Google ordered to halt human review of voice AI recordings over privacy risks
A German privacy watchdog has ordered Google to cease manual reviews of audio snippets generated by its voice AI. This follows a leak last month of scores of audio snippets from the Google Assistant service. A contractor working as a Dutch language reviewer handed more than 1,000 recordings to the Belgian news site VRT which was then able to identify some of the people in the clips. It reported being able to hear people’s addresses, discussion of medical conditions, and recordings of a woman in distress. The Hamburg data protection...
Dasha AI is calling so you don’t have to
While you’d be hard-pressed to find any startup not brimming with confidence over the disruptive idea they’re chasing, it’s not often you come across a young company as calmly convinced it’s engineering the future as Dasha AI. The team is building a platform for designing human-like voice interactions to automate business processes. Put simply, it’s using AI to make machine voices a whole lot less robotic. “What we definitely know is this will definitely happen,” says CEO and co-founder Vladislav Chernyshov. “Sooner or later...
DeepMind touts predictive healthcare AI ‘breakthrough’ trained on heavily skewed data
DeepMind, the Google-owned U.K. AI research firm, has published a research letter in the journal Nature in which it discusses the performance of a deep learning model for continuously predicting the future likelihood of a patient developing a life-threatening condition called acute kidney injury (AKI). The company says its model is able to accurately predict that a patient will develop AKI “within a clinically actionable window” up to 48 hours in advance. In a blog post trumpeting the research, DeepMind couches it as a breakthrough...
Former Cambridge Analytica director, Brittany Kaiser, dumps more evidence of Brexit’s democratic trainwreck
A UK parliamentary committee has published new evidence fleshing out how membership data was passed from UKIP, a pro-Brexit political party, to Leave.EU, a Brexit supporting campaign active in the...
Europe should ban AI for mass surveillance and social credit scoring, says advisory group
An independent expert group tasked with advising the European Commission to inform its regulatory response to artificial intelligence — to underpin EU lawmakers’ stated aim of ensuring AI developments are “human centric” — has published its policy and investment recommendations. This follows earlier ethics guidelines for “trustworthy AI”, put out by the High Level Expert Group (HLEG) for AI back in April, when the Commission also called for participants to test the draft rules. The AI HLEG’s full policy recommendations...