Historian Yuval Harari at the World Economic Forum earlier this year. He covers so many big ideas in half an hour. (“Algorithms will understand us better than we understand ourselves.”)
Category Archives: Artificial Intelligence
AI in Voice Forensics
AI is now so advanced that it can reveal far more about you than a mere fingerprint. By using powerful technology to analyse recorded speech, scientists today can make confident predictions about everything from the speaker’s physical characteristics – their height, weight, facial structure and age, for example – to their socioeconomic background, level of income and even the state of their physical and mental health.
Your voice can give away plenty of environmental information, too. For example, the technology can guess the size of the room in which someone is speaking, whether it has windows and even what its walls are made of. Even more impressively, perhaps, the AI can detect signatures left in the recording by fluctuations in the local electrical grid, and can then match these to specific databases to give a very good idea of the caller’s physical location and the exact time of day they picked up the phone.
One of the leading scientists in this field is Rita Singh of Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute. Interview with Ms. Singh
Dadbot
The people who make the streaming playlists
Good piece from last year on the people who curate playlists for streaming music services:
“As streaming has gone mainstream, these curators, many of whom began their professional lives as bloggers and DJs, have amassed unusual influence. Their work, as a rule, is uncredited — the better for services designed to feel like magic — but their reach is increasingly unavoidable. Spotify says 50% of its more than 100 million users globally are listening to its human-curated playlists (not counting those in the popular, algorithmically personalized “Discover Weekly”), which cumulatively generate more than a billion plays per week. According to an industry estimate, 1 out of every 5 plays across all streaming services today happens inside of a playlist. And that number, fueled by prolific experts, is growing steadily.”
“All the signs point to playlists being the dominant mode of discovery in the near future,” says Jay Frank, senior vice president of global streaming marketing for Universal Music Group, the largest of the major label conglomerates. “When it comes to trying to find something exciting and new, more people are going to want to go to trusted playlists.”
I hope these folks always have a job and I sort of think they will. Not convinced an algorithm can do the voodoo they do.