UK government partners with Google DeepMind to build a new AI-powered prototype aimed at faster housing decisions.
The UK government is developing an AI tool built with Gemini to speed up processing of housing planning applications, aiming to cut decision times in half. The tool acts as an assistant to planning officers by automating routine tasks like extracting data from documents, identifying relevant policies, summarizing feedback, and drafting assessment reports, while keeping the planning officer as the final decision-maker with full oversight and audit trails. This matters because local planning authorities face administrative backlogs that slow down the UK's goal to build 1.5 million new homes by 2029, and nearly 70 percent of planning applications are routine householder cases like extensions that consume significant officer time. The tool is being tested in early trials with three local councils and is planned to be made available nationally to all councils from 2027, building on an earlier successful tool called Extract that converts legacy planning documents into usable digital data.

The all-cash deal gives MoEngage access to technology that assigns AI agents to individual customers.

A new update for Google Home could make it less likely your smart home cameras mistake you for someone else, just because you're facing away from the camera. Starting June 23rd, Google's expanding its facial recognition feature so that people you've tagged in your Familiar Faces library can continue to be identified when their faces aren't clearly visible, using "additional non-biometric signals (body size, clothing color, etc.)." The Familiar Faces library will also begin aut

In this tutorial, we build a speech recognition and translation workflow using NVIDIA Canary-1B-v2. We begin by setting up the required audio, NeMo, NumPy, and SciPy dependencies, then load the Canary model on a GPU-enabled runtime for efficient inference. From there, we prepare audio into a clean 16 kHz mono format, perform English ASR, translate speech into multiple languages, generate word and segment timestamps, export translated subtitles as an SRT file, test long-form transcription, run b
Want to go deeper than the news? Explore live, cohort-based AI courses taught by practitioners.
Browse AI courses on Maven