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"The USC Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) is a leader in basic research and advanced technology development of virtual humans who think and behave like real people. ICT brings together experts in clinical psychology, cognitive science, computer vision, speech processing and artificial intelligence. This video shows two interactive technologies recently developed for multimodal perception and healthcare support: Multisense automatically tracks and analyzes in real-time facial expressions, body posture, acoustic features, linguistic patterns and higher-level behavior descriptors (e.g. attention, fidgeting). From these signals and behaviors, indicators of psychological distress are inferred to inform directly the healthcare provider or the virtual human. SimSensei is a virtual human platform specifically designed for healthcare support and is based on the 10+ years of expertise at ICT with virtual human research and development. The platform enables an engaging face-to-face interaction where the virtual human automatically reacts to the perceived user state and intent, through its own speech and gestures. Please note that due to privacy concerns, the people shown in this video are actors. SimSensei is not designed for therapy or medical diagnosis, but is intended as a support tool for clinicians and healthcare providers."

"INTERVIEW - [...] Luc Bretones, le directeur du Technocentre d'Orange et d'Orange Fab, détaille ce que l'Intelligence artificielle apporte aux assistants vocaux." "Ce nouvel usage demande du temps pour que les personnes se l'approprient mais, une fois ce cap passé, elles y trouvent un bénéfice évident et n'arrêtent pas de l'utiliser. La commande de la télévision par TV d'Orange est ainsi très pratique. En ce qui concerne Orange Bank, l'essentiel des requêtes de nos clients sur notre chatbot est traité par notre IA avec une grande efficacité. Pour Orange, il y a également un enjeu important d'inclusion, notamment des personnes qui ne savent pas lire ou écrire ou celles qui sont malvoyantes. Grâce à Djingo, elles vont pouvoir gagner en autonomie. "

"We need some new breakthroughs that fundamentally change the rotten trade-off we now make between privacy and AI. The good news is that there's a growing research effort in what's called "privacy-preserving" machine learning. Academics are trying to develop algorithms that can operate on encrypted data, which means they wouldn't need to access anyone's data directly. Other researchers are figuring out ways to combine insights from different machine-­learning models without needing to merge all their underlying data. Companies like Apple, ­Google, and Microsoft already have teams working on such projects."

"Wikidata, an obscure sister project to Wikipedia, aims to (eventually) represent everything in the universe in a way computers can understand. Maintained by an army of volunteers, the database has come to serve an essential yet mostly unheralded purpose as AI and voice recognition expand to every corner of digital life. "Language depends on knowing a lot of common sense, which computers don't have access to," says Denny Vrandečić, who founded Wikidata in 2012. A programmer and regular Wikipedia editor, Vrandečić saw the need for a place where humans and bots could share knowledge on more equal terms."

"Une trentaine de startups et de laboratoires de recherche ont créé le Voice Lab, une place de marché qui a pour but de fédérer les acteurs Français et Européens de la Voix pour faire face aux géants chinois et américains. L'objectif du Voice Lab ? Offrir une alternative aux propositions existantes, principalement américaines et chinoises. Parmi ses membres figurent le moteur de recherche Qwant, la startup Snips, le hub France IA ou encore CandyVoice."

[...] « ça ouvre de superbes opportunités aux aveugles, on est à égalité avec les voyants devant Google Home »[...]

https://golem.ai/ NLP classique vs NLP Machine learning

"[...] actuellement, Common Voice contiendrait 1 400 heures d'échantillons vocaux provenant de 42 000 contributeurs dans le monde, et couvrant 19 langues, dont l'anglais, le français, l'allemand, le farsi, le basque, le mandarin et le gaélique. Pour entraîner les IA, ces enregistrements sont accompagnés de métadonnées."

"Après la première vague des applications mobiles qui offrent des services pour mieux interagir avec sa ville (mobilité, loisirs...), les années qui arrivent vont voir se développer dans les villes des interfaces conversationnelles beaucoup plus intelligentes. Les simples chatbots qui émergent sur les smartphones pour personnaliser et contextualiser les services de la ville n'en sont qu'un début. Ce sont bien des interfaces vocales sophistiquées que l'on pourra trouver au coin de la rue. Et pour ce qui est des pays où filmer sur la voie publique n'est pas interdit, ce sera également la reconnaissance visuelle."

Après le voicebot, le callbot? souhaitons-nous vraiment déléguer l'intégralité de la relation avec les «vrais gens» à des robots ? déshumanisation des services marketing ?

"A voice-controlled virtual assistant-Siri, Alexa, Cortana, or Google Home-is only as good as the data that powers it. Training these programs to understand what you are saying requires a whole lot of real-world examples of human speech." "Developers generally need access to hundreds or thousands of hours of audio, says Alexander Rudnicky, a research professor at Carnegie Mellon University" "All of that is privately held, and generally unavailable to academics, researchers, or would-be competitors. That's why Mozilla decided to launch its Common Voice project." "Common Voice invites anyone with an internet connection and a microphone to submit brief recordings of themselves reading particular sentences, all through a couple of clicks or taps on a web browser. " "Mozilla aims to release a version of the dataset later this year and is hoping to have 10,000 hours of audio by that time, the quantity it estimates is enough to train a modern, production-quality system. "

How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think By James Vlahos "When his father was diagnosed with cancer, Vlahos decided to program a chatbot - which he named "Dadbot" - with his father's life stories, jokes and some of his mannerisms and personality quirks. Vlahos begins by gathering source material, interviewing his father about his childhood, family memories, school, work and favorite sports teams. He records the interviews, and their transcriptions fill a series of giant binders. As his father's health fails, the Dadbot gets better and better. Vlahos knows the Dadbot "will no doubt be a paltry low-resolution representation of the flesh-and-blood man," but he's still reasonably certain he can teach it to mimic his father's charm and humor. Most of "Talk to Me" is only tangentially related to the making of Dadbot; it's actually a deep history of the technology that made such a robot father possible, how we came to be on the cusp of truly conversational, natural-language technology that can hear and understand us, and talk back. "

"In particular, Google is making a big push to shift machine learning operations from the cloud onto peoples' mobile devices. This should allow ML-powered applications to be faster, more private, and able to operate offline."

"Women Reclaiming AI (WRAI) is an expanding activist artwork, presented as a feminist AI voice assistant, programmed through participatory workshops by a growing community of self-identifying women. Through creating a platform for collective writing and editing, the project co-creates an AI that challenges prescribed gender roles. It is a response to the pervasive depiction of AI voice assistants gendered as women, subordinate and serving. Designed by development teams which lack diversity, these systems are embedded with unrepresentative world views and stereotype in ways that reinforce traditional gender roles. WRAI aims to reclaim female voices in the development of future AI systems by empowering self-identifying women to harness conversational AI as a medium for protest. This project is created by artists-technologists Coral Manton and Birgitte Aga in collaboration with an ever evolving community of self-identifying women."

"L'année dernière, Google a présenté Duplex, une intelligence artificielle qui permet aux utilisateurs de Google Assistant de réserver une table au restaurant ou de prendre un rendez-vous chez le coiffeur sans téléphoner. Comment ça marche ? Lorsque l'utilisateur demande à Assistant de faire la réservation, Duplex téléphone l'établissement et discute (grâce à l'intelligence artificielle) avec le responsable pour réserver. Une fois l'appel terminé, Google Assistant confirme la réservation à son utilisateur. CallJoy, un nouveau service lancé par Area120, l'incubateur interne de Google, fonctionne de manière similaire mais fait l'inverse. Contrairement à Google Duplex qui a été développé pour contacter les établissements à la place des clients, CallJoy est destiné aux entreprises et répond aux appels des clients."

"Microsoft ne délaisse pas Cortana, son assistant personnel. Si l'entreprise s'est plus ou moins détournée du marché grand public pour la voix, elle entend bien faire de Cortana un must en entreprise. Cela passe entre autres par la capacité de tenir des conversations plus longues et plus naturelles." "A sa conférence Build 2019, ce 6 mai, Microsoft a présenté un exemple impressionnant d'une cadre gérant tout son planning à l'oral de cette manière. Une performance inégalée à l'heure actuelle. Elle est rendue possible par la technologie de Semantic Machines, start-up rachetée en mai 2018."

"When Conor Sprouls, a customer service representative in the call center of the insurance giant MetLife talks to a customer over the phone, he keeps one eye on the bottom-right corner of his screen. There, in a little blue box, A.I. tells him how he's doing. Talking too fast? The program flashes an icon of a speedometer, indicating that he should slow down. Sound sleepy? The software displays an "energy cue," with a picture of a coffee cup. Not empathetic enough? A heart icon pops up."

"F'xa is built with feminists values in mind and every response given holds up to feminist beliefs that avoid reinforcing bias and stereotypes. F'xa was created by a diverse team using the Feminist Internet's Personal Intelligent Assistant Standards and Josie Young's Feminist Chatbot Design research. In preparation for building F'xa, Young explored contemporary feminist techniques for designing technology called the Feminist Chatbot Design Process - a series of reflective questions incorporating feminist design, ethical AI principles, and research on de-biasing data. Using a smartphone, the bot works to ensure designers don't perpetuate gender inequalities into their chatbots and educates users on how current voice assistants give gender equality a bleak future. "

"Researchers at the University of Washington have developed a new tool to monitor people for cardiac arrest while they're asleep without touching them. A new skill for a smart speaker - like Google Home and Amazon Alexa - or smartphone lets the device detect the gasping sound of agonal breathing and call for help. "