This Week in NLP: Friday 23rd November 2018

This Week in NLP

Week ending Friday 23rd November 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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Better Fake Newsreaders 
One of the deficiencies of the recently announced Xinhua AI news anchor was its slightly choppy speech synthesis. Amazon's engineers have been exploring different speaking styles via neural TTS, and have demonstrated an improved 'newscaster' voice.  Check out the comparative examples in this article in The Verge. 

Amazon NLP APIs Update 
Ahead of its annual re:Invent conference, Amazon has announced updates to a number of its APIs. Comprehend, the text analytics API, now supports user customisation; and there are new voices for the Polly TTS service, new languages for Translate, and new accents and a streaming transcription capability for Transcribe, the speech recognition API.

Fighting Fakery 
Fleetunderground, a social platform that focuses on quality news, has released an AI-based news scoring system. This area is heating up:  recent entrants New Knowledge raised $11M in August, and the AI Foundation raised $10M in September. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal is teaching its staff how to detect deep fakes.

Automated Voice Profiling
Like many other aspects of AI, language technology is increasingly faced with ethical questions at every turn. This piece in The Intercept discusses the civil rights issues raised by technologies like Amazon's recent patent that extracts voice features such as accent, ethnic origin, emotion, gender, and age to better target advertising.

Robo Periodismo
Robo-journalism is kind of old news these days, courtesy of the early efforts of Narrative Science and Automated Insights, and the more recent localised news efforts of RADAR.  But most of this has been in English.  Narrativa, a Spanish AI start-up, is now writing sports and finance articles for major Spanish media using its Gabriele tool.

But wait, there's more ...
 
Gentle Reader uses MT to provide news from all major world languages in English.
Google demonstrates improved speaker identification in multiparty conversation.
Apple has filed a patent for an offline mode for Siri.
Huawei is working on a voice assistant to compete with Alexa and Google Assistant.  
Microsoft adds to its chatbot portfolio by acquiring XOXCO, a conversational AI start-up.

Text Analytics APIs | Language Technology GroupCheck out this unique technical deep-dive report that explains and compares the features of 26 commercial Text Analytics APIs in detail - save yourself weeks of research.

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