Good morning! Ok so I was nominated for this Venture Fuel “Visionary” award thing, and while I feel a little funny telling you about it, it’s an open vote, so if you, loyal reader, want to vote for me, you can do so here.

Now that that’s out of the way, here’s…

> Try Cooking By Ear, an audio cooking show. I love the site design. h/t Jared Newman, per always.

> Read 10 Exciting Ideas of 2018 in NLP. Unsupervised MT, Pretrained Language Models, Robust unsupervised methods, Contextual Word Embeddings, Syntactic Scaffolds for Semantic Structures…HOW CAN YOU PICK JUST ONE!

> Read Post-mortem on the 2019 Alexa Conference. Most interesting data shared in this post IMO is:

> Add @VoiceTechCarl on twitter voice tech list. Great way to see what’s going on more than the one a week(ish) that this newsletter comes out.

> Subscribe to Voice Chops Tuesdays. The newsletter is cool, despite being the self-proclaimed “#1 Voice Technology Newsletter” when, you know, you’re already subscribed to that.

> Watch Audio-Visual Speech Separation tech from SIGGRAPH 2018 and also this demo of AI Isolating Speech Signals. These accompany the paper “Looking to Listen at the Cocktail Party: A Speaker-Independent Audio-Visual Model for Speech Separation”.

> Read how Apple’s digital assistant just vaulted past Alexa and Cortana in an 800-question test.

> Or contrast that with the report that Apple’s Siri team far behind Amazon’s Alexa employee hiring rates. “when looking at the percentage of voice assistant-related jobs vs. the overall amount of job openings for each company, Amazon is still outpacing Apple. And when Apple is head-to-head with Amazon for domination of digital-assistant lifestyle, that’s a difference worth noting.”

> This is a pretty basic overview, but a good outline of why this is the Golden Age of Podcasts

and now…

> Read how AI can generate images of a finished meal using only a written recipe. Really really cool, the paper is worth a read.

> Read about how Virtual Creators aren’t AI but AI is coming for them. The tools that enable companies to make new virtual characters are getting really good.

Have a great weekend!

Matt Hrt.mn

@matthartman on twitter