Arria NLG introduced Arria for Excel, a Microsoft Office add-in that brings natural language generation (NLG) functionality to users of Microsoft Excel. Arria for Excel gives you the ability to instantly narrate Excel spreadsheets and export directly to Word or PowerPoint, and adds natural-language summaries and report automation within the worksheet, turning volumes of data into narratives. Users can tailor narratives to specific audiences, providing contextual commentary and explanatory analyses like those created by subject matter experts. Arria augments existing Excel workflows with:
- Consistency and accuracy. A next-generation report writer that dynamically automates data-driven financial summaries.
- Timeliness of reporting. Financial reports can now be published quickly after the end of the reporting period.
- Team sharing. Provides insightful information delivery across the enterprise.
https://www.arria.com/excel/
Yext, Inc. announced “Milky Way,” the latest upgrade to the natural language processing (NLP) algorithm that powers Yext Answers, Yext’s site search product. Headlining this milestone update is the adoption of BERT, (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers). Developed by Google, BERT is an open source machine learning framework for NLP designed to better understand user searches. By leveraging BERT within Named Entity Recognition (a process to locate and classify named entities mentioned in unstructured text into predefined categories), Yext Answers improves its ability to distinguish locations from other types of entities, including people, jobs, and events. The update includes:
- Improved Named Entity Recognition: By leveraging BERT, Yext Answers can now better understand the contextual relationship between search terms. Answers will return a more relevant result by taking into account the correct classification, whether a location, person or product.
- Improved Location Detection: The update leaves behind location biasing. Now, Yext Answers will filter through locations stored by a business in their Yext knowledge graph to surface the best match.
- Updated Healthcare Taxonomy: More than 3,000 new healthcare-related synonyms, conditions, treatments, and procedures have been added to the algorithm’s taxonomy.
- Improved Stemming and Typo Tolerance.
https://www.yext.com/resources/about/news-media/2020-08-yext-releases-milky-way/
Microsoft announced the general availability of Immersive Reader and new improvements to Azure Cognitive Services. Immersive Reader is an Azure Cognitive Service within the Azure AI platform that helps readers read and comprehend text. Through today’s general availability, developers and partners can add Immersive Reader right into their products, enabling students of all abilities to translate in over 70 languages, read text aloud, focus attention through highlighting, other design elements, and more. With the general availability of Immersive Reader, we are also rolling out the following enhancements:
- Immersive Reader SDK 1.1: Updates include support to have a page read aloud automatically, pre-translating content, and more.
- New Neural Text-to-Speech (TTS) languages: Immersive Reader is adding 15 new Neural Text to Speech voices.
- New Translator languages: Translator is adding five new languages that will also be available in Immersive Reader—Odia, Kurdish (Northern), Kurdish (Central), Pashto, and Dari.
With Immersive Reader, all it takes is a single API call to help users boost literacy. Learn more at:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/empowering-remote-learning-with-azure-cognitive-services/
Ethereum is the second-largest cryptocurrency platform by market capitalization, behind Bitcoin.[1][2] It is a decentralized open sourceblockchain featuring smart contract functionality. Ether is the cryptocurrency generated by Ethereum miners as a reward for computations performed to secure the blockchain.[3] Ethereum serves as the platform for over 260,000 different cryptocurrencies, including 47 of the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.[4][5]
Ethereum provides a decentralized virtual machine, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which can execute scripts using an international network of public nodes.[6] The virtual machine’s instruction set, in contrast to others like Bitcoin Script, is Turing-complete. “Gas”, an internal transaction pricing mechanism, is used to mitigate spam and allocate resources on the network.[6]
ConsenSys, a blockchain software company, announced the acquisition of Quorum, an enterprise variant of the Ethereum blockchain developed by J.P. Morgan. With the addition of Quorum, ConsenSys now offers a full range of products, services, and support for Quorum, accelerating the availability of features and capabilities—such as digital asset functionality and document management. ConsenSys will merge its existing protocol engineering roadmap with Quorum, leveraging the best of both codebases. All Enterprise Ethereum protocol technology at ConsenSys will fall under the ConsenSys Quorum brand, and developers will have the option to choose their underlying technology stack. Quorum will remain open source and become interoperable with ConsenSys’ other leading blockchain products, such as Codefi’s finance and commerce application suite. J.P. Morgan will be a customer of ConsenSys’ advanced features and services deployed on Quorum.
J.P. Morgan and ConsenSys have a history of collaboration after leading the creation of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, helping bring a Mainnet Ethereum client, Hyperledger Besu, to The Linux Foundation, and working together on industry applications built on Quorum, such as komgo and Covantis. Since the launch of Quorum in 2016, ConsenSys and J.P. Morgan have collaborated to make Ethereum the platform for enterprises building secure and customizable business networks. In addition to ConsenSys’ acquisition of Quorum, J.P. Morgan made a strategic investment in ConsenSys.
https://consensys.net/blog/press-release/consensys-acquires-quorum-platform-from-jp-morgan/
ConsenSys is a Ethereum software company. We enable developers, enterprises, and people worldwide to build next-generation applications, launch modern financial infrastructure, and access the decentralized web. Our product suite, composed of Infura, Quorum, Codefi, MetaMask, and Diligence, serves millions of users, supports billions of blockchain-based queries for our clients, and has handled billions of dollars in digital assets. Ethereum is the largest programmable blockchain in the world, leading in business adoption, developer community, and DeFi activity. http://consensys.net/.
Xelex Digital announced the release of its new audio and text annotation platform, WebChartAi, designed to accelerate the adoption of machine learning applications by simplifying the creation of training data at scale. The initial MVP (minimum viable product) release of WebChartAi focuses on manual annotation of audio and text data objects. Upcoming releases include semi-automated annotation, and image and video annotation. In addition to its use by companies for in-house projects, WebChartAi is designed for use by AI and NLP companies acting as service providers. The company is now seeking partners for the platform’s expansion beyond its current MVP form.
https://www.webchartai.com
Intelligent Integration Platform provider SnapLogic announced new enterprise automation capabilities that help employees across the business easily connect applications and data, streamline workflows and processes. The new capabilities include prebuilt, end-to-end process automations; ELT (Extract, Load, Transform) features and a quick-start solution for faster data warehousing; with a visual interface powered by machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP). With SnapLogic’s self-service, AI-powered integration platform, IT teams as well as business users across functions can use the low-code solution to connect apps and data and automate workflows and processes.
- New Prebuilt Automation Journeys: Prebuilt automation journeys unify all the applications and data that make up a complete business process, such as hire-to-retire, quote-to-cash, procure-to-pay, and customer 360. The SnapLogic platform learns, understands, and connects to all of an organization’s underlying systems, streamlining flows and processes, automated in their construction, with rich AI and machine learning (ML) capabilities layered on top, for faster, data-enriched outcomes.
- New NLP-powered Flow Interface: The visual flow interface guides non-technical business users through the integration and automation of business processes.
- New ELT Snaps: ELT Snaps accelerate the integration and movement of large volumes of complex data, whether in the cloud, on-premises, or in hybrid environments, into a cloud data warehouse and provide flexibility to leverage compute power for data transformations.
- New ‘Fast Loader’ Solution: The new quick-start solution helps enterprises load data from multiple cloud and on-premises applications and data sources into their cloud data warehouse faster with a new wizard-based interface and parallel loading.
https://snaplogic.com
