Will deep learning discover new medicines? Startups — and big-pharma partners — are betting on it. The problem: In theory, there’s a pharmacological cure for just about any ailment. In practice, discovering those therapies takes years and billions of dollars.

Chatbots designed to recognize Covid-19 symptoms dispense alarmingly inconsistent recommendations. Given the same symptoms, eight high-profile medical bots responded with divergent, often conflicting advice.

Are you secretly yearning to have a My Little Pony character voice your next online presentation? A new web app can make your dreams come true. 15.ai translates short text messages into the voices of popular cartoon and videogame characters.

Bored with your Spotify playlists? Let this robot singer/songwriter take you on a trip “Into Your Mind.” A music-composing, marimba-playing robot named Shimon has learned to write and sing its own lyrics, IEEE Spectrum reports.

Machine learning thrives on data, but information about the novel coronavirus and the illness it produces has been either thin or hard to access. Now researchers are pooling resources to share everything we do know.

Hoping to keep surveillance capitalists from capitalizing on your face? Safeguard your selfies with a digital countermeasure. Researchers devised a program that subtly alters portrait photos to confuse face recognition models without distorting the image to the human eye.

Fashion models recently sashayed down Paris Fashion Week catwalks in outfits designed by deep neural nets. Swedish design firm Acne Studios based its 2020 fall/winter men’s line on output from a generative adversarial network.

Deepfake videos in which one person appears to speak another’s words have appeared in entertainment, advertising, and politics. New research ups the ante for an application that enables new forms of both creative expression and

While deep learning is taking us into the future, it’s also opening windows into the past. A Redditor brought 100-year-old silent film footage of New York City into the 21st century by automatically sharpening the picture, boosting the frame rate, and adding color.

Deepfake tech reared its digitally altered head in Indian politics, but with a twist: Altered images of a politician were produced by his own campaign.

AI’s ability to transfer a person’s face from a source photo onto someone in a target photo doesn’t work so well when the target face is partially obscured by, say, eyeglasses, a veil, or a hand. A new technique handles such occlusions.

Neural audio synthesizers like WaveRNN or GANSynth produce impressive sounds, but they require large, data-hungry neural networks. A new code library beefs up the neural music studio with efficient sound modules based on traditional synthesizer designs.

A new system marks a step forward in converting text to speech: It’s fast at inference, reduces word errors, and provides some control over the speed and inflection of generated speech.What’s new: Yi Ren, Yangjun Ruan, and their co-authors at Zhejiang

Artificial intelligence was everywhere at the biggest, buzziest consumer-technology showcase in the U.S. AI ruled the convention floor at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, as numerous media outlets proclaimed.

In tasks that involve generating natural language, neural networks often map an input sequence of words to an output sequence of words. Facebook researchers used a similar technique on sequences of mathematical symbols, training a model to map math problems to math solutions.