Mob app development Kerala

Google made multiple major announcements related to the future of its Assistant today, including new voices, a feature to teach kids good manners, the ability to continue conversations, and Assistant being able to make phone calls on a user’s behalf.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai says he wants Assistant to be “natural and comfortable to talk to.” As such, users can now keep a conversation going with Assistant without repeatedly saying, “Hey Google,” to start every query. If you want to ask a question, you can keep asking more until you’ve reached a natural stopping point in the conversation. The feature, called continued conversations, should be available in the “coming weeks.” Amazon’s Alexa assistant already does this with its follow-up mode.

Assistant can now also handle multiple actions, that’ll let users ask for multiple things at a time.
Most interestingly, Google says Assistant will eventually be able to make phone calls for us. Users might be able to use Assistant to book appointments at salons or doctors’ offices. The live demo Google conducted showed Assistant making a phone call and then carrying out a conversation to book a hair appointment. It considered various time slots and compared them to the Assistant user’s calendar to find a convenient booking. The demo was incredibly impressive and natural sounding. It’s hard to believe it’ll work that well in the real world, but it would be life-altering if it did. This feature likely won’t be rolling out anytime soon, although Pichai says Assistant will soon automatically call businesses to ensure that it knows the correct hours, especially during holidays. You’ll see this information automatically updated in Google Search without knowing Assistant had to make a phone call.

The calling technology, called Duplex, is explained in a longer Google blog post that describes how the team is thinking about latency in responses and the Assistant’s natural cadence.

Director of product Lilian Rincon also demoed how voice controls will assist with more visual tasks, particularly with smart displays. Users will be able to ask Assistant to call up cooking videos and other video programming from YouTube. The Assistant is also getting a revamped look and experience on phones. It’ll act a lot more like Google Now and will call up a full-screen page of information when a question is asked. Smart home requests will also show up on the phone’s screen. The company has partnered with multiple food retailer chains, including Starbucks, Domino’s, and Dunkin’ Donuts, to streamline food pickup. Users can ask for their “usual order” and Assistant will pull up what it thinks they’ll want. The Assistant will also come to navigation in Maps later this summer, and users will be able to use it to play music from YouTube without video and to get their ETA.

The company’s new “pretty please” feature teaches kids to be kind and say “please” and “thank you” to their Google Assistant-equipped device. The Assistant will thank kids for saying please and will call out when the kids have asked for something nicely. This might help them learn to not demand things from their Assistant. Finally, six new voices are coming to the Google Assistant, including some male voices, like one based off singer John Legend

The company said last week that its Assistant is now compatible with more than 5,000 home devices, which is up from only 1,500 in January. Today, it said Assistant will support more than 30 languages and will be in 80 countries by the end of the year. Google’s clearly focusing on its Assistant, both from a usability standpoint and its prominence in the public conscience. The company installed a huge brand activation at CES and aggressively started marketing its Alexa competitor. Beyond getting the word out, Google needs to keep adding these features in order to stay ahead of Amazon and beat it in the smart assistant race.

Facebook is rolling out its Watch video service globally one year after it launched in the United States with original entertainment news and sports content to compete with platforms like Alphabet’s YouTube.

Facebook’s Head of Video Fidji Simo said Watch was gaining real momentum in a crowded marketplace because it was built on the notion that watching videos could be a social activity.

“Every month more than 50 million people in the US come to watch videos for at least a minute on Watch, and total time spent watching video on Facebook Watch has increased by 14 times since the start of 2018,” she told reporters.

“With Watch … you can have a two-way conversation about the content with friends, other fans or even the creatives themselves.”

Facebook said eligible creators would be able to make money from their videos using its Ad Breaks service in Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand as well as the United States from Thursday, with many more countries set to follow.

Simo said publishers were making “meaningful revenues” from its automated video advertising system on the platform, which has featured shows such as beauty mogul Huda Kattan’s “Huda Boss” and live “Major League Baseball” games.

“We know it’s been a long road but we’ve worked hard to ensure that the Ad Breaks experience is a good one for both our partners and our community,” she said.

Ad revenue will be split 55 percent for the content creator and 45 percent for Facebook, the same ratio as in the United States, Simo said.

Publishers need to have created three-minute videos that have generated more than 30,000 one-minute views in total over the past two months and must have 10,000 followers to participate in Ad Breaks, Facebook said.

Simo said Facebook was working on a variety of other options for creators to make money, such as branded content and the ability for fans to directly support their favourite creators through subscriptions.

“(Fan subscription) is something that is rolled out to a few creators now, but we are planning on expanding that program soon,” she said.

A new AI program created by computer scientist Bruce Ferwerda of Switzerland’s Jönköping University and marketer Mark Graus from The Netherlands’ Maastricht University is supposedly able to figure out a person’s “musical sophistication” by checking out their Spotify. The AI looks to a number of metrics concerning a person’s music listening habits to determine their musical sophistication score, most notably what tracks they listen to and how often they do so. Based on this, the AI can tell how varied a person’s tastes are and even how likely they are to engage in “musical” behaviors, such as listening to a wide variety of different music or even exhibiting musical talent themselves.

The study that helped create and train the program centered on 61 participants. Between all of their top tracks on Spotify, the AI was given a list of 21,080 pieces of music to analyze. The tracks were analyzed using various Spotify API plugins, looking for things like valence, beats per minute, danceability, and how much of the tracks were instrumental, among other metrics.The participants were then surveyed about their music tastes and habits to create a profile for each of them that detailed things like how much they spent on music, from albums to instruments, along with their emotional responses to music and how often they could be found listening. All of this data was enough to classify the participants and create a scale of “musical sophistication”. The higher somebody’s score was, the more likely they were to be deeply involved in music. The most sophisticated individuals were those with extremely wide-ranging tastes who created music as well as consumed it.

The practical use cases of such an AI are many; it could be used to vet music school students, to help cater music playlists and discovery algorithms on music services for listeners, and even to help train the presumably more human-like AI of the future in how they should “feel” about music, just to name a few possible uses. As to real-world examples, Google already has a musical AI project known as Magenta, which serves as a baseline for music-focused projects to build from. Something like this could greatly expand the knowledge base and training data set of an AI like Magenta.