In this regular column, we’ll bring you all the latest industry news centered around our main topics of focus: big data, data science, machine learning, AI, and deep learning. Our industry is constantly accelerating with new products and services being announced everyday. Fortunately, we’re in close touch with vendors from this vast ecosystem, so we’re in a unique position to inform you about all that’s new and exciting. Our massive industry database is growing all the time so stay tuned for the latest news items describing technology that may make you and your organization more competitive.
dbt Labs Launches Python Support to Expand What Data Practitioners Can Accomplish with dbt
dbt Labs, a pioneer in analytics engineering, announced that it has added support for data transformation in Python to dbt. This will supplement existing SQL capabilities and allow data teams to tackle new categories of problems, including statistical analysis and predictive modeling. dbt users will now be able to deploy Python and SQL from within the same workflow without the need for additional infrastructure.
“We created dbt to harness the power of the modern cloud data platform and empower all data practitioners to participate in the data transformation process. Six years ago, that meant working exclusively in SQL, the native language of the warehouse,” said Tristan Handy, Founder and CEO of dbt Labs. “Today, with advancements across data platforms, we’re excited to bring the power and accessibility of dbt to a new set of data workloads.”
SoundHound Launches Breakthrough Intelligent Transcription Service that Brings New Levels of Meaning and Structure to Conversations in Real-Time
SoundHound AI, Inc. (Nasdaq: SOUN), a global leader in voice artificial intelligence, announced the launch of Intelligent Transcription, a real-time voice AI transcription service that goes beyond previous solutions by accurately capturing, identifying and attributing meaning to conversations. SoundHound’s proprietary Speech-to-Meaning® system fuels its voice AI technology, going beyond sounds and words to better understand meaning and intent of human speech. With Intelligent Transcription, the system not only generates the text of a conversation in real-time, but simultaneously structures it and tags key topics and entities from which it infers the speaker’s meaning and intent.
“In a fast-paced environment, real-time transcription can be invaluable. But often it’s difficult to identify key topics or important information in the flow of a conversation,” said James Hom, Chief Product Officer at SoundHound. “Not only is our new transcription service extremely accurate, it’s powered by advanced AI technology that gives shape and structure to dialogue. This makes new information from live conversations more easily actionable, drawing the agent’s attention to meaning and details that may otherwise be missed. The net result is that Intelligent Transcription equips agents with more intelligence to take the right actions, faster.”
Uniphore Announces Industry’s Most Comprehensive Platform to Transform Customer Experience and Virtual Sales Engagements
Uniphore, a leader in conversational AI and automation, announced the release of its enhanced Uniphore X platform, the industry’s most comprehensive platform that enables brands to accelerate and improve two key areas of their business: Customer Experience and Sales. With the latest enhancements to the platform, the conversations that happen between live or virtual agents as well as those happening between sales and prospects are more effective and with minimal friction. Complete with conversational AI, emotion AI, knowledge AI, computer vision and robotic process automation (RPA), the power of the X platform lies in its intuitive architecture and the long-term investment it offers customers. From designing frictionless customer journeys to enabling virtual sales scenarios, customers can expect the X platform to help them realize ROI in these markets as well as others to come in the future.
“With our customers top of mind, our focus from the beginning has been to build a powerful platform that delivers the latest and most beneficial innovations in conversational, video and knowledge AI, and automation all in one place,” said Umesh Sachdev, CEO and co-founder of Uniphore. “Today’s release, announcing our X platform, the full integration of knowledge AI in our platform, as well as advancements in both our U and Q for Sales family of products, marks a new era of digital transformation for customer service and revenue teams.”
TigerGraph Announces Commitment to Support openCypher in GSQL
TigerGraph, provider of a leading advanced analytics and ML platform for connected data, announced its commitment to support openCypher, a popular query language for building graph database applications. Developers can now access a limited preview translation tool to learn how openCypher support will appear in TigerGraph’s flagship graph query language, GSQL. Support for openCypher will give developers more choice to build or migrate graph applications to TigerGraph’s scalable, secure, and fully managed graph database platform.
“Our mission at TigerGraph has always been to bring the power of graph to all, and our support for openCypher helps us do just that. We are empowering enterprises to accelerate their graph technology adoption via our advanced graph analytics and ML platform,” said Yu Xu, CEO and founder of TigerGraph. “With openCypher support, we are pushing the bounds of graph innovation and arming developers with another way to adopt and expand their use of graph to find competitive insights in their data.”
Pega Expands AI Capabilities so Enterprise Users can Work Faster and Smarter to Drive Real Results
Pegasystems Inc. (NASDAQ: PEGA), the low-code platform provider that builds agility into the world’s leading organizations, announced the latest edition of its Pega Infinity™ software suite to help transform how organizations quickly deploy apps, create smarter workflows, and deliver better experiences for employees and customers. New features empower brands with enterprise-wide AI that works behind the scenes to increase efficiency, speed innovation, and improve customer interactions for optimal results.
“AI is no longer a buzzword business leaders can ignore – it’s an essential change agent in driving transformation,” said Don Schuerman, CTO, Pega. “Enterprises need pragmatic AI-powered decisioning that enables more efficient work, hyper-personalized customer engagement, and better employee experiences. At Pega, we want AI to be more accessible, transparent, and functional to help all departments within an organization make faster, better decisions that get results for the greater good of the business and its customers. New Pega Infinity updates help users apply AI to how they build low-code apps and automate their workflows, opening new paths for innovative experiences that deliver real results.”
Syniti Introduces Syniti Match, the Industry’s First AI-Driven Matching Solution to Support Both Party and Operational Data
Syniti, a global leader in enterprise data management, announced the upcoming availability of its fully cloud-native Syniti Match, the most rapid and precise AI-powered data matching software on the market that supports both party and operational data. Enterprise data is often riddled with errors and consistencies like typos, missing fields, duplications, and name variances. Those errors are compounded when dealing with multiple systems which is increasingly common as organizations continue to modernize legacy operations. Syniti Match is purpose-built to handle data complexity, no matter the shape, source, or type of enterprise data, including customer, ERP, supply chain and business data.
“Organizations today simply can’t afford to base any decisions on poor quality data,” said Kevin Campbell, chief executive officer, Syniti. “At Syniti, we keep finding new and innovative ways to enable our customers to achieve the accurate and trustworthy data they need to run and growth their businesses.”
Symbl.ai Enhance Conversation Intelligence Accessibility With Managed Libraries and Recommendations
Symbl.ai, a developer-first platform providing best-in-class conversation intelligence (CI), has announced two new breakthrough features designed to make the technology more accessible for developers with little to no expertise in conversation AI or machine learning. Symbl’s CI platform allows users to track a wide array of actionable insights from conversations, both in real-time and asynchronously. These insights include topics of discussion, questions raised, action points, as well as tone, sentiment and intent, all of which can be used to provide automatic summaries of conversations, score leads, train staff and more.
Users can define their own groups of keywords and phrases with similar meanings known as “trackers”, which the technology then uses to provide actionable insights. Previously, the onus was on businesses themselves to create and grow their library of trackers, resulting in a “cold start” problem for those with limited resources or experience. To grow its tracker library, a company would need to invest a great deal of time watching, listening or reading through conversations to grow their tracker library manually, resulting in missed tracker opportunities and slow time to market. Symbl.ai has now rolled out a verticalized “managed libraries” feature which eliminates the “cold start” problem and allows businesses to start using CI functionality out of the box with a predetermined and constantly updated library of trackers. Companies can select a library that best suits their industry and get started immediately, adding their own tracker groups in just a few clicks.
Digital.ai Introduces New Version of Its AI-Powered DevOps Platform That Empowers Large Organizations to Innovate Through Global Economic Shifts
Digital.ai unveiled the Banff release of its AI-Powered DevOps Platform, featuring expanded intelligence, automation and collaboration, to further help companies accelerate digital transformation. The new version makes it possible for public sector and enterprise organizations to accelerate delivery while managing risk, all with a focus on driving maximum value from software investments.
At the heart of the AI-Powered DevOps Platform is its Intelligence capabilities which aggregate customer data spanning the entire software development and delivery lifecycle, automatically creating an industry-leading DevOps data lake. This data lake creates a single source of the truth for an organization’s software investments across the full lifecycle from planning and into production. Customers gain real-time insights, historical trend analysis and predictability in augmented analytic dashboards. This contextual data allows organizations to observe top level trends across the enterprise and quickly drill down to the team and individual levels to drive successful business outcomes. This release includes further expansion of Digital.ai’s machine learning and artificial intelligence solutions, allowing customers to move past historical trends to predictive, actionable insights.
“Software strategy now underpins every business strategy and business leaders need to navigate global economic uncertainty with agility, automation and security,” said Stephen Elop, CEO of Digital.ai. “We are truly excited to be delivering to our customers our latest release that removes the mystery and complexities in mapping software investments to topline business goals and priorities. Digital.ai believes that the future of enterprise DevOps is being able to turn data into actionable, predictive insights.”
Alteryx Announces New Analytics Cloud Capabilities and Enterprise Readiness Enhancements To Enable Analytics For All
Alteryx, Inc. (NYSE: AYX), the Analytics Automation Company, revealed new enhancements to enable cloud analytics and enterprise readiness. Businesses are embracing modern data architecture and cloud data warehouses like Snowflake to empower everyone in their organization to deliver data-driven insights from anywhere. In response, Alteryx is introducing new developments on the Alteryx Analytics Cloud platform, which provides unified and approachable end-to-end analytics in the Cloud.
“Putting powerful machine learning tools in the hands of everyone and making data science accessible is core to solving the biggest challenges in business today,” said Suresh Vittal, chief product officer at Alteryx. “At Alteryx, we are excited these new product enhancements will help essential in-department knowledge experts to make valuable contributions to the business by delivering outcomes that drive the innovation needed to succeed in hypercompetitive landscapes.”
Seek AI Launches to Automate Access to Organizations’ Data
Seek AI, a developer of AI-powered intelligent data solutions, announced the launch of its new B2B SaaS platform that automates the mundane, repetitive work that data professionals perform within many organizations. Seek AI allows data teams to automate and oversee database query projects, thereby dramatically improving productivity, especially for sales and marketing purposes. Seek AI uses complex deep-learning foundation models with hundreds of billions of parameters. These models are the technology behind Open AI’s DALL-E and GPT-3, and are powerful enough to understand natural language commands and generate high-quality code to instantly query databases.
“We’ve built a platform that uses artificial intelligence to reduce inefficiencies in accessing data,” says co-founder and CEO Sarah Nagy. “Currently, data scientists and business analysts waste time manually writing repetitive code. We’ve automated that process with sophisticated natural language processing and machine learning.”
Weights & Biases Bolsters Developer-First MLOps Platform with Major Updates, Including ML Workload Orchestration and Enterprise ML Lifecycle Management
Weights & Biases announced significant enhancements to its developer-first Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) platform. The latest additions will accelerate ML activities for enterprises and ML practitioners, providing a seamless, end-to-end MLOps experience from model prototyping to production. There seems to be a new large ML model grabbing headlines every week. Whether it’s OpenAI’s big releases like GPT-3, Dalle-2, or Whisper, or one of the many open-source projects generating state-of-the-art models, like Stable Diffusion, OpenFold, or Craiyon, these models have found their way into the mainstream. All of the ML teams developing these models use Weights & Biases to debug their models, collaboratively improve them, and accelerate their work.
“As enterprises invest heavily in machine learning infrastructure and workflows become more complex, today’s ML practitioners need a platform that will work across the entire ML lifecycle,” said Shawn Lewis, CTO and Co-Founder, Weights & Biases. “We’re committed to making machine learning work in the real world, all within a platform that will increase productivity and output. By expanding use case coverage, offering new deployment options, adding ML workload orchestration, increasing security investment, and much more, the latest enhancements build on our mission to help all customers succeed with ML.”
John Snow Labs De-Identification Solution Enables Data Monetization and Healthcare Innovation
John Snow Labs, the Healthcare AI and NLP company and developer of the Spark NLP library, announced improvements to its automatic de-identification solution. The company recently established a new state-of-the-art record on the n2b2 standard de-identification benchmark, achieving an F1 score of 96.1%, and decreasing its error rate by 33%. By enabling organizations to automatically de-identify large datasets, John Snow Labs empowers product innovation and cost savings for healthcare organizations worldwide.
“Natural language processing has made it possible to automatically de-identify valuable, but otherwise unusable, unstructured patient-level data, like clinical notes, images, and scanned documents,” said David Talby, CTO, John Snow Labs. “Once de-identified, the datasets can be shared more safely and easily with researchers and builders, ushering in a new generation of accurate and innovative healthcare solutions. Without large-scale automatic data de-identification, this would not be possible at scale.”
Striim Announces the First High Performance, Fully Managed Real-Time Streaming and Integration Service for Google BigQuery
Striim, Inc. announced Striim for BigQuery, the streaming SaaS solution that uses change data capture (CDC) technologies to integrate and replicate data from enterprise-grade databases such as Oracle, MS-SQL, PostgreSQL, MySQL and others to Google Cloud BigQuery enterprise data warehouse. Customers can quickly build a new data pipeline to stream transactional data from hundreds and thousands of tables to BigQuery with sub-second end-to-end latencies to enable real-time analytics and address time-sensitive operational issues.
“Fresh data is essential for enterprises to make the right business decisions at the right time,” said Alok Pareek, Executive Vice President of Engineering and Products at Striim. “Our customers are increasingly using BigQuery for their data analytics needs. We have designed Striim for BigQuery for operational ease, simplicity, and resiliency so that our customers can quickly and easily extract business value from their data. We have automated schema management, snapshot, CDC coordination, and failure handling in the data pipelines to deliver a delightful user experience. ”
Introducing The Data Productivity Cloud from Matillion
Matillion, a leader in data productivity, announced a platform and ecosystem designed to get data business-ready, faster – The Data Productivity Cloud. As cloud data grows, organizations must adopt fresh approaches to achieve a greater level of data productivity. In parallel, the pace of change is faster than ever, and businesses must be ready to navigate unprecedented, disruptive moments like pandemics, severe weather, and supply chain issues more frequently. Overburdened data teams are hampered by brittle data infrastructure resulting from antiquated data integration methods, legacy ETL, or point solution ELT technology. Matillion’s Data Productivity Cloud helps teams get data business-ready, faster, accelerating time-to-value and increasing the impact data can have. Users load, transform, synchronize, and orchestrate data on an integrated platform. These workloads improve productivity and efficiency for data teams.
“Data productivity is an important factor for driving a modern business. Enterprises need to harness the power of their data, or they risk losing their competitive edge,” said Ciaran Dynes, chief product officer at Matillion. “Matillion puts data teams at the center of driving competitive advantage by helping them to deliver business-ready data, faster. The Data Productivity Cloud is designed to meet data practitioners wherever they are – at their skill level, for their data stack, and to suit their current and future ambitions.”
DataStax and Intel Collaborate to Advance Apache Cassandra and Apache Pulsar-based Technologies on latest Intel Xeon Scalable Processor Family
DataStax, the real-time data company, announced a strategic collaboration with Intel to enhance the performance of technologies built on the open source Apache Cassandra® database and the Apache Pulsar™messaging and streaming technology on latest Intel Xeon Scalable processors. The companies plan to deliver enterprise and cloud solutions built on these powerful open source projects as well as contributing advancements to the respective open source projects. DataStax has been selected for the Intel Disruptor Initiative, where Intel collaborates with select cutting-edge companies that are pushing the limits of innovation.
“Cassandra powers many of the world’s most demanding workloads, and Intel has always been a big supporter of the Cassandra project,” said Ed Anuff, DataStax chief product officer. “We’re excited to work with Intel to further optimize performance of both Cassandra and Pulsar-based services on Intel’s powerful technologies.”
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