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Showing posts from January, 2018

A Simple Way to Understand Machine Learning vs Deep Learning

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A Simple Way to Understand Machine Learning vs Deep Learning Understanding how today’s artificial intelligence works might seem overwhelming, but it really boils down to two concepts you probably have heard of before: “machine learning” and “deep learning”. Neither are brand new ideas, but the way they’re used to describe intelligent machines seems to constantly evolve. Machine learning and deep learning are how Netflix knows what you might want to watch next, or how Facebook can recognize your friends’ face in a photo, or  how a support agent can figure out if you’ll be satisfied with your customer service . So what are these buzzwords that still dominate the conversations about artificial intelligence, and how exactly are they different? And what do they mean for customer service?   What is machine learning? Here’s a basic definition of machine learning:  “Algorithms that parse data, learn from that data, and then apply what they’ve learned to make i...

The 5 Best Amazon Alexa Skills for Business Productivity

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The 5 Best Amazon Alexa Skills for Business Productivity Categories:  amazon ,  Amazon Alexa Digital assistants  like Amazon’s Alexa, which is the persona associated with the Amazon Echo, have made existing technology even more convenient. They’re most often used in smart homes, but the Amazon Alexa Skills kit has many uses for the office as well. How to Enable a Skill on the Amazon Echo You can enable Amazon Alexa Skills through three different methods: Voice:  Say “Alexa, open [name of skill.” This is the fastest method, but you obviously have to know the exact name of the skill in order to turn it on. App:  Open the navigation menu on the left-side of the Alexa app and tap “Skills.” From there, simply enable the skills you want to use. Website:  Find a skill you want to use on the Amazon website, install it and then click “Enable.” 5 Essential Amazon Alexa Skills you must Enable 1. Schedule Management As you’re jumping around fr...

Microsoft creates AI that can read a document and answer questions about it as well as a person

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Microsoft researchers have created technology that uses artificial intelligence to read a document and answer questions about it about as well as a human. It’s a major milestone in the push to have search engines such as Bing and intelligent assistants such as Cortana interact with people and provide information in more natural ways, much like people communicate with each other. A team at  Microsoft Research Asia  reached the human parity milestone using the Stanford Question Answering Dataset, known among researchers as  SQuAD . It’s a machine reading comprehension dataset that is made up of questions about a set of Wikipedia articles. According to the SQuAD leaderboard, on Jan. 3, Microsoft submitted a model that reached the score of 82.650 on the exact match portion. The human performance on the same set of questions and answers is 82.304. On Jan. 5, researchers with the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba submitted a score of 82.440, also about the same as a human. Th...

Artificial Intelligence Building Blocks

To find success with artificial intelligence, banks and credit unions will need to cultivate new capabilities — from machine learning to natural language processing. Computer scientist and celebrated futurist Ray Kurzweil says artificial intelligence will match human intelligence by 2029, and that by 2045, it will have multiplied the human biological machine intelligence of our civilization a billion times. Predictions like this abound amid the hype surrounding AI. Real understanding however, is less common. Many enterprises are unclear about what constitutes AI, where it can be applied, and how to prioritize its use cases within the organization. In a survey commissioned by Infosys on the state of AI adoption, half of the 1,600 respondents said that not knowing where AI could assist was one of their biggest challenges. A good understanding of the technologies under the umbrella of artificial intelligence is key. Many of these technology pieces have seen rapid and impressive e...