It is unclear if SoftBank was deliberately seeking to evoke dystopia when it named this project, but “EmotionCancelling Voice Conversion Engine” has a bleakness that would turn George Orwell green.  The technology, developed at an AI research institute established by SoftBank and the University of Tokyo, is still in its R&D phase, and the early demo version suggests there is plenty more work ahead. But the principle is already sort of working, and it is as weird as you might expect. In theory, the voice-altering AI changes the rant of an angry human caller in real time so the person at the other end hears only a softened, innocuous version. The caller’s original vocabulary remains intact (for now; give dystopia time to solve that one). But, tonally, the rage is expunged.

"The primary design goal of most popular AI employment tools in China centres around boosting productivity and reducing costs, which is realized through four processes.

Lloyds hires Amazon Web Services executive as its new AI chief

EY engineers are working to make sure that when an employee asks for the status of a contract, for example, Microsoft’s bot knows where to fetch the information.... A lot of people think AI is just pixie dust they can sprinkle, and it’s gonna make their lives easier,” said Keith Mescha, an executive director with the EY unit that helps clients use Microsoft products. “There’s actual effort and work to make sure they do it right.” Lumen marketing chief Ryan Asdourian said the assistant saves salespeople more than three hours a week researching prospects, which he estimated would translate into about $50 million in additional annual revenue if those employees invested the free time back into their jobs... “One of the things that we’ve done really well is we’ve taught people how to use the product,” he said. The results are “significantly better when your employees know how to use it.” ... Meanwhile, companies are slowly learning what information to feed into the software. Give it too little to chew on, and Copilot is essentially a very expensive email drafting tool. Give it too much, and an office worker might call up a colleague’s salary or peek at projects unrelated to their job. That quandary — and the cost of painstakingly reworking data storage or software permissions — represents “the biggest impediment” to widespread adoption of the software...  Unlike a new feature in a software update, successfully deploying Copilot tends to require hiring consultants or devoting training resources that could be spent elsewhere. “Most companies are not ready” to use Copilot without changing how they label and store information... It’s only as good as what you put into it.

consumers’ mass adoption of AI tools has had a knock-on effect on attitudes towards robotics, said Sonali Fenner of management consultancy Slalom. This has enabled companies to consider using robots in public-facing settings. Fenner used the example of a large retail client who deployed Spot, a Boston Dynamics robot dog powered by Google’s Gemini Pro model, in its stores to assess inventory. “[The hype] has opened the door a little bit to what is expected in particular environments and, even if you don’t want Spot walking around your retail store, you might accept a slightly less intrusive robot,” Fenner added. Ahti Heinla, co-founder of Skype and chief executive of delivery bot start-up Starship Technologies, who has deployed the small grocery robots across more than 100 cities and towns in Europe and the UK, said he was surprised at how easily people “perceive the robots to be normal participants in public space, and accept them as natural”.

Meet ElliQ Your AI sidekick for happier, healthier aging

The explosive growth of generative AI combined with ML is taking AI and advertising to another level by permeating every aspect of advertising, from workflows to personalization. Generative AI is like a vaccine that has cracked a code for changing the entire advertising process down to the level of how a media planner responds to requests for proposals