AI audio firm ElevenLabs has secured deals with actors Matthew McConaughey and Michael Caine, who will use the company’s tech to generate AI versions of their iconic voices. The announcements, made at the inaugural ElevenLabs Summit, came as the company revealed plans to aggregate AI availability of more than 25 famous voices — including Maya Angelou, Alan Turing and Liza Minnelli — in its new Iconic Marketplace, a platform focused on “ethical sourcing and licensing of some of the world’s most recognizable voices.” ElevenLabs said McConaughey is signing on as an investor in the company. Continue reading ElevenLabs Adds Well-Known Voices to Its Iconic Marketplace

Alphabet’s London-based DeepMind loosed AlphaZero, its AI-powered system that can master games without human intervention, on Stockfish, the highest rated chess game engine, and crushed it. DeepMind developed the self-training method, dubbed deep reinforcement learning, specifically to attack strategy board game “Go,” and an earlier iteration of the system beat one of the world’s best “Go” players, although it needed human guidance. AlphaZero trained itself in chess in three days, rejecting red-marked moves after a mere 1,000 simulations. Continue reading DeepMind’s AlphaZero Defeats Leading Chess Game Engine

Unlike Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant and Microsoft’s own Cortana, the latter’s social chatbot Xiaoice (pronounced “Shao-ice”) isn’t constructed simply to answer questions or resolve problems but can also tell jokes, write poetry, and exhibit “empathic computing” abilities. In China, Xiaoice resided on Huawei smartphones and was a weather reader on Dragon TV, a Shanghai TV station. Debuted in China in May 2014, Xiaoice has had more than 30 billion mainly text conversations with 660 million people around the world. Continue reading Microsoft Chatbot Xiaoice Excels at AI-to-Human Engagement