Neura has announced plans to make its personal artificial intelligence (AI) service and ecosystem commercially available after successfully raising $11 million in a Series A funding round. The funding round was led by AXA Strategic Ventures and existing investor Pitango Venture Capital, and was joined by Liberty Israel Venture Fund and Lenovo Group. Speaking to ZDNet, Neura CEO Gilad Meiri said just shy of launching the company three years ago, the company is now ready to make its AI ecosystem commercially available. "What we're going to do is putting it on the shelf and inviting the world to use it, and that obviously requires a different level of infrastructure, scale, security, and customer support, so the money is mainly geared towards that," he said. Neura has developed technology based on data collected from human behaviours, and plans to make the information accessible to help enhance apps and devices through personalisation.

Cadillac's first whack at autonomous driving technology will arrive later than planned, the company said this week. In September 2014, GM CEO Mary Barra said Super Cruise, which would let your Cadillac do the driving on the highway, would appear in the fall of 2016. That timeline, Automotive News reports, has slipped to some time in 2017, and Cadillac confirmed the feature won't be in the CT6 when it goes on sale later this year. Super Cruise doesn't do much. It maintains a safe speed and keeps you in your lane.

Because taxes involve a bunch of complicated rules that everybody wants to get right, but very few people want to learn. For a lot of our customers, the formal etiquette used to word invitations, address envelopes, and all the rest of the process is very much the same way. The program uses artificial intelligence (A.I.) for a lot of different aspects of etiquette, but one of the best examples is the  expert system that automatically creates the wording for invitations. The wedding planning software asks the user questions about their wedding plans, and then, based on the specific situation (A couple hosting their own wedding, which will be outside, at the residence of a friend, at a particular time, etc.) the software use the classic, formal rules of etiquette to produce invitation wording which takes into account all of the factors, and is still elegant and proper. In addition to using an expert system for wording invitations, the wedding planning software also handles an issue that for many brides and grooms is their largest etiquette headache: figuring out what to call their guests on the invitation envelopes. How should their names read on the invitation?

Global Speech Recognition Market is expected to grow with market size of US $13 billion by 2022. Growing mobile banking application and adoption of mobile- and cloud-based computer technology is driving the Speech Recognition Market. The growing adoption of automated and smart applications in consumer electronics and healthcare industries act as the major contributor for the growth of the speech recognition market during the forecasted period. Taste the market data and market information presented through more than 50 market data tables and figures spread over 110 numbers of pages of the project report. Market Research Future has predicted that this market will be dominated by North America throughout the forecast period.

SAN FRANCISCO, June 9 (Reuters) - Apple Inc announced a series of long-awaited enhancements to its App Store on Wednesday, but the new features may not ease concerns of developers and analysts who say that the App Store model - and the very idea of the single-purpose app - has seen its best days. The revamped App Store will let developers advertise their wares in search results and give developers a bigger cut of revenues on subscription apps, while Apple said it has already dramatically sped up its app-approval process. The goal is to sustain the virtuous cycle at the heart of the hugely lucrative iPhone business. Software developers make apps for the iPhone because its customers are willing to pay, and those customers, in turn, pay a premium for the device because it has the best apps. The store is now more strategically important than ever for Apple as sales of the iPhone begin to level off and the company looks to software and services to fill the gap.

Nuance Communications, Inc. announced today that Providence Health & Services is deploying Dragon Medical 360 Network Edition across its healthcare enterprise, making medical voice recognition available at 27 hospitals and 250 clinics for approximately 8,000 clinicians. According to a news release, Providence Health & Services is ranked by Thomson Reuters as among the top 20 percent of best-performing health systems in the country. The organization-wide use of Dragon Medical will help Providence roll out the Epic electronic health record (EHR) system by letting clinical staff document and navigate the EHR simply by speaking, saving time and allowing them to be more efficient and effective. Over the next year, Dragon Medical will be integrated with Epic and once fully deployed, clinicians will be able to use the just by using their voice, leading to faster EHR system adoption and improved physician satisfaction with EHR use, the press release claims. "Dragon Medical builds upon our current Nuance-driven background speech workflow through eScription and will give physicians more documentation options," said Laureen O'Brien, chief information officer, Providence Health & Services.

Data Analytics Skytree, Inc. just announced the launch of both their company and their primary product, Skytree Server. Skytree is a machine learning program intended to serve as a replacement for SQL databases, and has the ability to take even unstructured sets of data and crunch it faster than traditional methods. The company claims that its learning algorithms can be used to process data for a wide variety of applications, from predicting the effectiveness of sales promotions to fraud detection to molecular modeling to astronomy. Which is no surprise, as algorithms to predict certain types of data are often easily portable to other types of data. The trick is just in setting the data up properly.

Tay wasn't meant to be racist, sexist, or otherwise offensive. But as an artificial intelligence program that Microsoft designed to chat like a teenage girl, it was quick to learn from whatever it was told. So it came as little surprise when Tay started to make sympathetic references to Hitler – and created a firestorm on social media – soon after its release on Wednesday. The uproar led Microsoft to suspend the chatbot in just a few hours. "Unfortunately, within the first 24 hours of coming online, we became aware of a coordinated effort by some users to abuse Tay's commenting skills to have Tay respond in inappropriate ways," the company said in a statement.

Can Donald Trump make artificial intelligence "great again?" A new Twitterbot is analyzing the way Mr. Trump speaks and using the data to generate tweets. The end result is intended to be an autonomous program capable of crafting tweets that sound like Mr. Trump and it has already garnered thousands of fans. "Much of my actual robotics research deals with these types of modeling techniques," Mr. Hayes said in a MIT article about the project. "I thought this would be a good way to learn more about some of the concepts, and have a little bit of fun in the process."

Last October, Google CEO Sundar Pichai spoke about what machine learning means for Google. He called it "transformative," and said that Google was "rethinking everything we're doing" in the context of machine learning. A subset of artificial intelligence, machine learning is an approach in which "neural network" computers use algorithms to sort through large sets of data, discovering patterns and relationships on their own rather than following predefined rules to solve problems. Google already uses machine learning to fight spam in Gmail and to allow its services to better understand spoken words. And this week the company announced it's working to bring machine learning to the device people spend the most time interacting with: the smartphone.