WebProNews

Tag: Natural Language Processing

  • Aisera Partners With Microsoft to Deliver AI Service Desk Solutions

    Aisera Partners With Microsoft to Deliver AI Service Desk Solutions

    Aisera has become member of the Microsoft for Startups program, partnering with Microsoft to deliver AI-based service desk solutions.

    Aisera specializes next-gen AI service desks, automating requests, tickets and operations for customer service, DevOps, HR and IT. Aisera’s platform uses conversational AI and natural language processing to help deliver personalized experiences and reduce costs and resolution times.

    The companies will offer AI Service Desk on Azure, as well as AI Service Desk on Teams. 

    “Being a part of the Microsoft for Startups program is another proud moment for Aisera as we continue an era of explosive growth of the company having recently announcing a new round of funding, new customers including Dartmouth College, and exciting new integrations and partnerships that empower our enterprise-focused end-to-end automation services,” said Muddu Sudhakar, founder and CEO of Aisera. “With the support of Microsoft as a key growth partner, we are prepared to take the next step in enhancing Aisera’s services, increasing our offerings and raising our auto-resolution rates for our enterprise customers.”

    “The Microsoft for Startups program was started with the goal of assisting innovative startups, like Aisera, to escalate their growth so they can reach the enterprise businesses that need their solutions,” said Jeffrey Ma, Vice President, Microsoft for Startups. “It’s clear that Aisera will be another success story for the Microsoft for Startups program and we look forward to working alongside their team to make that happen.”

  • IBM Using AI to Simulate Crowds at the US Open

    IBM Using AI to Simulate Crowds at the US Open

    IBM is turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to simulate crowds in the first-ever, spectator-less US Open.

    Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, like many sports, the United States Tennis Association (USTA) has had to adapt to the safety measures required to contain the virus. As the USTA’s digital partner for 29 years, IBM set to work recreating the stadium experience using AI.

    “Among the challenges the USTA faced this year was how to recreate the sound of fans inside the stadium,” reads the blog post. “IBM leveraged its AI Highlights technology to recreate crowd sounds gleaned from hundreds of hours of video footage captured during last years’ tournament. In past years, AI Highlights used Watson to digest video footage and rank the excitement level of each clip to compile a highlight reel in near-real time and classify specific crowd reactions, including the crowd roar, to give each clip a crowd reaction score. This insight will be used this year to dynamically serve up those sounds based on similar play from last year. The AI Sounds tools will be available to the production teams in-stadium and at ESPN.”

    In addition to the stadium experience, IBM is using AI to help fans better connect with the experience. For example, Match Insights with Watson Discovery uses natural language processing (NLP) and natural language generation to take statistics and other structured data and translate it into narrative form. This will help fans get up-to-speed and become “experts” on the players and matchups.

    “COVID-19 brought disruption to sports as a whole, and the ability of fans to experience live sporting events has been heavily impacted in 2020. At the same time, the pandemic accelerated the need for engaging technologies using AI and underpinned by a scalable hybrid cloud,” said Noah Syken, Vice President of Sports & Entertainment Partnerships, IBM. “As the technology partner to the USTA, we transformed our offerings to meet tennis fans where they are this year – experiencing the sport through the US Open digital properties everywhere.”

  • AI Company Leaks 2.5 Million Medical Records

    AI Company Leaks 2.5 Million Medical Records

    Cense AI has inadvertently leaked 2.5 million detailed medical records of auto accident victims.

    Cense AI is an “SaaS platform that helps business in implementing Intelligent Process Automation, intelligent bots to automate tasks without disrupting current system.” The company specializes in “simplifying implementation of business process automation using Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing.”

    According to security researcher Jeremiah Fowler, working in collaboration with Secure Thoughts, Cense AI left two folders with medical data exposed on the same IP address as the company’s website. The two folders contained a combined “2.5 million records that appeared to contain sensitive medical data and PII (Personally Identifiable Information). The records included names, insurance records, medical diagnosis notes, and much more.” In addition, there were clinics, insurance providers and accounts contained in the data.

    This is a massive breach on the part of a company trusted with the most sensitive type of customer information, and serves as a cautionary example of what can happen when outside companies are given access to medical data.

    What’s more, to date, there has not been any public statement, blog post or explanation on Cense’s part. In other words, this appears to be another case study in how not to handle a data breach.

  • Google Updates Its Search Algorithm: Brings Neural Network Techniques to Search

    Google Updates Its Search Algorithm: Brings Neural Network Techniques to Search

    Whenever Google updates, tweaks, replaces or improves its search algorithms, webmasters the world over anxiously wait to see how it will impact their rankings.

    Google’s latest update, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), is one of the company’s most interesting to date. Last year Google “introduced and open-sourced a neural network-based technique for natural language processing (NLP) pre-training,” or BERT.

    The company is using BERT to better understand complex, natural language queries and return more relevant results.

    “By applying BERT models to both ranking and featured snippets in Search, we’re able to do a much better job helping you find useful information,” wrote Pandu Nayak, Google Fellow and Vice President, Search in a company blog post. “In fact, when it comes to ranking results, BERT will help Search better understand one in 10 searches in the U.S. in English, and we’ll bring this to more languages and locales over time.

    “Particularly for longer, more conversational queries, or searches where prepositions like ‘for’ and ‘to’ matter a lot to the meaning, Search will be able to understand the context of the words in your query. You can search in a way that feels natural for you.

    “To launch these improvements, we did a lot of testing to ensure that the changes actually are more helpful. Here are some of the examples that showed up our evaluation process that demonstrate BERT’s ability to understand the intent behind your search.

    “Here’s a search for ‘2019 brazil traveler to usa need a visa.’ The word ‘to’ and its relationship to the other words in the query are particularly important to understanding the meaning. It’s about a Brazilian traveling to the U.S., and not the other way around. Previously, our algorithms wouldn’t understand the importance of this connection, and we returned results about U.S. citizens traveling to Brazil. With BERT, Search is able to grasp this nuance and know that the very common word “to” actually matters a lot here, and we can provide a much more relevant result for this query.”

  • Facebook Just Bought A Voice Recognition Company

    Facebook has acquired Wit.ai, a company that builds voice recognition and natural language processing tools for developers. It has over 6,000 developers on its platform.

    The platform is open, which is a quality the startup clearly takes pride in.

    “For a long time I’ve been obsessed with building machines that understand human languages,” it says in a blog post. “18 months ago, we started Wit.ai with the vision that no solution is to be found in a closed, centralized, managed approach. We’ve been building an open, distributed, community-based platform that makes it easy for developers to build apps that users can talk to.

    The platform will remain open and free under Facebook’s ownership.

    On the acquisition, Wit.ai says, “It is an incredible acceleration in the execution of our vision. Facebook has the resources and talent to help us take the next step. Facebook’s mission is to connect everyone and build amazing experiences for the over 1.3 billion people on the platform – technology that understands natural language is a big part of that, and we think we can help.”

    TechCrunch, which first reported on the news, shares a statement from Facebook: “Wit.ai has built an incredible yet simple natural language processing API that has helped developers turn speech and text into actionable data. We’re excited to have them onboard.”

    As that report points out, Facebook has been looking for additional staff fro its Language Technology Group, which may be working on voice-to-text for Messenger.

    Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

    Images via Facebook, Wit.ai

  • Yahoo Acquires SkyPhrase For Natural Language Processing

    Yahoo announced today that it has acquired SkyPhrase, a developer of natural language processing technology. The company will become part of Yahoo Labs.

    “The team of four has built amazing natural language processing technology and we’re excited to welcome them to our Yahoo Labs team in New York,” Yahoo says in a blog post.

    “At SkyPhrase, we believe online information and services would be much more powerful and user friendly if people could tell computers what they want to accomplish using natural language,” the SkyPhrase team says in its own announcement. “The technology we developed enables computers to understand more complex and precise human language than ever before.”

    “In Yahoo, we have found a company that not only shares our vision, but delivers a rich collection of information and services to a massive user base,” it adds. “We are excited to join Yahoo Labs to continue to work on our shared vision of making computers deeply understand people’s natural language and intentions. We can’t wait to take things to the next level together.”

    From the sound of it, SkyPhrase’s technology will likely be used for fantasy sports (among other things). TechCrunch notes that the company has created an app that makes it easier to find fantasy football stats that are relevant to making picks and monitoring teams.

    Yahoo has made other sports-related acquisitions this year. In October, it acquired sports betting/polling app company Hitpost. Prior to that, it acquired Bignoggins, which it almost immediately incorporated into its fantasy sports experience.

    Image: SkyPhrase