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Google Duplex, a new AI software that talks eerily like a human!

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At Google’s biggest event of the year, CEO Sundar Pichai introduced Google Duplex, a new AI software that talks eerily like a human, and even uses realistic stammers like “um” and “ahh.”

Google Duplex is designed to make phone calls for the user, and demonstrations implied that the humans on the other end of the phone calls didn’t realize they were speaking with software, causing an uproar of ethical criticism.

Google confirmed that Duplex — which is not yet widely available — will be able to identify itself on the phone, and that “transparency” is a high priority for the future of the product.

Google introduced their newest jaw-dropping feat at the I/O conference this week: a hyper-realistic sounding chatbot that will be able to make phone calls for you.

The demonstration received both praise and skepticism, with some calling in to question the ethics of an AI that cannot easily be distinguished from a real person’s voice.

Today, a Google spokesperson confirmed in a statement to Business Insider that the creators of Duplex will “make sure the system is appropriately identified” and that they are “designing this feature with disclosure built-in.”

In a demonstration of the software, called Google Duplex, the voice used human-like stammers such as “um,” and sounded so realistic the humans on the other end of the line seemed to be completely unaware they had actually been chatting with an AI, causing many tech influencers to debate on Twitter and elsewhere whether Duplex and other chatbots should be required to identify themselves to humans.

Here’s the full statement from Google:

“We understand and value the discussion around Google Duplex — as we’ve said from the beginning, transparency in the technology is important. We are designing this feature with disclosure built-in, and we’ll make sure the system is appropriately identified. What we showed at I/O was an early technology demo, and we look forward to incorporating feedback as we develop this into a product.”

Google CEO Sundar Pichai preemptively addressed ethics concerns in a blog post that corresponded with the announcement earlier this week, saying:

“It’s clear that technology can be a positive force and improve the quality of life for billions of people around the world. But it’s equally clear that we can’t just be wide-eyed about what we create. There are very real and important questions being raised about the impact of technology and the role it will play in our lives. We know the path ahead needs to be navigated carefully and deliberately—and we feel a deep sense of responsibility to get this right.”

In addition, several Google insiders have said that the software is still in the works, and the final version may not be as realistic (or as impressive) as the demonstration.

You can watch the full Google Duplex demonstration here:

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  • Business Insider

Experiencing Poor Phone Battery Life?

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Have you been experiencing reduced battery life on your phone recently?

Unsuspecting mobile phone owners may be left with flat batteries after they update their handsets, despite technology companies promising longer life and better performance from the new software.

It was recently discovered that when iPhones or Android phones are updated to the latest version of their operating systems, their battery life can fall by as much as three hours.

A two-year-old iPhone 6 lost 38 minutes of battery life when it was updated to the latest version of Apple’s iOS software, iOS 10. A Google Nexus 6P phone went from 12 to nine hours of battery life when the most recent version of Android was installed.

Both the iPhone and Android software claim that features in the latest versions improve battery life, rather than hurting it.

Mobile phone companies typically release major software updates every year as well as adding smaller changes throughout the year. When an update is released, users are sent notifications urging them to upgrade and are often given no way to revert to the previous operating system, meaning they are stuck with the new software even if they suffer from worse performance.

It was recently stated that software updates can also mean the memory of tablets and phones falling dramatically due to the extra capacity taken up by more advanced software. A Microsoft Surface Pro 3 tablet lost 30 gigabytes of storage when upgrading to the latest version of Windows – enough for thousands of photos.

The updates often include new features and important security changes that protect users from being tracked or having their details stolen, but early versions can be loaded with bugs.

It’s also been said that mobile phone companies should do more to warn users of the side effects of updating, and allow them to revert to older software if they wish.

It was found that battery life and storage were improved in some cases. Updating an iPad Air to the latest software improved battery life by two hours and updating a Samsung Galaxy tablet improved it by four and a half hours.

Richard Headland from ‘Which?’ said “Given how much we rely on mobile devices, companies should do more to tell us about the possible downsides of updates, as well as the benefits,”

Apple and Google declined to comment.

This year, Microsoft was forced to pay a travel agent (£8,000) after an unwanted automatic upgrade to her computer left it slow and prone to crashing.

 

If you found this article interesting, check out our ‘Latest Industry News’ page for more Technology insights. You can view it by clicking on this link!

– James Titcomb

5 Major Tech Giants collaborate in Future of AI

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The world’s biggest technology companies are joining forces to consider the future of artificial intelligence (AI).

Amazon, Google’s DeepMind, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft will work together on issues such as privacy, safety and the collaboration between people and AI.

Dubbed the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, it will include external experts.

One said he hoped the group would address “legitimate concerns”.

“We’ve seen a very fast development in AI over a very short period of time,” said Prof Yoshua Bengio, from the University of Montreal.

“The field brings exciting opportunities for companies and public organisations. And yet, it raises legitimate questions about the way these developments will be conducted.”

Bringing the key players together would be the “best way to ensure we all share the same values and overall objectives to serve the common good”, he added.

One notable absentee from the consortium is Apple. It has been in discussions with the group and may join the partnership “soon”, according to one member.

The group will have an equal share of corporate and non-corporate members and is in discussions with organisations such as the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

It stressed that it had no plans to “lobby government or other policy-making bodies”.

“AI has tremendous potential to improve many aspects of life, ranging from healthcare, education and manufacturing to home automation and transport and the founding members… hope to maximise this potential and ensure it benefits as many people as possible,” it said.

It will conduct research under an open licence in the following areas:

  • ethics, fairness and inclusivity
  • transparency
  • privacy and interoperability (how AI works with people)
  • trustworthiness, reliability and robustness

Microsoft’s managing director of research hailed the partnership as a “historic collaboration on AI and its influences on people and society”, while IBM’s ethics researcher Francesca Rossi said it would provide “a vital voice in the advancement of the defining technology of this century”.

Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Google’s artificial intelligence division, DeepMind, said he hoped the group would be able to “break down barriers for AI teams to share best practice and research ways to maximise societal benefits and tackle ethical concerns”.

And Amazon’s director of machine learning, Ralf Herbrich, said the time was ripe for such a collaboration.

“We’re in a golden age of machine learning and AI,” he said.

“As a scientific community, we are still a long way from being able to do things the way humans do things, but we’re solving unbelievably complex problems every day and making incredibly rapid progress.”

Artificial intelligence is beginning to find roles in the real world – from the basic AI used in smartphone voice assistants and web chatbots to AI agents that can take on data analysis to significant breakthroughs such as DeepMind’s victory over champion Go player Lee Sedol.

The win – in one of the world’s most complex board games – was hailed as a defining moment for AI, with experts saying it had come a decade earlier than anyone had predicted.

DeepMind now has 250 scientists at its King’s Cross headquarters, working on a variety of projects, including several tie-ins with the NHS to analyse medical records.

In a lecture at the Royal Academy of Engineering, founder Dr Demis Hassabis revealed the team was now working on creating an artificial hippocampus, an area of the brain regarded by neuroscientists as responsible for emotion, creativity, memory and other human attributes.

But as AI has developed, so have concerns about where the technology is heading.

One of the most vocal and high-profile naysayers is Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, who has tweeted the technology is “potentially more dangerous than nukes [nuclear weapons]” and expressed concerns humans were “just the biological boot loader for digital super-intelligence”.

In order to combat this fear, Google are developing their own AI kill switch which will always allow humans to maintain control over AI machines.

Last year, Mr Musk set up his own non-profit AI group, OpenAI.

It is not, at this stage, part of the Partnership on AI.

If you found this article interesting, check out more similar content by visiting our latest industry news page. You can access it by following this link!

 

– Jane Wakefield

New Android Operating System takes off!

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Google is releasing the new version of Android – to some people.

The company has allowed people to play with Android 7.0 ahead of its release, and it was first unveiled in June

Android Nougat is being sent out to people’s phones around the world.

It will initially arrive on Google’s own Nexus devices first, and soon arrive on the upcoming LG V20. Other phones will have to wait until their carriers and manufacturers decide to make it available – potentially leaving them open to big security problems.

The new version of Android brings new features including better battery life, more emojis and virtual reality compatibility that sits alongside a whole host of VR tools.

Google said that there are more than 250 major new features in the newest version of Android, which is officially version 7.0.

But the primary new tools include expanded emoji, quick settings controls that can be easily accessed to change settings and the ability to run two apps side-by-side. It also has new battery tools, which allow the phone to drop into a special lower power usage mode that will let it last for longer.

It also brings new security features, meant to make Android better at keeping data private. Many of those features are locked to new devices, but they allow phones to automatically store information in the background and make sure that files are encrypted so they can’t easily be read by people.

Some people have already been able to use those features, since Google this year allowed developers to try out the software before it was actually released. That should have allowed them to ensure that apps are all up to date for the new operating system, making it run more smoothly from the off.

For everyone else, the software will roll out gradually. All of the recent Nexus devices will be updated over-the-air, and others will come with time.

 

– Andrew Griffin, Independent

Can Google’s new Video Chat App compete with the Giants?

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Google has launched its video chatting app, called Duo.

It represents Google’s response to other popular video calling options, including Apple’s FaceTime, Microsoft’s Skype and Facebook’s Messenger.

It’s not that different from the other video chatting services, except that it gives users a glimpse at who’s making the call, helping people decide whether to answer or not.

The company says it’s calling the feature, “knock, knock”.

The new app, originally announced in May, is being released as a free service for phones running on Google’s Android operating system as well as Apple’s iPhones.

Calls are encrypted and the video resolution changes depending on the speed of your connection.

Like FaceTime on iOS, Duo only requires a person’s phone number to connect.

Many other services require both people to have account logins to use the video calling options.

Google’s been offering video calling through Hangouts since 2013, but the company’s now tailoring that service for business meetings and it won’t plug into the new video chat service.

Duo is being billed as a simpler, more reliable way to see friends and family as you talk to them.

The app is rolling out around the world over the next few days.

It’s the first of two new mobile apps that Google has planned for the next few months.

The US Company is also preparing to unveil a new messaging app called Allo featuring a robotic assistant that will suggest automated responses to texts.

That includes commenting on pictures sent by friends, thanks to its use of image recognition algorithms.

Google announced a conversation-based tool – Google Assistant – to control smartphones, smartwatches and other devices earlier this year.

It can be used to find information, play media and carry out tasks via a chat between the user and the software.

The firm also announced a voice-activated device with a built-in speaker called Google Home to deliver the tech to living rooms.

– BBC News

Cloud Competition: Amazon vs Google vs Microsoft

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With Amazon, Google and Microsoft all reporting strong growth on the back of cloud, we take a closer look at how they have achieved it

The grip that Amazon Web Services (AWS) has on the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market can make it hard for even relatively big players to get a look-in when enterprise CIOs shop around for cloud services.

Microsoft has managed to hold its own, with the help of its Azure platform, by focusing on convincing its existing base of on-premise enterprise customers to ditch their own servers and use its cloud infrastructure.

It is a strategy that appears to be working very well for Microsoft. Its fourth-quarter 2016 financial results saw the Azure cloud division emerge as one of the company’s best-performing business initiatives, with revenue growth of 102%.

In recent years, the company has also publicly committed to matching AWS on price for various commodity cloud services, which has been a useful marketing tactic.

For instance, every time Amazon decides to publicly announce a price cut for any of its cloud infrastructure services, Microsoft grabs the opportunity to crowbar its way into that narrative and announce a price cut of its own.

This has helped to create the impression that the IaaS market is something of a two-horse race between AWS and Microsoft, which is an image Google has been working hard to dispel since late 2015 when it appointed former VMware co-founder, Diane Greene.

A Google board member since 2012, Greene was appointed to oversee the running of Google’s newly-converged cloud services business, bringing the product, engineering, sales and marketing efforts of its off-premise infrastructure and software initiatives under one roof for the first time.

Unified approach

The move was comprehensively referenced during a conference call to discuss Alphabet, Google’s parent company, and its 2016 second-quarter results, with CEO Sundar Pichai, who described how taking a more unified approach to cloud was opening doors for it in the enterprise.

“It’s a big set of changes, and it’s obviously having an impact,” said Pichai on the call transcribed by Seeking Alpha.

“So for me, I see a shift to a world-class enterprise approach, and it’s definitely having an impact on the type of conversations we are having and the outcome of the RFPs [requests for proposals] we are engaged in.”

Proof of that is evident in some of the high-profile contract wins Google has secured this year with the likes of music-streaming site Spotify and Apple.

To keep up this momentum, the company outlined the steps it has taken to increase its headcount across several areas of the business, including its cloud division, with more than 2,460 recruits taken on in the previous quarter.

Google vs AWS

At present, Alphabet does not provide a breakdown within its financial results of the cloud’s contribution to its wider business, which banked a profit of $4.9bn against revenues of $21.5bn in Q2.

Instead, it is reported as “other revenue”, which means the performance of Google’s converged cloud unit is muddied because its figures are lumped in with those for Google Play and the company’s hardware ventures.

Even so, this part of its business brought in revenue of $2.2bn, up 33% on the year before.

It is currently unclear just how big Google’s cloud business is, but there is no denying that AWS has the upper hand, based on its financial results, which were released the same day.

The activities of AWS alone brought in $2.9bn in revenue for its parent company, Amazon.com. This figure is 58% higher than that for the same quarter a year ago, and equates to about 9% of Amazon’s total sales.

During a conference call to discuss the results, also transcribed by Seeking Alpha, the senior management team at AWS said the work being done behind the scenes to improve the efficiency of its infrastructure was having a positive impact on its revenue generation.

Datacentre footprint

The company is also currently building out its datacentre footprint across the globe in response to customer concerns about latency, data sovereignty and security, and this looks set to bring a fresh tranche of users on board, it said.

Brian Olsavsky, chief financial officer at Amazon.com, said: “When we expand geographically, existing customers will run more of their workloads on AWS. Sometimes they have local latency concerns or security issues that require them to run things in their country, so that helps.

“We also open up to new customers when we add these regions, and it is certainly an exciting investment for our customer base.”

In view of Google’s and Microsoft’s attempts to become even bigger thorns in the side of AWS, the company is in no danger of overlooking the competitive threat either of these rivals pose to its market-leading position in the cloud.

Particularly, as Olsavsky referenced elsewhere during the results call, there is a strong chance that AWS, Google and others will find their services being used by the same customers as enterprises move to adopt a multi-cloud approach in their IT environments.

“We have been in this business longer than anyone,” he said. “Having said that, there is plenty of room for multiple suppliers in this business.

“What we focus on is innovating on behalf of customers and expanding our geographic footprint to make our services more widely available.”

In a briefing note following the recent wave of financial results, Kate Hanaghan, research director at analyst house TechMarketView, said AWS clearly continues to lead the way in the cloud market.

“We know more about the performance of AWS than its competitors,” she said. “Google’s cloud revenue is buried, and while we know Microsoft’s Azure revenue was up 102% in its last quarter, this was from an unknown base.

“Our view is that AWS is growing at a slower rate in the UK specifically. That said, AWS is outpacing the market and most of the other players.”

– Caroline Donnelly

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