ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

AMAZON ALEXA THE ORIGINAL SMART SPEAKER ASSISTANT TALKS TO AUSSIES IN 2018. www.amazon.com.au

While Amazon’s main web store and Prime SVOD offering launched in 2017, the online retail giant said that its popular smart speaker and digital assistant wouldn’t arrive until early 2018. The launch of Google Home has shown that there is a lot of interest digital assistants on Wi-Fi speakers, despite the identical smartphone-based assistants not generating much long-term use. Amazon’s delayed launch will give Google a clean run at the Australian Christmas period, but Amazon only announced it was opening up integration options for third-party developers in November.

GOOGLE BUILDS AN AI THAT NURTURERS OTHER AI BETTER THAN US AT CREATING MACHINE-LEARNING SOFTWARE. research.googleblog.com

In what is clearly the first step to Skynet in real life, researchers at Google Brain unleashed an AI back in May that was designed specifically to build and develop other machine-learning systems. If this concept wasn’t equal parts incredible and creepy enough, Google calls AutoML’s creations ‘child’ AIs. By December 2017, AutoML’s child AI network, NASNet, which it trained to recognise visual objects in real time from video, was better than our state-of-the-art human-designed AI systems, accurately predicting 82.7% of identified objects.