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Though characters like Woody and Buzz Lightyear are wonderfully realistic and lovable, the relationship that kids have with them is largely one-sided. Kids can hear these characters talk—not only through movies, but games, toys, and other movie merchandise—but they can’t engage them.

It was this idea that inspired Jacob to team up with his former Pixar colleague, Martin Reddy, and launch a new company, ToyTalk. The San Francisco-based outfit develops mobile games that let kids have conversations with animated characters—dialogues that can last for hours

Known as PullString, it’s equal parts speech recognition engine and script writing tool, and it’s quite a departure from other speech rec tools developed by the likes of Microsoft, Google, and Apple. It’s tailored specifically to kids, whose sentence structure, pitch, and vocal tone have posed challenges for traditional tools.

they were able to show that automated facial expression recognition could be nearly as accurate as human recognition in analyzing a wider range of student movements and gestures.

emotionally-aware software isn’t without ethical and privacy questions, but it opens the door to technology that’s even more engaging and that fits more seamlessly into our lives.

types of technologies could be used to generate more personalized digital experiences

new facial recognition software that can capture a person’s expressions and convert them into animation in real-time

which records facial features and movements, like wrinkles on an actor’s face, which previously was difficult to include in an animated character.

software will be useful for their animation process as it can be used by anyone at any time

Microsoft Hyperlapse is a new technology that creates smooth and stabilized time lapses from first-person videos.

you can time lapse those experiences, distilling them into easily consumable, enjoyable experiences.

Smart billboards will identify car models and target ads to drivers

Some day in the not-too-distant future ads you see on billboards will be there simply because of the make, model, and year of the vehicle you’re driving. Smart data storage company Cloudian and Japanese advertising company Dentsu are launching just such a program in Japan this fall, as reported by CNN Money.

Cloudian and Dentsu tested smart billboard vehicle recognition earlier this year with impressive results. Combining big data and deep learning, the test identified vehicles in traffic correctly 94 percent of the time.

Gimenez’s take is “shoppable Instagram:” an app that uses image recognition and a large collection of retailers — 400-500 merchants selling over two million items from upwards of 15,000 brands — to create a more engaging and ultimately more fruitful social commerce experience.

Social commerce, the idea of buying products listed on social media sites, is huge in Asia.

“When you see anything online or on Instagram, the frustration is that you can’t shop even when people are using it as merchants,

what’s called “deep learning”—a form of artificial intelligence that’s rapidly reinventing a wide range of online services—the company is beefing up its Inbox by Gmail app so that it can analyze the contents of an email and then suggest a few (very brief) responses

The idea is that you can rapidly respond to someone while on the go—without having to manually tap a fresh message into your smartphone keyboard.

system learns to generate appropriate replies by analyzing scads of email conversations from across Google’s Gmail service

The 5 feet, 300 pound scooting robot is stacked with quite the resume of capabilities and because it delivers real-time data to a secure monitored location, it will minimize threats for human security officers that take on these dangerous jobs.

this venture gets some backing as security companies are looking for more innovative solutions to counter their turnover rates, some as high as 400%, Knightscope reports.

hese autonomous patrol units are doing the jobs that may be too dangerous for people and doing them better, backed with day and night 360-degree video capture, infrared and thermal scanning, proximity sensors, radar for real-time 3D mapping, and optical character recognition, allowing the K5 to never forget a face. Knightscope confirmed though that K5s are NOT intended to replace law enforcement, instead “to help and assist officers, improve response times and keep them out of harm’s way if possible.”