Culture

Your Voice, Your Choice

A startup enables people who participate in voice chat to use realistic artificial voices in real time.What’s new: Massachusetts-based Modulate offers a voice-masking tool to forestall harassment of people, particularly women and trans individuals,

Roll Over, Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven died before he completed what would have been his tenth and final symphony. A team of computer scientists and music scholars approximated the music that might have been.

Search Goes Multimodal

Google will upgrade its search engine with a new model that tracks the relationships between words, images, and, in time, videos — the first fruit of its latest research into multimodal machine learning and multilingual language modeling.

Too Fabulous for Face Recognition

Drop off your adversarial hats, eyeglasses, and tee shirts to the second-hand store. The latest fashion statement is adversarial makeup.What’s new: Researchers at Ben-Gurion University and NEC developed a system

Fighting Fakes

A supergroup of machine learning models flags manipulated photos.What’s new: Jigsaw, a tech incubator owned by Alphabet, released a system that detects digitally altered images. The organization is testing it with a dozen

Fake Aim

Gamers looking to cheat in first-person shooters can’t miss with AI-assisted marksmanship. What’s new: A video-game hack uses computer vision to blast virtual enemies at superhuman speed, Ars Technica reported.

A Bicycle Built for Zero

Self-driving cars, get ready to share the road with self-riding bikes.What’s new: Beijing-based machine learning researcher Zhihui Peng built a riderless bike that stays upright, navigates, and avoids collisions, Synced

Every Problem Looks Like a Nail

Robots are brushing their way into the beauty market.What’s new: A trio of companies is developing automated nail-painting devices that integrate robotics and computer vision, The New York Times

Crosswords Go the Way of Go

A hybrid of deep learning and symbolic AI took the prize at a major puzzle competition.What’s new: A system called Dr. Fill outscored nearly 1,300 human contestants at April’s annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, Slate

Haters Gonna [Mute]

A new tool aims to let video gamers control how much vitriol they receive from fellow players. What’s new: Intel announced a voice recognition tool called Bleep that the

New Life for Old Songs

Neural networks can tease apart the different sounds in musical recordings.What’s new: Companies and hobbyists are using deep learning to separate voices and instruments in commercial recordings, Wired reported. The

Star Trek: The Videobot Generation

A digital doppelgänger of Star Trek’s original star will let fans chat with him — possibly well beyond his lifetime.What’s new: AI startup StoryFile built a lifelike videobot of actor William

Your Words, Their Voices

Voice clones — the audio counterpart to deepfaked images — are poised to invade popular media and entertainment.What’s new: Professionals and amateurs alike are using AI to emulate the voices of human actors, Wired reported.

Make Your Ancestors Smile

Machine learning is bringing old photos to life.What’s new: A new service from genealogy company MyHeritage lets users animate their ancestors’ portraits, making them smile, blink, and turn their

How Art Makes AI Feel

An automated art critic spells out the emotional impact of images.What’s new: Led by Panos Achlioptas, researchers at Ecole Polytechnique, King Abdullah University, and Stanford University trained a deep learning