In todays update of technology news: Brands turning to top domain names led by Google; Microsoft makes voice recognition breakthrough, new Macs coming, and you may be in a perpetual police photo lline-up.
Brands go for top domain names
Look for brands to soon start using their own names instead of the traditional dot com for their digital properties. Google transferred 19 previously separate Google blogs to blog.google in September.
Other brands that have been approved for these top-level domains are .ford; .homedepot; .delta; .Nike, .hbo; .kindle; .apple; .ibm; .canon; and .samsung, among others.
Microsoft voice recognition breakthrough
Microsoft has developed a system that recognizes speech as accurately as professional human transciptionists.
Engineers at Microsoft’s artificial intelligence and research group achieved a record-breaking error rate of only 5.9 percent. That’s how often a system mishears words.
The MS system performed as well as trained human transciptionists listening to the same conversations.Microsoft’s paper on the system said humans and the automated system mostly fumbled over the same sounds in the tests, with the exception of “uh-huh” and “uh”
“Our progress is a result of the careful engineering and optimization of convolutional and recurrent neural networks,” Microsoft says.
You can read the Microsoft technical report on the research here: Achieving Human Parity in Conversational Speech Recognition. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.05256v1.pdf
Are you in the perpetual police line-up?
US law enforcement agencies have created a huge database of ID photographs from state driver’s licenses that can be searched using face-recognition software, says the Center on Privacy and Technology.
More than 117 million photographs of adult US citizens (that’s half of all US adults) are part of the “perpetual line-up,” says the report published by the Center and the Georgetown University Law Center.
The report calls the network “highly problematic” because it is “Uncharted and frankly dangerous territory.” The photos, unlike fingerprints and DNA samples taken from people who have been arrested, includes millions of innocent people.
Read the Georgetown Law press release here: https://www.law.georgetown.edu/news/press-releases/half-of-all-american-adults-are-in-a-police-face-recognition-database-new-report-finds.cfm
New Macs coming Oct. 27
Reports say Apple plans to introduce new Macs at an Oct. 27 event.
The move has been expected since the company introduced MacOS Sierra last month but without any new models featuring the operating system.
It’s been quite a while since Apple made many changes to any Mac models. Rumors say the company may introduce a MacBook Pro with customizable touchscreen keys.
