Rejecting unwanted suitors over text is an awkward challenge for a generation of online daters. Ghostbot will detect incoming texts from the person you've chosen to "ghost" – a modern (and cowardly) dating trend that involves ceasing all communication with an unwanted suitor – and send automated responses, lacking in warmth of enthusiasm, until the other person takes the hint. For example, if the other person pushes for a date, Ghostbot might reply: "Nope," "I just have no time right now," or "Sorry, just me and [pizza emoji] tonight." This continues until the pestering messages peter out. "We hear a lot of anecdotes about terrible texting from dating matches, but sometimes blocking someone creates an awkward social circumstance. Ghostbot helps you go through the motion of ghosting someone without negative consequences," said Will Carter, co-founder of Ad Hoc Labs, which makes Ghostbot.

If you are a member of the dating public, you have likely ended your romance with someone--or been slowly snubbed--by a drawn-out, awkward string of text messages and silence. For the uninitiated, this practice of smothering a personal relationship to death by withdrawing from communication is known as ghosting, and there's now a pretty mean chatbot who will do this for you. Users can access the bot through Burner, an app that specializes in providing people with temporary or secondary phone numbers that are used by consumers ranging from online daters who want privacy to charter boat captains who want to separate their personal and business lives on their cell. The company collaborated with screenwriter Peter Miriani and bot-makers Voxable to launch the feature. Though the bot will usually wait anywhere from several minutes to several hours before responding with a ghosting text, for testing purposes the bot was set to go back-and-forth in real time.

I heard you mention a way to stop robocalls on your national radio show. I was unable to write it down at the time. I am so tired of these calls! A. The service I spoke of is called Nomorobo. It lets the phone ring once, and then it identifies the caller. If the caller is a robot telemarketer, it automatically hangs up for you.

Machine learning is a hot topic, but what applications is the technology driving and what drives machine learning? The short answer, concludes a new research report on machine learning, is data--lots of data. "Data is available in volumes never dreamed of, which means the algorithms have more to get their teeth into," concluded a survey by market watcher 451 Research, noting that "machine learning lives or dies depending on the quantity and quality of the data available." Moreover, the rise of application containers in software development "means small [machine language] applications can be placed into software without breaking the rest of the application," the report's authors continue. With enterprises large and small going digital and computing resources ubiquitous, there's plenty of data available with which to train rather than simply program machines.

Job Description - Experience and Background: 8-10 years of overall experience 4 years of Solution Designer for case analysis, requirements structuring, data analysis and data modelling to support Enterprise wide decision support systems. Minimum 6 months of experience in Hadoop/Big Data platform Architecture Solution design for Automation based solution specifically using machine or cognitive learning. Areas of Expertise Expertise: in handling huge data loads and optimizing the system to accommodate ever increasing data in the data warehouse/ data store. Rich Data Design & Data Governance Experience Diverse experience in Requirement Capture, Architecture, Solution Design & Delivery Strong Domain experience preferably in Banking, Aviation, Healthcare, Telecom (Either one of them will suffice). Concepts of solution hosted in cloud infrastructure Cognitive or Machine learning based algorithms and implementation Knowledge of concepts like data mining, text mining, data classification, pattern matching, pattern recognition etc.

Apple, known for its steady stream of slick consumer electronic devices, used its annual developer conference in San Francisco to roll out a raft of millennial-friendly texting tools to enhance emojis, image sharing and add animations to messages. Among a two-hour stream of product announcements at the annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) event, Apple engineers demonstrated the latest update of Apple's smartphone software iOS, which will now let iPhone users add larger emojis, see photos and videos appear in a stream of text messages, add animated effects and "emojify" messages by converting typed words into emoji. Opening the event with a moment of silence for the victims of the weekend's shooting at a gay night club in Orlando, CEO Tim Cook – who has become a leader on gay rights issues since talking about his own sexuality in 2014 – called the attacks a "senseless unconscionable act of terrorism and hate aimed at dividing and destroying". Cook then set about laying out his vision for a future where Apple's software forms the central hub of its customers' lives, helping track their fitness, send love notes, navigate the road and trade pictures of cute dogs. Apple is clearly responding to the voice of the consumer; messages is the most popular app on iOS, and the new features are designed to offer more playful options that replicate some successful third party messaging apps. "We're providing emoji predictions as you type," said Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering.

Pepper is a child-height human-shaped robot described as having been designed to be a genuine companion that perceives and acts upon a range of human emotions. SoftBank, the Japanese telecom giant, acquired Aldebaran Robotics and commissioned the development of Pepper. Subsequently SoftBank joint ventured with Alibaba and Foxconn to form a development, production and marketing entity for the robots. There has been much fanfare about Pepper, particularly about it's ability to use its body movement and tone of voice to communicate in a way designed to feel natural and intuitive. The number of Peppers sold to date is newsworthy.

While Gupta might have been relieved that he was not taken to task by his stern coach at Prepathon, an online test prep startup founded in September 2015, what he didn't know was that the person he was chatting with on the Prepathon app was not his coach but a bot! Millennials -- those born between 1980 and 2000 -- are texting more and talking less. And millennials matter because they will account for 40% of all consumers in the US by 2020, as projected by Goldman Sachs. While Jaiswal might be content with one chatbot, others want multiple bots. Aarti Gill is one of them. The cofounder of FitCircle, a chat-based health and fitness platform, boasts 32,000 bot users.

Almost two decades ago, Google was just a search engine with a textbox and a promising algorithm that curated the ever growing internet into a list of blue links. As technology paced further, the Mountain View based company invested in a bunch of rising platforms and ideas that revolved around the future of the World Wide Web. Spreading across soon enough, their growth skyrocketed eliminating major tech leaders from the market. Moreover, industry's dependencies grew more on Google when they inhibited the responsibility of improving 80% of the smartphones around the globe. However, in the past year or so, smartphone manufacturers have been unable to maintain the wow factor in their products.

IBM Watson is going to Japan via IBM's new alliance with Japanese telecommunication giant SoftBank, on Tuesday, February 10, 2015. SAN FRANCISCO -- Japanese telecommunications giant SoftBank is selling 8 billion in Alibaba stock in order to pay down debt, the company said in a statement Tuesday. SoftBank, which was among the earliest investors in Chinese e-commerce juggernaut Alibaba (BABA), will sell 2 billion in stock back to Alibaba. It will offer another 5 billion in securities that in three years will convert into Alibaba shares. Another 500,000 in stock will be sold to an unnamed wealth fund and 400,000 to the Alibaba Partnership, which controls nomination of the company's directors.