We can give you the wrong answer much faster

/

PROBABLY the CTO of every large technology company has to be a futurist. But it's a rare CTO who speaks at the Singularity Summit to consider the prospects for an artificial general intelligence surpassing humans. But Intel's CTO, Justin Rattner, laid out the future of Moore's Law to a packed auditorium for whom computational speed is a near-religious experience.

Yet Rattner says afterwards that raw speed won't be enough. "I once asked our speech recognition team if there was any direct relationship between machine computing speed and recognition accuracy and after a long pause, they said – because they knew I was not going to be happy with the answer – no." He asked why: "Our recognition performance is limited by our algorithmic understanding, not by our instruction speed. We can give you the wrong answer much faster, but we can't give you the right answer much faster."
Speech recognition is, of course, just one of many tasks even a very young human can do routinely and simultaneously.
"It's clearly a case where, until we have the right algorithms, no amount of performance improvement is going to give us the recognition performance a young child can deliver. That's why I try to separate out these notions a little. I have little doubt that when we figure it out we'll require lots of computing power, so there's no sense in abandoning it." 
[click heading for more]

Terre Haute company to test dictation software

/

InfraWare Inc., a medical transcription software company, announced Thursday it soon will begin beta testing its new dictation recognition engine aimed at increasing the speed and reducing the cost per line of medical transcription through intelligent back-end automation.The Terre Haute-based software developer and transcription ASP provider will marry its existing InfraWare 360 transcription speech recognition platform and its newly developed artificial intelligence engine to generate more accurate and less expensive first-draft text versions of physician audio dictations. Of the $1.2 million project budget, $871,000 was supplied by a grant from the state’s 21st Century Research and Technology Fund. [click heading for more]

Computers 'to match human brains by 2030'

/

Computer power will match the intelligence of human beings within the next 20 years because of the accelerating speed at which technology is advancing, according to a leading scientific "futurologist".

Dr Kurzweil is considered one of the most radical figures in the field of technological prediction. His credentials stem from being a pioneer in various fields of computing, such as optical character recognition and automatic speech recognition by machine.[click heading for more]

Zabaware Wins Loebner Prize for Artificial Intelligence

/

It is one thing to talk to your computer it is quite another to have a conversation where you are exchanging information and the computer learns and utilizes the information in the future. Zabaware’s Ultra Hal technology and its associated brain are currently doing just that. The software can give your computer a personality using AI technology, speech recognition technology, and real-time animation. It can be used as an entertainment program, a companion, or an office assistant. It learns from conversations and evolves and improves the more it talks with a person. In addition to chat it can perform useful functions such as remembering and reminding of appointments, keeping an address book, dialing phone numbers, launching program, and more.