Category: AI/ML News

One group commonly misunderstood by voice technology are individuals who speak African American English, or AAE. Researchers designed an experiment to test how AAE speakers adapt their speech when imagining talking to a voice assistant, compared to talking to a friend, family member, or stranger. The study tested familiar human, unfamiliar human, and voice assistant-directed …

Read more “Machine listening: Making speech recognition systems more inclusive”

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly useful for programming and robotics tasks, but for more complicated reasoning problems, the gap between these systems and humans looms large. Without the ability to learn new concepts like humans do, these systems fail to form good abstractions—essentially, high-level representations of complex concepts that skip less-important details—and thus …

Read more “Natural language boosts LLM performance in coding, planning and robotics”

Millions of people relied on the federal Affordable Connectivity Program to stay online and access work, health care, and school. Now that the program has expired, some fear being cut off.

A four-legged robot trained with machine learning has learned to avoid falls by spontaneously switching between walking, trotting, and pronking — a milestone for roboticists as well as biologists interested in animal locomotion.

Speech is critical to detecting suicidal ideation and a key to understanding the mental and emotional state of people experiencing it. Suicide hotline counselors are trained to quickly analyze speech variation to better help callers through a crisis.

Britain’s former climate adviser says the country’s future plans are weak, climate protests are no longer helpful, and working closely with Big Oil is a jarring necessity.

Whether you’re bird-watching or baseball-spotting, we break down prices and specs to find the best pair for you.

Whether you’re snoozing in a campground or schlepping up to an alpine valley, these are the best pads we’ve found for resting your weary bones.

The use of pliable soft materials to collaborate with humans and work in disaster areashas drawn much recent attention. However, controlling soft dynamics for practical applications has remained a significant challenge. Researchers developed a method to control pneumatic artificial muscles, which are soft robotic actuators. Rich dynamics of these drive components can be exploited as …

Read more “Built-in bionic computing”

More like Robot Rock, am I right? (Sorry.) These are some of the best dust busters around, and they’re cheaper than usual.