With the launch of iOS 12, iPhone owners were introduced to Siri's new Shortcuts feature that makes suggestions based on a user's routines. Numerous third-party apps -- such as Pandora, Evernote and even Google News -- already offer such integration, but one of the most eagerly anticipated platforms, Philips Hue, has been missing. Now, that wait is over -- Philips Hue users with the latest version of the app received Shortcuts support today. The update means that users can activate lighting scenes by using recorded personal phrases. In addition, Siri now learns when certain scenes are used and "suggests them for quick activation on the phone's lock screen, Siri search or Siri watch-face," Philips wrote in its App Store description.

If the theme of Microsoft's Tuesday Surface event was about maintaining focus, then the new Microsoft Surface Headphones fall right in line: Spin the noise cancellation dial on Microsoft's new cans, and the world fades away. Headphones aren't usually considered to be a PC accessory, but anyone who's worked in a coffee shop--or the office equivalent, the dreaded open-plan office--knows that casual conversation and cup clinks can be enormously distracting. Enter the $349 Surface Headphones, Microsoft's over-the-ear headphones that feature both active noise cancellation as well as a connection to Cortana, Microsoft's voice assistant. Like mice and keyboards, headphones are a subjective experience--we all experience them differently on our ears. I found the Surface Headphones a bit confining during my first interaction with them, though the noise cancellation worked well in the loud, bustling environment of Microsoft's demo space.

Adobe Analytics is a sophisticated product, so much so that users might focus on a set of known metrics at the cost of missing key insights. Adobe introduced an AI-fueled virtual assistant called Intelligent Alerts today to help users find deeper insights they might have otherwise missed. John Bates, director of product management for Adobe Analytics says that in the past, the company has used artificial intelligence and machine learning under the hood of Analytics to help their users understand their customer's behavior better. This marks the first time, Adobe will be using this technology to understand how the user works with Analytics to offer new data they might not have considered. "Historically we've analyzed the data that we collect on behalf of our customers, on behalf of brands and help provide insights. Now we're analyzing our users' behavior within Adobe Analytics, and then mashing them up with those insights that are most relevant and personalized for that individual, based on the signals that we see and how they use our tool," Bates explained.

Some argue that Apple's more conservative approach is damaging to the development of core products like Siri, especially in the face of fierce competition from Amazon's Alexa. But Cook reiterated to Vice the company's "collect as little data as possible" stance, saying he considers privacy "one of the most important issues of the 21st century." The tech CEO added that he is not typically a "pro-regulation kind of person," but he would be willing to work with lawmakers to educate them and ensure that tech companies create products that are "great for society." "I think some level of government regulation is important to come out on that," Cook told Vice.

Machine learning offers considerable potential for streamlining and transforming routine information processes in life sciences -- but could more creative applications of artificial intelligence take things further still? The scope for artificial intelligence in life sciences is potentially significant -- enabling accelerated scientific breakthrough, thanks to new potential to identify the minutest anomalies in unwieldy global data masses, and facilitating greater drug personalisation. Far from hovering on some futuristic horizon, the technology is already available too -- which means pharma companies need to build it into their agendas and plans now, if they don't want to risk sacrificing competitive advantage. From intelligent internet and content searches that adapt to user preferences, to automated personal assistants like Alexa and Siri, and customer care channels such as web chat, AI is already in common use as part of people's routine activities. One of the great appeals of AI is the scope for process automation and acceleration, using clever algorithms that can complete complex tasks previously limited to human capacity.

Autumn marks the latest raft of statistics reports as the research firms push out the latest numbers to businesses. They give a sense of where the AI, virtual assistant and chatbot markets are headed, help drive adoption and nudge businesses to catch the next trends. Reading one or more of these reports will help give you a specific vertical or general market overview. MarketsandMarkets' latest report highlights rapid growth in the chatbot market when it comes to the booming health sector. Massive customer demand and a lack of specialist time mean bots will soon be a common feature for medical professionals, GP surgeries and hospitals.

ABSTRACT We explore active learning (AL) utterance selection for improving the accuracy of new underrepresented domains in a natural language understanding (NLU) system. Moreover, we propose an AL algorithm called Majority-CRF that uses an ensemble of classification and sequence labeling models to guide utterance selection for annotation. Experiments with three domains show that Majority-CRF achieves 6.6%-9% relative error rate reduction compared to random sampling with the same annotation budget, and statistically significant improvements compared to other AL approaches. Additionally, case studies with human-in-the-loop AL on six new domains show 4.6%-9% improvement on an existing NLU system. Index Terms-- Active Learning, Domain Expansion, Natural Language Understanding, Intelligent Virtual Assistants 1. INTRODUCTION Intelligent virtual assistants (IVA) with natural language understanding (NLU), such as Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Google Assistant, and Microsoft Cortana, are becoming increasingly popular. For IVA, NLU is a distinct component of spoken language understanding (SLU) [1], in conjunction with automatic speech recognition (ASR) and dialog management (DM). ASR produces a token sequence from speech, which is passed to NLU for both classifying the action or "intent" that the user wants to invoke (e.g.

Lots of the news from Microsoft's Surface event leaked ahead of time, but we didn't necessarily expect to see these new Surface Headphones today. As you might expect, the main draw here is that Cortana is on board and easily accessible, but there are some other impressive specs here as well. Microsoft went with over-the-ears design which offers active noise cancellation; the company says it has 13 levels of noise cancellation all told. There are four beam-forming mics and four active noise cancelling mics as well as 40mm drivers. The Surface Headphones work with any Bluetooth-enabled device, so if you work across Mac and Windows or happen to use an iPhone, you're covered.

The biggest surprise during Microsoft's Surface launch event wasn't a computer -- it was a pair of headphones. The Surface Headphones are Microsoft's first entry into premium cans, but they have just about everything you'd want: They're wireless, feature noise canceling and have Cortana directly integrated. But based on my quick demo, the Surface Headphones can easily hold their own. It's clear that Microsoft learned a lot from the competition. The Surface Headphones are light and incredibly comfortable, thanks to a generous amount of cushioning around the earpads and headband.

Prefer to watch – here is my event video … (if the video doesn't' show up – check here) Here is the 1 slide condensation (if the slide doesn't show up, check here): Event Report - Dreamforce 2018 - Where is the Innovation from Holger Mueller Want to read on? Here you go: Salesforce and Apple partner. At first glance, enterprises love it when market leaders' partner, especially when they are joint customers. With Salesforce committing to build iOS specific apps, taking advantage of iPhone features, moving closer to Swift – is a big favor to Apple. The concern for CIOs is – Salesforce is creating two classes of mobile users.