Gigaom AI Minute – May 15

Transcript

• A professor has employed an AI-based teacher's assistant to field forum questions from students. The research team working on the TA, Jill Watson, which was built on the IBM Watson platform, now have her answering questions with 97% certainty.

• Research teams at Microsoft, including a deep-learning startup recently acquired by the company, are developing what they call a 'literate machine' to read and answer passages of text in order to free up professionals, from reading documents to focus on client and patient care.

• A street-level photo crowdsourcing platform, Mapillary, is teaching machines to see using its dataset of over 130 million worldwide images. Using its collection, the world's largest, the company has its sights on empowering autonomously driving cars, delivery robots, and smart city designs.

• Amazon has recently launched a style assistant called Echo Look. Using a voice-controlled hands-free camera and Alexa, the bot even has a feature called Style Check which uses machine learning algorithms to determine current trends and give your outfit a "second opinion."

• A new wearable technology predicts happiness, sadness, or neutrality in conversations. It's MIT developers hope to improve how people communicate with one another through the smartwatch system, which uses deep-learning algorithms to analyze speech patterns, vitals, and score sentiment