Amazon is introducing a feature that will allow Alexa to suggest voice apps when you don't know what app to ask for. Instead, you will be able to simply tell Alexa what you want to accomplish to receive recommendations of skills to help you achieve that goal. Now in beta, the CanFulfillIntentRequest interface can be used by the creators of Alexa skills in the U.S. to alert Amazon to the kinds of questions their skill may be able to answer or queries the skill is able to fulfill. Amazon's Alexa Skill Store now has more than 30,000 voice apps, and getting users' attention can be something of a challenge. The intent request introduced today should help users discover more voice apps and connect developers making skills with a larger audience.

My regular readers will recognize Zaid's name. In 2012, at LegalTech New York, I used his very cool "The Mashup App" which was a vision for the future of the web: a web where we control our personal information and curate our digital data -- from memories to knowledge -- from all from our personal devices. The app is a personal database in which you save your digital data. You can save all types of data including web, PDF, images, video, audio, location, and time data. Since your personal database is on your device, you can save everything that is important to you – in this case, a log of every place I visited during my 3 days at LegalTech that year, plus the 3 days after in NYC at client meetings. From this I could generate a "diary" of my day, or my week and I could also associate any document (such as a PDF or a restaurant receipt or dry cleaning bill) I had to that "pin" location and/or day.

SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA – Apple will offer more ways for people to limit the time they spend on iPhones while introducing features designed to make its products even more indispensable. The paradox emerged Monday as Apple executives previewed new versions of free software due out this fall. The forthcoming controls are aimed at addressing criticism that devices are becoming increasingly addictive and distracting, especially for children during their formative years. Yet Apple made it clear it also hopes to make its devices and services even more alluring -- and potentially irresistible -- by creating new avenues for its digital assistant, Siri, to serve as a backup brain for its users. The company is also creating more entertainment options and new ways to communicate, including a way for up to 32 people to join a group video chat through FaceTime. People have become so dependent on technology that it's unlikely any company will be able to solve the addiction problem, but they can help keep it from getting worse, Gartner analyst Brian Blau said.

Apple's Siri has fallen behind its virtual assistant competition. Google's Assistant expertly surfaces information, while Amazon's Alexa works with a staggering number of third-party apps for a broad variety of capabilities. Apple isn't admitting defeat, though: Siri played a prominent role at WWDC, the company's "Worldwide Developers Conference," on Monday. Specifically, Apple is finally tackling the issue of customization with its personal digital assistant: Making Siri do more, proactively, to make your day easier. Apple is primarily accomplishing this with a new tool called Siri Shortcuts, a sort of IFTTT built straight into iOS for personalizing and automating Siri commands and functions.

Apple AAPL 0.84% introduced at least seven things at its annual Worldwide Developer Conference that could actually make your life better. After a year filled with bug fixes and heavy user criticism about everything from fragile MacBook keyboards to Siri's incompetence, Apple's focus was on improving existing things rather than introducing new ones. It didn't do enough, at least not during the keynote, to address the bugs and shortcomings of its core products. But it did show us it had some real user needs in mind with these improvements. Facebook and others have recently come under fire for tracking you online, often without you knowing.

Recent advancements in deep neural networks for graph-structured data have led to state-of-the-art performance on recommender system benchmarks. However, making these methods practical and scalable to web-scale recommendation tasks with billions of items and hundreds of millions of users remains a challenge. Here we describe a large-scale deep recommendation engine that we developed and deployed at Pinterest. We develop a data-efficient Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) algorithm PinSage, which combines efficient random walks and graph convolutions to generate embeddings of nodes (i.e., items) that incorporate both graph structure as well as node feature information. Compared to prior GCN approaches, we develop a novel method based on highly efficient random walks to structure the convolutions and design a novel training strategy that relies on harder-and-harder training examples to improve robustness and convergence of the model. We also develop an efficient MapReduce model inference algorithm to generate embeddings using a trained model. We deploy PinSage at Pinterest and train it on 7.5 billion examples on a graph with 3 billion nodes representing pins and boards, and 18 billion edges. According to offline metrics, user studies and A/B tests, PinSage generates higher-quality recommendations than comparable deep learning and graph-based alternatives. To our knowledge, this is the largest application of deep graph embeddings to date and paves the way for a new generation of web-scale recommender systems based on graph convolutional architectures.

Mary Meeker is a legend in Silicon Valley. Because every year, she comes out with what many think is the most complete and thorough analysis of the technology industry. Now, Mary and her team do impeccable work: her presentations are full of great graphs, her slides full of data…and you have to believe that her insights come from hours of researching the industry and listening to the thousands of entrepreneurs that come to Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (Meeker's employer) for investments. There is one problem though. The research pack is long and dense.

Apple is tackling smartphone addiction and adding group video chats to FaceTime in the new iOS12. Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, shows new iOS12 features that allow users to see how much time they're spending on their mobile devices, at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference Monday, June 4, 2018, in San Jose, Calif. Bravo, Apple is finally tackling smartphone addiction. These are the two key standout features that will be coming to the iPhone as part of an iOS 12 software upgrade that Apple unveiled Monday at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose. Such models could be as ancient as the iPhone 5s, or the same handsets supported by iOS 11.

Instead, they can just raise their wrist and talk into the watch in order to speak with Apple's digital assistant. Shortcuts for Siri are also coming to Apple Watch, which allows users to set custom Siri commands that will appear on their watch. They can also customize the way buttons appear in the Apple Watch's Control Center. Apple said more third-party apps are coming to the Apple Watch. Now, third party apps can play background audio, which means users can sync their audio books, playlists and guided meditations to their Apple Watch, and they'll play continuously in the background.

Apple wants to make it easier for you to control apps using Siri. That's the gist of a new app, called'Shortcuts,' that the iPhone maker unveiled on Monday at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose, California. With a single voice command, users can build their own multi-step routines for Siri to run across a variety of apps. Apple unveiled a new'Shortcuts' app at the annual Worldwide Developers Conference that lets users create custom commands for the digital assistant. 'We want to make Siri do much more for you and we're doing that by taking advantage of the power of apps,' said Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering.