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"Voice is natural, voice is human. That's why we're fascinated with creating usable voice technology for our machines. But most of that technology is locked up in a few big corporations and isn't available to the majority of developers. We think that stifles innovation so we're launching Project Common Voice, a project to help make voice recognition open to everyone. Now you can donate your voice to help us build an open-source voice recognition engine that anyone can use to make innovative apps for devices and the web."

MIT's Open Documentary Lab and IDFA's DocLab have joined together to put the long story of documentary innovation into perspective, and to speculate about its future.

This story originally appeared on Contagious I/O, our customisable research platform featuring the world's most innovative, creative and effective campaigns and marketing ideas

"rtificial intelligence already pervades 21st-century life, from Siri's directions to Netflix's suggestions of what you should watch next. But how much emotional intelligence is inside computers, cell phones, and video game consoles? In the past, the answer has been "none" - even the most complex deep learning machine is still a machine. That's changing, though, thanks in part to Nevermind, a video game that can sense players' emotions and adjust the experience to fit."

Innovations are exciting, but BBC needs to establish itself quickly, says Broadcast editor Chris Curtis

Tinkering with technology is what we do. Making something innovative, imaginative, going where no man has gone before makes us as happy as cats at Christmas… oh man those Christmas trees!

Forum theatre is a type of theatre created by the innovative and influential practitioner Augusto Boal as part of what he calls his "Theatre of the Oppressed." Boal created Forum theatre as a forum for teaching people how to change their world. While practicing earlier in his career, Boal would apply 'simultaneous dramaturgy'. In this process the actors or audience members could stop a performance, often a short scene in which a character was being oppressed in some way. The audience would suggest different actions for the actors to carry out on-stage in an attempt to change the outcome of what they were seeing. This was an attempt to undo the traditional actor partition and bring audience members into the performance, to have an input into the dramatic action they were watching. Eventually this 'simultaneous dramaturgy' became Forum theatre when audience members were asked not just to suggest different actions, but to come on stage and perform their own interventions.

"Ambient Literature is a two-year collaboration between UWE Bristol, Bath Spa University and the University of Birmingham, established to investigate the locational and technological future of the book. Funded through a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the project is focused on the study of emergent forms of literature that make use of novel technologies and social practices in order to create robust and evocative experiences for readers. "