running simultaneously.
Immersive apps, on the other hand, like this game title, Dr. Grordbort— which Magic Leap has been teasing for years — respond to the geometry of the space that you are in and is thus called an immersive app.
Here’s a video of an immersive experience in action.
Moving beyond apps, the company also had a good deal to share about how you interact with what’s happening in the headset.
We got a look at some hand controls and what that may look like.
When it comes to text input, an area where AR/VR systems have had some struggles, it looks like you’ll have an appropriate amount of options. Magic Leap will have a companion smartphone app that you can type into, you can connect a bluetooth keyboard and there will also be an onscreen keyboard with dictation capabilities.
One of the big highlights of Magic Leap tech is that you’ll be able to share perspectives of these apps in a multi-player experience which we now know is called “casting,” apps that utilize these feature will just have a button that you can press to share an experience with a contact. No details on what the setup process for this looks like beyond that though.
Those are probably the most interesting insights, although there’s plenty of other stuff in the Creator Portal, but also here are a few other images to keep you going.
[gallery ids="1681679,1681678,1681680,1681705"]
It really seems like the startup is finally getting ready to showcase something. The company says that its device will begin shipping this summer and is already in developer hands. Based on what Magic Leap has shown here, the interface looks like it’ll feel very familiar as opposed to some other AR interfaces that have adopted a pretty heavy-handed futuristic look.
Lip syncing for computer animated characters has long been simplified. You draw a set of lip shapes for vowels and other sounds your character makes and let the computer interpolate how to go from one shape to the next. But with physical, real world puppets, all those movements have to be done manually, frame-by-frame. Or do they?
He toyed around with a number of approaches for making the lip mechanism before coming up with one that worked the way he wanted. The lips are shaped using guitar wire soldered to other wires going to servos further back in the head. Altogether there are four servos for the lips and one more for the jaw. There isn’t much sideways movement but it does enough and lets the brain fill in the rest.
On the software side, he borrows heavily from the tools used for lip syncing computer-drawn characters. He created virtual versions of the five servo motors in Adobe Animate and manipulates them to define the different lip shapes. Animate then does the interpolation between the different shapes, producing the servo positions needed for each frame. He uses an AS3 script to send those positions off to an Arduino. An Arduino sketch then uses the Firmata library to receive the positions and move the servos. The result is entirely convincing as you can see in the trailer below. We’ve also included a video which summarizes the iterations he went through to get to the finished Billy Whiskers or just check out his detailed website.
[Jame’s] work shows that there many ways to do stop motion animation, perhaps a part of what makes it so much fun. One of those ways is to 3D print a separate object for each character shape. Another is to make paper cutouts and move them around, which is what [Terry Gilliam] did for the Monty Python movies. And then there’s what many of us did when we first got our hands on a camera, move random objects around on our parent’s kitchen table and shoot them one frame at a time.
YOU ARE NOT A MATCH. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) just spent $12.33 to test a system that could quite literally cost people their lives. On Thursday, the nonprofit organization, which focuses on preserving the rights of U.S. citizens, published a blog post detailing its test of Rekognition, a facial identification tool developed and sold by Amazon.
Using Rekognition’s default setting of 80 percent confidence (meaning the system was 80 percent certain it was correct when it signaled a match), the ACLU scanned a database of 25,000 publicly available mugshots looking to match them to photos of every sitting representative in Congress, in both the Senate and the House of Representatives.
Rekognition matched 28 Congresspeople to mugshots. It was wrong, but it found matches anyway.
THE POLICE AND P.O.C. Not only did Rekognition mistakenly believe that those 28 Congresspeople were the same people in the mugshots, the people it wrongfully matched were disproportionately people of color; while people of color make up just 20 percent of Congress, according to the ACLU, they accounted for 39 percent of the false matches.
“People of color are already disproportionately harmed by police practices, and it’s easy to see how Rekognition could exacerbate that,” wrote the ACLU in its post. “An identification — whether accurate or not — could cost people their freedom or even their lives.”
AMAZON’S RESPONSE. An Amazon spokesperson told The Verge that poor calibration was likely the reason Rekognition falsely matched so many members of Congress. “While 80 percent confidence is an acceptable threshold for photos of hot dogs, chairs, animals, or other social media use cases, it wouldn’t be appropriate for identifying individuals with a reasonable level of certainty,” said the spokesperson. They said Amazon recommends at least a 95 percent confidence threshold for any situation where a match might have significant consequences, such as when used by law enforcement agencies.
HALT! While anyone can use the system relatively cheaply (Rekognition, according to its web site, “charges you only for the images processed, minutes of video processed, and faces stored”), like the ACLU did, Amazon is actively marketing Rekognition to government and law enforcement agencies. Several are already using the service.
The ACLU isn’t the only organization actively petitioning against this use; Amazon shareholders and employees have urged the company to stop providing Rekognition to government agencies. So have dozens of civil rights groups and tens of thousands members of the public.
So far, Amazon has not indicated that it plans to comply with these requests. But perhaps, if members of Congress see just how flawed the system really is, they’ll be compelled to take action, placing a halt on any law enforcement use of facial recognition software, as the ACLU requests in its blog post.
Posted by Mary Chen, Product Marketing Manager, and Ralfi Nahmias, Product Manager, Dialogflow
Today at Google Cloud Next '18, Dialogflow is introducing several new beta features to expand conversational capabilities for customer support and contact centers. Let's take a look at how three of these features can be used with the Google Assistant to improve the customer care experience for your Actions.
Create Actions smarter and faster with Knowledge Connectors Beta
Building conversational Actions for content-heavy use cases, such as FAQ or knowledge base answers, is difficult. Such content is often dense and unstructured, making accurate intent modeling time-consuming and prone to error. Dialogflow's Knowledge Connectors feature simplifies the development process by understanding and automatically curating questions and responses from the content you provide. It can add thousands of extracted responses directly to your conversational Action built with Dialogflow, giving you more time for the fun parts – building rich and engaging user experiences.
Understand user texts better with Automatic Spelling Correction
When users interact with the Google Assistant through text, it's common and natural to make spelling and grammar mistakes. When mistypes occur, Actions may not understand the user's intent, resulting in a poor followup experience. With Dialogflow's Automatic Spelling Correction, Actions built with Dialogflow can automatically correct spelling mistakes, which significantly improves intent and entity matching. Automatic Spelling Correction uses similar technology to what's used in Google Search and other Google products.
Enable Automatic Spelling Correction to improve intent and entity matching
Assign a phone number to your Action with Phone Gateway Beta
Your Action can now be used as a virtual phone agent with Dialogflow's new Phone Gateway integration. Assign a working phone number to your Action built with Dialogflow, and it can start taking calls immediately. Phone Gateway allows you to easily implement virtual agents without needing to stitch together multiple services required for building phone applications.
Set up Phone Gateway in 3 easy steps
Dialogflow's Knowledge Connectors, Automatic Spelling Correction, and Phone Gateway are free for Standard Edition agents up to certain limits; for enterprise needs, see here for more options.
We look forward to the Actions you'll build with these new Dialogflow features. Give the features a try with the Cloud Next FAQ Action we made:
Fujikura Kasei Co., Ltd. is a polymer resin manufacturer, they have challenged innovative technological development as a chemical manufacturer and developed high value-added products including DOTITE, electrically conductive paste, since its foundation.
StretchSense creates polymer soft sensing arrays as stretchy sensors for Smart Clothing. It's a 7 layer capacitive sensor measuring any movement. They are over 130 people in the factory who can create any garment size, with high consistency, low cost.
IDTechEx Research Director Dr Khasha Ghaffarzadeh, Interviews Dr Andy Goodwin, Advanced Materials Advisor, and Warwick Grigor, Non-Executive Chairman of First Graphene on their fire retardant additive at the IDTechEx Show! Europe 2018.
First Graphene is an advanced materials company seeking to position itself in the lowest cost decile of global graphene suppliers. It has developed an environmentally sound and safe method of converting its supplies of ultra-high grade Sri Lankan graphite into the lowest cost highest quality graphene, in bulk quantities. In so doing it is addressing the three greatest impediments to the commercialisation of graphene, being reliable quality at realistic prices in sufficient volumes to facilitate the development of applications in modern materials, energy storage devices, coatings and polymers. It aims to use these competitive advantages to access new technologies and processes and in turn gain maximum leverage to the entire graphene supply chain, from sourcing the raw material to end use, with development of associated intellectual property for licencing and sales.
For more information about First Graphene, visit
Learn more about the IDTechEx Show! Berlin: http://IDTechEx.com/Europe
Learn more about the IDTechEx Show! USA: http://IDTechEx.com/USA
Printed Electronics World - The source for global news on printed, organic and flexible electronics, interpreted by experts: http://printedelectronicsworld.com
Amoureux de maquettes et de la saga Star Wars, l’internaute “Plasticstarwars” s’amuse à reproduire avec beaucoup de réalisme les explosions des vaisseaux des films en utilisant… du coton et des LEDs.
Quand on a de l’imagination et une bonne dose de créativité, on n’a pas forcément besoin de grand chose pour produire des effets spéciaux impressionnants. Et ce n’est pas l’artiste que nous allons vous présenter aujourd’hui qui va venir vous dire le contraire. Connu sur le web sous le pseudonyme Plasticstarwars, ce créatif est, vous vous en doutez, un véritable passionné de la saga de science-fiction imaginée par George Lucas.
Véritable amoureux de maquettes et de cosplays Star Wars en tous genres, Plasticstarwars fabrique lui même ses propres effets spéciaux. Il simule à la perfection les explosions des vaisseaux spatiauxStar Wars en utilisant tout simplement du coton et des LEDs pour l’éclairage.
Et on doit avouer que le résultat est absolument impressionnant ! Une belle démonstration de créativité qui prouve, une fois de plus, qu’on n’a pas forcément besoin de gros moyens pour affirmer son talent. On vous laisse découvrir ci-dessous quelques unes des créations de Plasticstarwars, et on vous invite à vous rendre sur son profil Instagram pour en découvrir plus sur son univers et sa passion.
Citroën vient en aide aux personnes qui sont malades en voiture et lancent les lunettes Seetroën qui, en plus d'offrir un magnifique jeu de mots, permettent d'éliminer le mal des transports.
At present it alternates between two modes: imitative and eye contact. Both, of course, rely on a nearby (or, one can imagine, built-in) camera that recognizes and tracks the features of your face in real time.
https://t.co/P70P4kCtvG pic.twitter.com/H4VGXXVPTN
Citroën vient en aide aux personnes qui sont malades en voiture et lancent les lunettes Seetroën qui, en plus d'offrir un magnifique jeu de mots, permettent d'éliminer le mal des transports.
