Narcissistic Tendencies or Simply Intrigue?

There’s an AI you can use to create your very own “digital voice”—and all it takes is a one-minute audio clip of your dulcet tones to create it. This means you can listen to “yourself” read books, text messages, and maybe even the latest news.

As narcissistic as listening to your own voice all the time sounds, you have to admit, it’s intriguing and may bring to mind these questions: How realistic of a voice impression can it create? Listen to examples here. Can someone else take a one-minute audio clip of me talking and then use my digital voice for nefarious purposes? The company says no, but the concept is troubling. Would Alexa take commands from my “digital voice”? If any of you experiment with this, send the results our way! We’d love to know how it goes.

Cracking Your Lubb-Dupp Cipher

Lots of us at one point or another experience an unusual heartbeat. One second your heart is happily, quietly, and regularly lubb-dupping away (I promise I didn’t make lubb-dupp up), and the next second, it’s bizarrely off. If this irregular heartbeat bothers you enough, you’ll go get it checked out, and your doctor will likely send you home with a Holter heart monitor to wear for 24 hours—but then, of course, your heart does absolutely nothing out of the ordinary in those 24 hours, and your doctor tells you that you’re probably just fine.

But what if you could wear something that would monitor your heart all the time and also identify when something’s off? This AI tech, which is now FDA approved, does just that. It collects your data and identifies when a heartbeat is unusual for whatever activity you’re doing. It can read your heart rate every five seconds, 24/7, if need be. So when your heartbeat doesn’t make sense, it tells you to take an EKG immediately through your device. Also, on a similar front, researchers led by Andrew Ng are adjusting an AI so it can speed up and improve irregular-heartbeat diagnoses. All of this to better learn what your heart’s rhythm is telling you.

 What Don’t They Know?

This AI tells you when they eat, sleep, drink, walk, rest. It also predicts their sicknesses, their fertility, and their body temperature—these bovine have no privacy. But the company that created this tech says all this data is helping dairy farmers improve milk production by 30 percent, and it’s also helping cows become healthier, and hopefully happier. It tracks cow activities with a neck sensor and then uses the collected data to inform farmers about their cows’ health. All farmers have to do is check the stats on their apps.

 Unique of the Week

An augmented reality company uses deep learning to pull Uma Thurman and John Travolta from Pulp Fiction and project 3D versions of them into your living room (see video below). While we think this tech’s current form has a lot of glitches to work through before it’s flawless, it’s still brilliant, and it gives us a unique view into our possible future: one day you’ll be able to have anybody from a video hanging out in your living room in 3D, and your child’s imaginary friend from TrollHunters won’t be so imaginary.

AI Tidbits