Google Home will take on Amazon Echo when the voice-activated device launches later this year. MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - Google officially entered the voice-activated digital assistant race Wednesday with Google Home. The small device will compete directly with Amazon's popular Echo and should be available to consumers later this year, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced at the search company's annual developers conference. The move had been anticipated, as Google looks to put its mark on a coming age of artificial intelligence in which machines learn to interpret and answer human queries by leveraging the speed and scope of cloud competing. The device will be able to play music, complete a range of tasks and answer questions that one would ask of Google search.

Google unveiled Wednesday a significant overhaul to its voice search functionality that makes it smarter and more intuitive. The revamped software also has a new name: "Google Assistant." Google Assistant understands language more naturally than standard Google voice search. For example, if a user asks who directed the film The Revenant, that person can follow up with a query like "Show me his awards." The user doesn't have to say the director's name to get the correct answer.

While Facebook and Microsoft are busy building discreet bots to squawk at you in messenger programs, Google's taking another angle. Google Assistant--a new smart assistant announced by CEO Sundar Pichai at Google I/O 2016--weaves together the complex information that Google already has about the world and the detailed information that the company already has about you to create a helpful AI that revolves your world. Building on the deep knowledge base of Google Search, the individual knowledge base of Google Now and your Google profile, and the advanced natural language recognition that's been improving in Android year-in and year-out, Google Assistant is designed to be conversational and help you get things done, Pichai says. For example, you could ask Google Assistant "Who designed this?" while standing in front of a famous sculpture with your phone, and the bot is able to mix location data and image recognition to identify exactly what you're looking at and provide the answer in seconds. It also ties in the personal knowledge that Google already has about you to tie your natural language queries to your specific scenarios.

Facebook has two of them: WhatsApp and Messenger. They're all messaging apps--smartphone apps that let you chat with friends and family. But they're rapidly morphing into something else, a new kind of super communication tool that does so much more than just shuttle texts between people. So, it should come as no surprise that Google is building a new one of its own. The big difference is that, well, it comes from Google.

"We think of it as building each users its own individual Google," CEO Sundar Pichai said on the Google I/O stage today. He added that 20 percent of Google mobile searches today occur through voice searches. "We've started becoming truly conversational with our users," he said. As an example, Pichai offered up the idea of finding a movie to watch on a Friday night. Assistant will respond with the available titles and theater locations, as you'd expect.

LikeSo lets you choose the words to look out for. LikeSo and Ummo are two new applications that analyze your speech and can help you improve your diction. So we put a movie famous for its speech - Clueless - to the test. NEW YORK--"So, ya know, like, frankly my dear, I totally, just don't give a damn." OK, so that's not quite the way Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) delivered his famous parting words to Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh) in Gone With The Wind.

"Legislation to enable the future development of the UK's first commercial spaceports." The new law would form part of the Modern Transport Bill. The UK's desire to build a spaceport on British shores isn't new, however. In the summer of 2014, the government revealed eight locations that it was considering for the landmark project. Six of these were in Scotland, leaving Wales and England with one apiece.

That has spurred speculation that Google will release a virtual-reality device to compete with Facebook's new Oculus Rift headset, as well as Samsung's Gear VR. Analysts also believe Google may release an artificial-intelligent gadget to compete with Amazon's Echo, which is a cylinder-like device that includes a virtual assistant named Alexa.

Panoramic Power, a leading provider of device-level energy management solutions, is pleased to announce the release of Device Analyzer, an innovative data-science approach to energy management that generates actionable energy and operational efficiency insights. Using advanced machine learning algorithms, Device Analyzer provides users with greater visibility into the operational state of each of their monitored devices. Device Analyzer learns usage patterns for any device such as lighting, HVAC and production lines and with pre-defined algorithms per device-type, allows users to see the device's operational state in real-time. It understands and monitors device sequencing, detects anomalies and automatically generates operational insights. Device Analyzer shifts the user interaction from a focus only on energy consumption, to an operational one - delivering significant value to improve operations, productivity and facility performance.

How do you get accurate results using machine learning on problem after problem? The difficulty is that each problem is unique, requiring different data sources, features, algorithms, algorithm configurations and on and on. The solution is to use a checklist that guarantees a good result every time. In this post you will discover a checklist that you can use to reliably get good results on your machine learning problems. Machine Learning Checklist Photo by Crispy, some rights reserved. You have no idea what algorithm will work best on a problem before you start.