When Siri was originally released on the iPhone 4S back in 2011, the reviews were somewhat lukewarm. On the positive side, having an intelligent assistant baked into a massively popular smartphone was a huge leap forward. On the other hand, Siri didn't always perform as advertised. Even more problematic was that Siri's feature set was purposefully stunted by Apple. In fact, the Siri Apple released in 2011 wasn't even as capable as the Siri app that Siri's original developers had previously released on the App Store.

Small is beautiful, as the old saying goes, and nowhere is that more true than in media files. Compressed images are considerably easier to transmit and store than uncompressed ones are, and now Google is using neural networks to beat JPEG at the compression game. Google began by taking a random sample of 6 million 1,280 720 images on the web. It then broke those down into nonoverlapping 32 32 tiles and zeroed in on 100 of those with the worst compression ratios. The goal there, essentially, was to focus on improving performance on the "hardest-to-compress" data, because it's bound to be easier to succeed on the rest.

Looking for an artificial intelligence that can write all your email messages so you don't have to? That dream is still years away. But in the meantime, a startup called Boomerang wants to take you at least part of the way there. Boomerang makes a plug-in for Gmail and Outlook that lets you hit the "snooze button" on certain messages. They'll disappear from your inbox but then reappear at later time.

Today's post is from Sean McClure. Sean is the Director of Data Science at Space-Time Insight, a leading provider of advanced analytics software for organizations looking to leverage machine learning for their business applications. Having worked across diverse industries, and alongside many talented professionals, Sean has seen the blend of approaches required to convert raw data successfully into real world value. Sean's passion is working with cross-discipline teams to build the next generation of adaptive, data-driven applications. Organizations are a product of their choices.

As part of our look back over the last 70 years, we created this quiz all about British motoring from 1946 to 2016.But enough about the past – we've always got one eye on the future, with exciting new developments happening in the automotive industry all the time. Right now, electric cars are growing in popularity, in-car infotainment tech is getting more and more impressive, and manufacturers are working with governments to make self-driving cars a reality. Within the next decade, Britain's roads could begin looking very different. In the year 2086, how might the motoring world have changed? There will be some major changes over the next 70 years.

Whether you're blogging, publishing a video, or sharing an image, you are contributing to the 2.5 quintillion bytes of data that is made everyday! The old method of publishing tons of content isn't as effective as it used to be. Many more are publishing great content nowadays to the point that it's becoming increasingly difficult to be heard over all that digital noise. It's time to blow off that dust and apply a shiny new coat of machine learning polish to your content strategy. As a sub-set of artificial intelligence, machine learning occurs when computer algorithms are programmed to learn from the data and information it inputs.

Baidu's Deep Speech 2 is a cloud-based voice recognition software based on a deep learning neural network. "But we were noticing that in the past two to three years, speech recognition was actually improving a lot, benefiting from big data and deep learning to train its neural networks to produce faster, more accurate results. For English, the speech recognition software was three times faster with a 20.4 percent low error rate. For Mandarin Chinese, the software was 2.8 times faster with a 63.4 percent lower error rate compared to typing.

Earlier this year, we watched a world-renowned Go mastermind get pummeled in a complex game by an artificial intelligence (AI). Now, humans are about to lose in yet another battle with the machines--and this time, it's over typing. There is a speech recognition software that has improved to the point that it is faster and more accurate at producing text than human typists. That's according to researchers from Stanford University and the University of Washington, which ran a study on a new program developed by Chinese internet giant, Baidu. Baidu's Deep Speech 2 is a cloud-based voice recognition software based on a deep learning neural network.

Why can't computers watch the Earth from above and automatically map our roads, buildings, and trash heaps? Satellite operator DigitalGlobe is teaming up with Amazon, the venture arm of the CIA, and chipmaker Nvidia to try to make it happen. In a joint project, DigitalGlobe today released satellite imagery depicting the whole of Rio de Janeiro to a resolution of 50 centimeters. The outlines of 200,000 buildings inside the city's roughly 1,900 square kilometers have been manually marked on the photos. The SpaceNet data set, as it is called, is intended to spark efforts to train machine-learning algorithms to interpret high-resolution satellite photos by themselves.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display