Artificial Intelligence is Improving Education Sector like never before

We’re in 2020 and long past the days back when we used to stand outside the school library to get the opportunity to copy two or three Encyclopedia pages, to use as a kind of reference for our school projects.

With this age having grown up with the benefit of access to technology at their fingertips, the field of education has hugely changed and overturned in this digitally driven world. Artificial Intelligence in the education market was worth US$2.022 billion for the year 2019.

The worldwide AI in the education market is anticipated to be valued at USD 3.68 billion by 2023, at a CAGR of 47% during the forecast period of  2018 till 2023. Artificial intelligence has already infiltrated our lives on an individual level. By 2030, India will have the biggest number of youngsters in the globe, a size which will be a shelter in particular if these youngsters are sufficiently skilled to join the workforce. The recently launched SDG Index 2019-2020 by Niti Aayog appointed a composite score of 58 to India under the SDG on Quality Education, with just 12 states/UTs having a score of more than 64.

The current government consumption on education is under 3% of the GDP and the pupil-teacher ratio for primary school remains at 24:1, lower than that of Brazil and China. Further, with the quickly expanding population and decreasing assets, it would not be conceivable to match the demand for teachers.

As per a study by creative strategies, Around 97% of smartphone users are utilizing AI-driven voice assistants like Siri and the Google Assistant.

Artificial intelligence significantly utilizes deep learning, machine learning, and advanced analytics particularly for checking the learning cycle of the student, for example, the marks acquired and speed of a specific individual among others. Likewise, these solutions offer a personalized learning experience and top-notch training and cause the students to upgrade prior knowledge and learning. Let’s look at some of the ways AI is changing the education sector.

Voice Assistants

One more AI segment being productively utilized by educators in learning is voice assistants. These incorporate Amazon’s Alexa, Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana, and so on. These voice assistants permit the students to converse with educational materials without the inclusion of the educator. They can be utilized in home and non-educational environments for encouraging communication with educational material or to get to any additional learning help.

The point behind these voice assistants is to gracefully respond to all normal questions regarding campus needs as well as for it to be modified for the specific timetable and courses of each student. This aids in lessening the prerequisite for internal support and chops down the cost of printing school handbooks which are only temporarily utilized.

The work of these voice assistant systems breaks the dreariness and gets an energizing prospect for the students. The deployment of this technology is anticipated to rise in the coming years.

Biometric Verification

Mundane and support tasks of the teacher – participation and other regulatory tasks can be taken over by AI. For instance, biometric validation for the students can be presented and incorporated with UDISE+ (Unified District Information System for Education) – an application that is one of the biggest Management Information Systems on School Education.

The biometric attendance records could likewise be utilized as a proxy  for comprehensiveness of the education in the district/state/block and can be handily tracked. This also helps to screen the national indicators, for example, the participation rate of youth and adults and the extent of male-female enrolled in higher education, technical and vocational education. Further, it can help evaluate the quality of education in the school.

Personalized Learning

Artificial Intelligence is being utilized for personalizing learning for every student. With the work of the hyper-personalization idea which is empowered through machine learning, the AI innovation is consolidated to plan a customized learning profile for every individual students and to tailor-make their training materials, thinking about the method of learning favored by the student, the student’s capacity and experience on an individual basis.

Different AI-fueled applications and frameworks help the students in getting instant and customized responses as well as in getting their questions cleared from their educators. Artificial intelligence is additionally playing a role in augmenting tutoring and designing personal conversational, education assistants who can offer them help in education.

Automated Grading

With Draft National Education Policy 2019 prioritizing online learning in its plan, machine learning techniques, for example, Natural Language Processing could be utilized for automated grading of assessments for a huge scale on platforms, for example, DIKSHA, E-PATHSHALA and SWAYAM (Study Webs of Active Learning for Young Aspiring Minds) – objective questions and subjective ones. Automated creation of content is another field where AI can intercede – given enormous sources of data on the web, NLP methods will have the option to utilize Automatic Text Summarization to make crisp substance and distribute them on these e-learning sites.

The standard unified curriculum made by ML-based techniques will be in accordance with the broadly characterized learning results (MHRD has planned a 70 markers-based matrix called Performance Grading Index (PGI) to level the states and UTs) and will impartially help assess pointers on the level of students accomplishing at least a minimum proficiency level.

Conclusion

We can expect Artificial Intelligence and ML to possess an integral place in all educational experiences. Artificial intelligence has begun to demonstrate its favorable circumstances and power in a wide range of educational areas, and it is not yet clear how the innovation will enable and upgrade overall learning outcomes for all.

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In the world of technology and devices, nothing remain constant, everything changes with time. It was a time when Facebook was a social media platform where people could express their opinion but now it is hub of marketing, business and journalism. Similarly Google is also expanding. It has started producing phones and started investing in artificial intelligence industry, including Duplex.

Duplex is AI-based service that assist person by talking to the restaurants and offices on behalf of the user. However, it cannot talk to the friends like people do. What duplex can do is to reserve seat in restaurant by talking to the restaurants staff or fix an appointment by talking to the office. The machine talk themselves in human like voice to make the life easier. The phone can book the seat in parlor or do registrations as well.

By 2019, the service was available in the United States and New Zealand only but a Google support page reveals that Duplex can be downloaded in Australia, UK and Canada from now onward as Google has listed more contact numbers on the support page.

Google Duplex was introduced in 2018 at I/O conference in which CEO Sundar Pichai demonstrated that the service would make appointments without human interaction. He demonstrated to the audience by making an appointment via technology. According to his demonstration, the technology could understand “um” and pauses that make the machine assisted communication more like a human. After the demonstration, the company posted a video that has steps how to reserve seat in a restaurant via the AI.

Initially, the technology was available in a few states and there were concerns about its use. The shops and small business said that the call would be made via machine without informing them that their operator are talking to the machine not a human.

However, Google tried to solve their problem and make it easier for companies to accept it, they succeed not much. In the beginning, the company used to disclose in the call that machine is conversing by telling the listener that Google is on the phone and the call will be recorded while giving option not to record the call while speaking to the humans to businesses. However the companies have chance to choose not to record the call. On choosing that options, the call is transferred to non-recorded line by the Google Assistant. Right now, there are human listeners of the service that has been helping to improve the algorithm of the Duplex.

Google Duplex is available on Google Pixel devices and Android phones that have the OS of version 5.0. The company has said to start the Duplex in iPhones as well.

Duplex can be used easily. A person has to activate Google Assistant, ask the assistant to reserve seat. This will give you list of cafes and restaurants and call the place which you choose. The machine will ask you day, time and date and then the seat will be reserved.

So, this is what you should know about Duplex. If you live in Australia, New Zealand or any country where it is available them use it and make your lives easier!

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Happy AI vacations. If you are the recent hardware recipient with the Google Assistant inside, such as a smart speaker or Google Nest smart screen, here is a guide to make the most of it.

Well done, Google Assistant can help you cook, shop, learn, remember things, stay in touch with your loved ones and interpret dozens of languages, not to mention that it acts as a remote control for your TV.

The basics

Let’s call this your standard problem feature set. This is the reason why smart speakers became popular in the first place and are the types of actions that the average user is most likely to do: how to set a timer or alarm, control smart home devices, play music and create music events. calendar.

Once you have downloaded the Home application, follow the instructions to do things like integrate your favorite music streaming service or enable voice control of smart home devices.

You’ll also want to set up Voice Match if you have multiple people in your home and want to do things like ask what’s in your personal calendar or add an event to your calendar. Voice Match works for up to six members of a household.

Some things you can do with your speaker or smart screen:

• Create lists or dictate a note for up to 30 seconds
• Get directions
• Make phone calls
• Find your phone
• Find nearby businesses
• Remember important information, such as a family member’s birthday.
• Search Google Assistant voice apps for things like quiz games or DIY tips
• Search podcasts by topic
• Follow your stock portfolio

Did you notice that I did not give instructions on how to do any of this? This is because the Google AI Assistant is designed to understand how people talk and adjust to command variations. Unlike any other form of computing, when done correctly, the conversation interface should not require training. Then ask away.

Assign a Reminder

This is also quite basic, but if you share your home address and work with Google in the Home app, you can create reminders based on the location that will appear on your phone or make a sound when you enter through the door.

In August, Google Assistant had the ability to assign reminders to up to six members of a household. Assigned reminders appear for the first time on the person’s smartphone and can also be location based or scheduled to take place at a specific date or time.

When you assign reminders with Nest Hub Max, a smart screen with facial recognition released this fall, the reminders appear on the screen when you see your face when you approach the device. If you can support Google’s facial recognition that recognizes your family, this can be very useful at home.

Choose a voice

Gone are the days of a single female assistant with a monotonous voice. Today, most artificial intelligence assistants are more expressive than a few years ago, and with the exception of Amazon Alexa, all major artificial intelligence assistants now offer female and male assistant options. Google Assistant offers you up to 11 different voices to choose from.

Text-to-speech synthesis also means that you can make Google Assistant answer queries with the voice of John Legend or UnsafeIt’s Issa Rae. Amazon Alexa can also speak as Samuel L. Jackson. It seems likely that the tech giants that make AI assistants will incorporate more celebrity personality options for voice computing in 2020.

To be clear, AI that sounds like celebrity voices is not for every exchange, but it works for responses to common requests like “What’s the weather like?” Or “Tell me a joke.”

Ask a question

Once you’ve chosen your favorite voice, you can ask factual questions from the Google Assistant about almost anything, from “Who was the 36th president of the United States?” Until “Where is the nearest Best Buy?”

You are speaking with the correct AI for your random questions: for the second consecutive year, Google Assistant ranks number 1 among virtual assistants in an annual IQ test that measures their ability to accurately answer questions. Although other attendees are catching up, Google Assistant outperforms the competition in virtually all categories, including local search and trade questions.

Another analysis this summer found that the Google Assistant is best placed among AI assistants to answer questions about the most used medications in the United States.

If you have a smart screen, the answer to the questions may also include images. And ask a question related to animals, such as “What does a whale sound like?” And you may hear the sound. Or ask for a local business and the instructions can be sent directly to your phone.

Things for children

If you’ve ever seen children interact with a smart speaker, you probably understand that many children love controlling artificial intelligence assistants, and Google Assistant has made a growing list of things children should do since they the first startup speaker was available in 2016

There are alarms with characters from Ninja Turtles, Lego or Nickelodeon who can tell jokes or share words of encouragement. There are also Google Assistant voice apps for children of characters like SpongeBob SquarePants.

Google Nest speakers and screens can hear you read a book, and when you reach certain sections, the words will signal the sound effects. My Storytime even allows parents to record stories so that their children can listen to them at ease through the Google Assistant voice application.

Children under 13 can create their own Voice Match profile that allows the Google Assistant to recognize their voice with parental permission.

Continuous Conversations

Asking questions can be fun, but what about tracking? Continuous conversations allow Google Assistant to listen for about 10 seconds after an initial exchange of a follow-up question. Ask “What is the capital of California” and then “And how many people live there?” And Google Assistant will understand the context.

This is designed to make exchanges feel more fluid and human and less like you’re talking to a basic bot.

Interpreter mode

With your permission, the Google Assistant can act as a translator for up to 44 languages. The interpreter mode for home speakers was launched in January for approximately two dozen languages. It is not a perfect solution, since translations were limited to about 15 seconds at launch, but it can still be useful in the right context.

The interpreter mode also recently reached Google Assistant on Android devices.

If you speak more than one language at home, you can enable the Multilingual Google Assistant in the startup application. That means Google Assistant can speak and answer questions in English and Spanish.

Search your photos and YouTube

This can be a lot of fun and a great way to explore your own photos or watch videos. Try “Hello Google, show me my photos from last weekend” or “Hello Google, show me my photos of Portland.”

You can also say “Hello Google, play the Warriors Game on YouTube TV” or “Hello Google, show me cats that dance tap on YouTube”. To avoid unpleasant video recommendations, responses may be limited to YouTube Restricted Mode or YouTube Kids.

It’s important to keep in mind that you don’t need a smart screen to do this: a home speaker can also work in conjunction with a Chromecast connected to your TV to display photos based on voice commands. And depending on the brand and model, the Google Assistant can also act as a remote control for your TV or Roku device to allow you to turn the device on or off, change the channel or request certain programs.

cook a meal

The Google Assistant incorporates thousands of recipes from the web, and home speakers can help with step-by-step guides for cooking a recipe. You can also check with the Google Assistant about basic cooking things, such as the amount of 500 ml in ounces, or set timers to make sure your pan doesn’t burn.

Cooking with the Google Assistant works best when you can see the recipe and scroll through the instructions, instead of waiting for a speaker to guide you at each step or for the assistant to repeat the steps when you fall behind, get distracted or look for an ingredient.

Smart screen users can swipe left to see recipe recommendations. Favorite recipes can also be saved in the Google application.

Transmit a message

When you tell Google Assistant to transmit a message, you quickly send an audio fragment to other devices in a home so you can tell everyone that it is time for dinner or bedtime.

Transmission responses were introduced to allow transmissions to be interactive even if you are away from home.

This feature naturally encourages people to have more than one speaker, because transmitting a message to someone does not make much sense if they are both in the same room.

Voice commands for privacy

This year there was a slow trickle of incidents related to the privacy of artificial intelligence assistants made by technology giants such as Amazon, Apple and Microsoft. Most of these stories involved external contractors who listened to extremely intimate audio from users who did not know that humans were reviewing the interactions recorded with their AI assistant.

In response, Amazon and Google introduced voice commands focused on privacy that allow you to quickly say things like “Hello Google, delete the last thing I said” or “Hello Google, delete everything I told you last week.”

Google makes it possible to delete voice recordings in the My Activity section of the Home application, but voice commands make it even easier and do not require you to search your account.

Downtime with digital well-being

Google also introduced Digital Wellbeing, a set of services to monitor and limit the use of technology.

With Google Assistant, this feature allows you to disable music or video or limit Google Assistant responses based on the time of day. This can be good in homes where children talk with the assistant when it is time for bed.

An important element in my wish list: Enable restrictions based on a unique voice identification, so that parents can block their talking children, but still have a full range of motion with a voice computing device, for example.

You can also disable voice or video calls and interactions with third-party Google Assistant voice applications.

Create routines

Routines are voice commands that you can customize to perform multiple actions with a single sentence. For example, you can make “Ok Google, good morning” a signal for the assistant to read the news, turn off your phone, change the temperature in your home, inform you about your daily trip and turn on your coffee maker. Or you can do a routine that turns off smart appliances when you leave home or turn them on when you return from work.

The one I use most often is “Good morning” to check my calendar and listen to the latest news.

Routines can even incorporate Google Assistant voice applications such as Headspace for things like the word of the day or meditation or breathing exercises. If you follow a certain religion, routines can be good for daily devotions or to get things like a date of the day or a word of the day.

Companies like Google and Amazon offer Routines because they know that voice commands that become part of their daily lives will likely see the highest levels of commitment. Daily routines are one of the 5 rules that Google Assistant Vice President Scott Huffman must follow for voice computing.

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SAN FRANCISCO — Google’s latest phone and smart-home devices came packaged with a not-so-subtle message: Google cares about your privacy. Does it?

The tech company has had a complicated relationship with user information in the past. Google’s latest steps offer consumers some additional protections, although it’s unclear how much more secure users will feel.

Google unveiled a new Pixel smartphone and other hardware devices on Tuesday, all aimed at getting people more hooked on services powered by the company’s Google Assistant and other artificial-intelligence technology.

But privacy has emerged as a bigger issue with these products thanks to the growing popularity of always-listening “smart speakers” and similar devices. Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple have all recently acknowledged employing human contractors to listen to and transcribe some voice recordings captured by AI software.

Most such AI work, from interpreting voice requests to answering questions to turning on your lights, takes place in the cloud, not on your device. Users have very little control of what happens to their data in the cloud.

On Tuesday, though, Google emphasized that much of what you do on its new phones will stay there. Its new facial recognition unlock feature won’t transmit details to Google servers for processing, for instance, and its Assistant can also handle many queries directly on the phone. A new recording transcription feature and radar technology that recognizes gestures are also done on the device.

“You need to know what your data is safe,” Rick Osterloh, Google senior vice president of hardware, said at the company’s New York launch event Tuesday. “When computing is always available, designing for computing and privacy becomes more important than ever.”

Apple and Amazon have also emphasized their privacy commitments at recent product launches.

The goal is to give people more choice over privacy settings, Osterloh said. Nest speakers and cameras now come with physical switches to turn off cameras and mics, for example.

Still, Google relies heavily on customer information to build user-specific profiles it uses to target digital advertising, which produces the vast majority of its income.

The Assistant, akin in basic function to Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa , is emerging as Google’s latest digital data collector. It can learn more about you from your queries and can direct you to other Google services such as maps and search, which also feed into Google’s multi-billion dollar advertising business.

“Their end game is trying to collect all this data and target you with advertising,” said Victoria Petrock, principle analyst at eMarketer. “The voice is a whole new way to capture people’s behaviors.”

The more helpful the Assistant becomes, the more likely people are to use it.

On the hardware front, Google’s new Pixel 4 features a fancier camera that will recognize people who’ve appeared previously in your photos in order to automatically focus on them in new shots.

The new phone also comes with motion-sensing technology that allows people to skip songs or switch apps by gesturing near the phone.

The Pixel 4 will carry a starting price tag of $799 — $100 more than the entry-level iPhone 11 — and will go on sale Oct. 24. The larger XL version will cost $899, or about $200 less than the similar-sized iPhone 11 Pro Max.

Google’s phones have been well reviewed, but have yet to make much of a splash in the market dominated by Apple, Huawei and Samsung. In fact, Google’s hardware products have never been big moneymakers. Rather, they offer a way for Google to showcase its money-making services.

The company also unveiled true wireless earbuds, called Pixel Buds, Google’s answer to Apple’s AirPods. The new model, which will go on sale early next year for $179, does away with the wire that connects the two buds.

Google introduced Nest Mini, the smaller version of its smart speaker. It comes out next Tuesday for $49. Google’s refreshed Wi-Fi router, Nest Wi-Fi, will be available in the coming weeks for $269. A new Pixelbook Go laptop goes on sale in January staring at $649.

Google hardware team, including many former Google Glass engineers, work from a light-filled, architecturally impressive building near the company’s main campus in Mountain View, California. The building is complete with a “color lab” for finding the perfect device hues, a materials library for all sorts of elemental inspiration and a small model shop to build device prototypes on site.

“We started by defining what it feels like to hold Google in your hands,” hardware design executive Ivy Ross said. “The good thing about coming a little bit late to the hardware arena is you get to stand back and look at everyone else.”

One of the challenges this time around was finding a way to make the products more sustainable, a feat especially notable on the Nest Mini, which has a “fabric” casing made of yarn created from plastic water bottles.

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Microsoft Dominates the Charts

Microsoft’s Research Asia team took home first place in eight of the 11 categories in which it participated (out of 19 categories in total). For the remaining three entries (English-Kazakh, Finnish-English, and Lithuanian-English), it won the second prize.

When we think of AI, voice recognition and translation likely isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. It’s certainly not as sexy as a robot butler doing your cooking. However, if AI is to become as disruptive as forecasts predict (Accenture speculates $8.3 trillion for the US market alone by 2035), then understanding us when we talk to it, and speaking to us in a language we can understand, is a cornerstone feature. AI is defined by its ability to simulate human intelligence, after all.

If you’ve used apps such as Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa, or Cortana, particularly with a non-American accent, you’ll know there’s vast room for improvement. The same goes if you’ve traveled abroad relying on a translation app, or if you’ve made use of automatic translation in your business, career, or social life. This pertains to anything from Google Translate on websites or document translations on Facebook. In all instances, it’s clear that it’s very much a work in progress.

Microsoft Climbing Back to the Top

The Microsoft brand is synonymous with tech’s early days, but while it’s still a mainstay, the behemoth doesn’t inspire the same awe it used to. Now that hot new tech moves a mile per minute and Google has taken the crown as a one-stop shop for everything from browsers to email to cloud storage.

Other than Windows, Microsoft seems to have lost favor with its original audience, the home user. But the company isn’t content with staying the stock standard corporate SaaS and cloud service provider it has become.

In the past few years, it’s been hard at work on two of the most promising technologies of the near-future: Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence.

So, Microsoft’s recent quiet win is a more significant feat than it appears to be. The market leader is committed to dominating the tech of tomorrow.

Marrying AI and Blockchain

The company has already added BaaS (Blockchain as a Service) to its arsenal. Now let’s fast-forward to the time when Microsoft will expand its AIaaS (AI as a Service) beyond current offerings like Azure Bot Service to offer a more sophisticated AI product catalog.

It’s not a big leap, then, to imagine that there might be a day when these two converge under the tech giant’s lead. Since Microsoft operates primarily at the enterprise level, this could be the mainstream push needed to accelerate the blending of two technologies into one powerful force. They are, after all, a natural fit, as numerous companies combining the two shows.

Though Microsoft could lead a centralized AI-Blockchain convergence, it would ultimately pave the way for decentralized solutions to be developed and refined. Blockchain already allows for a lower entry-level to high tech than most small and medium-sized businesses have hitherto had access to. By combining blockchain with AI, currently still one of the costliest R&D technologies, a new wave of business innovation will open itself up to become more efficient, safe, and transparent.

Many proponents of decentralization oppose the Galactus-like force with which mega corporations guzzle up the lion’s share of everything from profits to groundbreaking frontiers. However, it paves the way, smashing through the gigantic barriers to entry that only a company with Microsoft-scale resources can bring to the table. In so doing, it opens up the canal for smaller fish with less capital to follow.

In this arena, Microsoft doesn’t disappoint. It’s already democratizing access to simplified machine learning tools so that more developers will join the ranks to utilize AI in a transformed future.

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