This Week in NLP: Friday 26th October 2018

This Week in NLP

Week ending Friday 26th October 2018.
Brought to you by The Language Technology Group.

Another week's over.  Did you keep up with your Twitter feed?  Did you catch up on all those blogs?  No?  Well, we did, so you can relax: here are the key happenings this week in the world of Natural Language Processing that we think are worth knowing about. 
 
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Simultaneous MT Gets Closer
This is really neat: Baidu’s spoken language translator gets started on your sentence before you finish it, and makes predictions to overcome the problems of different word orderings.  Early days, but promising; see the full paper for the gory details.  Meanwhile, Google's voice translating earbuds get a bad review.

Are Your Ears Burning? 
They should be, because the war for your headphones is hotting up. Following last week’s announcement that Google Assistant would be available on a wide range of Android headsets and phones, it's now Alexa's turn, with the announcement of Qualcomm's Smart Headset Development Kit for Amazon's Voice Service.

Making Ads Conversational 
Google-supported startup AdLingo works with a number of common chatbot platforms to enable chatbot interactions from within display advertising.  This isn't a new idea – both Twitter and Facebook have explored related ideas in the past – but it's the first time it's been accessible across the web, making it possible for users to interact with brands without leaving the website they’re visiting.

Sit Down for This One
This week's quirky use of speech tech: LG and Natuzzi, arguably the world's most well-known furniture brand, have collaborated on a smart sofa that can be controlled via Google Assistant, so you can request any of five custom seating positions.  If you're going to be a couch potato, you might as well recline go all the way.

This is Ridiculous
The headline says: 'Pepper the robot questioned by House of Commons select committee on AI'.  This kind of thing hardly encourages a well-informed public debate on the state of AI.  If you're new to NLP and would appreciate a more realistic appraisal of where we are today, this piece by Ben Dickson is not a bad place to start.

But wait, there's more ...
 
Eating your own dog food: Versacom uses MT to translate AI literature.
Conversational AI in banking:  Finn AI raises US$11M.
Kono processes emails to schedule meetings.
Tableau announces Ask Data, a conversational UI that lets you query your data.
No need to shout: Alexa now has a whisper mode.

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