 Meta's Builder Bot generates virtual scenes from voice commands. Meta's Mark Zuckerberg announced plans for an AI-based universal speech translator and an AI "builder bot" for virtual worlds. The AI projects were revealed during today's Meta AI: Inside the Lab event, which covered the ways the Facebook parent is building AI technologies for the metaverse. The network is a more immersive 3D version of the internet that will let people interact through virtual and augmented reality. "The key to unlocking a lot of these advances is AI," Zuckerberg said. Communicating in the metaverse: - Zuckerberg said interacting in virtual worlds will depend on communicating with people in different languages.
- To help achieve this, Meta engineers are working on an AI model called "No Language Left Behind."
- The translation system can learn languages using less training data than existing models.
- This will ensure that all languages are translatable "even if there isn't a lot of text available to learn from."
- A second part of communicating in the metaverse will involve an AI Babelfish, which would achieve instantaneous speech-to-speech translation for all languages.
- Meta is developing the universal speech translator to directly translate speech in real-time without needing written text as an intermediary,
- Zuckerberg called it a "superpower" that people have dreamed of, adding that "AI is going to deliver that within our lifetimes."
Assistants in the metaverse: - The CEO also announced Builder Bot, an AI system that allows people to generate and import 3D items into virtual worlds by using voice commands.
- In a demo, Zuckerberg commanded the AI tech to create a beach and added clouds, trees, and a picnic blanket to the scene.
- Once the technology advances, people should be able to create complex worlds to explore and share with others in the metaverse using only their voices, he said.
- The Builder Bot is a part of Meta's newly announced CAIRaoke project, which aims to improve AI chatbots and assistants.
- Project CAIRaoke is a fully end-to-end neural model for building on-device AI assistants.
- The technology could allow people to have more natural and fluid conversations with voice AI.
- Zuckerberg said he wants to one day build assistants that can shift between the virtual and physical worlds.
Fueling the metaverse: - Last month, Meta revealed its super-fast AI supercomputer to fuel experiences for its metaverse plans, which will require compute power in the quintillions of operations/second.
- The AI Research SuperCluster will help Meta build better AI models, analyze text, images, and video, develop augmented reality and metaverse tools, and accelerate AI R&D.
- The supercomputer will enable AI models that can understand hundreds of languages and learn from trillions of examples.
- It's expected to be the world's fastest supercomputer for AI tasks once it's fully built out in mid-summer.
REUTERS 
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 Checkers Drive-In Restaurants said it will expand the use of Valyant AI's conversational AI system to more fast-food drive-thrus. Valyant AI's assistant, called Holly, relies on deep neural networks to understand language and take customer orders, as well as refine its capabilities over time. More: - The system is currently installed at 12 franchise-owned Checkers and Rally's stores. It will now be introduced at an additional undisclosed number of franchisee-operated restaurants across the U.S., according to the companies.
- Trained on customer recordings, Holly is capable of speech-to-text and natural language understanding to carry on unstructured conversations with customers.
- The tech can be integrated into drive-thru ordering platforms and point-of-sale systems. Valyant AI claims the system can upsell products and cut down on customer wait times.
- Some Checkers operators have been using the AI to fill in gaps caused by the labor shortage and make employees' jobs less stressful.
Zoom-out: - The announcement comes after Checkers signed a deal with another AI tech company, Presto, to bring its AI voice ordering to all 267 company-operated restaurants.
- Presto's drive-thru voice solution, which uses AI to automate speech recognition, can understand most awkward phrasing and complex orders.
- That rollout is expected to finish by December.
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California's Supreme Court has ruled that autonomous-vehicle company Waymo can keep details of its technology private. This week's ruling could set a precedent by favoring stronger protections for trade secrets in the self-driving vehicle industry. More: - Waymo, Alphabet's self-driving subsidiary, sued the California DMV last month, arguing that information it provided to the agency is a trade secret and should be kept from industry competitors.
- The company was seeking to protect details about its semi-autonomous Driver software and how it analyzes and deals with accidents and other emergencies.
- The case stemmed from a public records request filed with the DMV. An unidentified third party who filed the request had challenged redacted sections of Waymo's documents, and the DMV advised Waymo to seek an injunction.
- In the suit, Waymo argued that sharing trade secrets would undermine its investments in automated driving technology and create a "chilling effect across the industry."
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Aporia, provider of a monitoring platform to ensure machine learning models perform up to par, raised a $25M Series A funding round backed by new investors Tiger Global and Samsung Next. Existing investors TLV Partners and Vertex Ventures also took part in the financing, which will help Aporia triple its workforce and grow its U.S. presence. More: - Aporia launched its service last year as an observability platform. It's since grown to resemble more of a full-stack ML monitoring platform.
- The service monitors for irregularities in AI data input and model performance. It also offers insights and explainability as a way to address bias and other failures.
- For example, the platform explains how models make predictions "by showing how much each input parameter contributed to the decision and how the prediction shifts with changes to the input data."
- The company says its solution provides "full visibility of how models are performing in the real world."
- In the past six months, Aporia claimed a 600% growth in its number of customers, which now include insurance company Lemonade and security platform Armis.
- The Tel Aviv-based startup has raised $30M to date.
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🍋 MORE FRESH FUNDING 🍋 - Soul Machines, a startup using AI to create lifelike digital people that could populate the metaverse, secured a $70M round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2.
- Skael, a provider of AI assistants and software tools that automate business tasks, raised $38M in Series A funding led by RTP Global.
- Synthetic voice and video startup Neosapience announced $21.5M in funding to expand and speed up its growth.
- AI personal trainer platform Altis closed a $7M seed funding round led by PentaLab.
- Voila, an AI-driven social commerce platform, raised $6M in a Series A led by Sinovation Ventures.
- Workflow automation platform Bardeen.ai emerged from stealth with $3.5M in seed funding.
- Logistics pricing infrastructure firm Greenscreens.AI announced its first outside investment, led by Tiger Global, of an undisclosed amount.
For the latest on AI startup funding and more in the VC community, subscribe to our newsletter Inside Venture Capital.
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- Google's Area 120 in-house incubator launched a product, called Checks, that uses AI to identify potential privacy and compliance problems within mobile apps.
- In the latest beta release of iOS 15.4, Apple has added a more gender-neutral voice option for AI assistant Siri.
- Technical.ly profiled ModelOps and MLOps platform Modzy, which Booz Allen Hamilton spun out as an independent company in December. Modzy helps companies overcome implementation challenges and safely deploy and scale their AI applications.
- Healthcare tech company Wellsky plans to acquire AI-enabled patient engagement platform TapCloud for an undisclosed amount.
- ICYMI: Meta AI open-sourced data2vec, a high-performance and self-supervised algorithm that learns on its own in multiple modalities, including from speech, image, and text data.
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 |  | Beth is an Inside Analyst and a former public policy/investigative reporter. She has covered AI, VR, technology, and e-commerce for Inside. When she's not busy writing, she's hiking in Arizona's desert, playing pickleball, or trying out new Mexican food recipes. |   | | Editor | Aaron Crutchfield is based in the high desert of California. Over the last two decades, he has spent time writing and editing at various local newspapers and defense contractors in California. When he's not working, he can often be found looking at the latest memes with his kids or working on his 1962 Ford. | |
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