Google Assistant Advances Languages

Have now been using Google assistant bilingually for about a year, with multiple voices as I explore them.    Impressive work, everybody needs language assistance. 

Google Assistant gets new voice options in nine more languages
Voice options will be presented as colors, not genders.

By Rachel England, @rachel_england in Engadget

Google Assistant users outside the US haven't had much choice when it comes to voice options -- until now, as Google launches a second voice for Assistant in French, German, Dutch, Japanese, Norwegian, Korean, Italian and English for India and the UK.

The new voices have been built with DeepMind's WaveNet technology to help them sound natural, and will be displayed in settings as a color, rather than as a gender. Users selecting a voice in one of these languages will be able to choose from "orange" or "red," and when you set up Google Assistant for the first time you'll be randomly assigned one of them. According to Google, "We've learned that people enjoy choosing between voices to find one that sounds right to them, and we think it's important to present these voices without any labels." The new voice options launch today. ... " 

ACM Tech Talk: From Media to Meaning: Classic Machine Learning

Good piece.   With frightening implications of the combination surveillance, neural methods,  and the use of high speed video generation to fake anything we want. Notable explanation of Adversarial neural networks (GAN).

Watch First ACM Tech Talk: “From Media to Meaning: Classic Machine Learning” with Blaise Agüera y Arcas

Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a Distinguished Scientist at Google AI, where he leads a team that works on intersections of neural nets and neuromorphic AI. In this talk, Blaise examines the recent revolution in deep networks which has enabled the use of classic machine learning techniques to go from media to meaning. He covers neural nets, generative adversarial techniques, and the ethical implications of these new technologies.  ... "