Apple Inc.'s new head of artificial intelligence will also oversee the Siri digital assistant, taking on that responsibility from software executive Craig Federighi, according to the company's website. Apple listed John Giannandrea on the site as its first Chief of Machine Learning and AI Strategy. He's also responsible for Core ML, an Apple tool that helps developers integrate machine learning features into their apps, along with "Siri technologies," Apple said on Giannandrea's new online biography. Apple also updated the biography of Federighi, who runs iPhone and Mac software, to indicate he's no longer in charge of Siri. Apple shifted responsibility of Siri from Eddy Cue, a senior vice president in charge of most services and original content, to Federighi just last year.

Can't get your Amazon Echo or Google Home smart speaker to understand you? It might be your accent. Two teams of researchers recruited by The Washington Post found that Amazon's Alexa assistant and the Google Assistant exhibit a pattern of poor performance with certain dialects. They tested thousands of voice commands dictated by more than 100 people across 20 cities, and the results were conclusive: Google's and Amazon's speakers were 30 percent less likely to understand non-American accents than those of native-born users, and the overall accuracy rate for Chinese, Indian, and Spanish accents was about 80 percent. It points to clear evidence of bias in the data used to train the two voice recognition systems, Rachael Tatman, a Kaggle data scientist with expertise in speech recognition, told The Washington Post.

Machine Learning Apps are fast invading into our everyday lives as the technology is progressing towards delivering smarter mobile-centric solutions. Embedding mobile apps with Machine Learning, a promising segment of AI, is spelling out a lot of advantages for the adopting companies to stand out amidst the clutter and rake in sizeable profits. Many organizations are investing heavily in Machine Learning to reap its benefits. Based on a prediction, Machine Learning as a service market will touch $5,537 million by 2023 while growing at a CAGR of 39 per cent from 2017-2023. Machine Learning Applications refer to a set of apps with Artificial Intelligence mechanisms that are designed to create a universal approach throughout the web to solve similar problems. The ML apps are based on a continuous learning process and provide end users with the exceptional user experience.

Editor's Note: This article originally appeared on ITProPortal and has been republished with permission. The workplace of the future is going to be made up of hyper-connected workers, and AI will play its part in ensuring this outcome. Soon, digital assistants, voice-controlled devices, and huddle rooms will be commonplace in the office. For businesses, this rise in AI assistance will greatly improve workplace collaboration and free up valuable time for employees to undertake more productive activities. Today's tech-savvy employees are well-versed in tech such as live video and instant messenger to connect and collaborate from anywhere in the world. The introduction of AI will act as an extension to this technology.

The main contribution of this paper is to introduce and describe a new recommender-systems dataset (RARD II). It is based on data from a recommender-system in the digital library and reference management software domain. As such, it complements datasets from other domains such as books, movies, and music. The RARD II dataset encompasses 89m recommendations, covering an item-space of 24m unique items. RARD II provides a range of rich recommendation data, beyond conventional ratings. For example, in addition to the usual ratings matrices, RARD II includes the original recommendation logs, which provide a unique insight into many aspects of the algorithms that generated the recommendations. In this paper, we summarise the key features of this dataset release, describing how it was generated and discussing some of its unique features.

If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA TODAY's newsroom and any business incentives. Living in the age of technology is rough. Every day it seems like there's a new product to get behind like a dog treat camera or those hoverboards those kids are riding these days. It can be easy to get lost in the next kickstarter or really not understand what the heck is going on with technology trends.

According to Gartner, "to keep pace with the demands of digital transformation initiatives, application development teams will augment their efforts with AI "co-developers" to streamline programming efforts". Gartner predicts that "by 2022, at least 40% of new application development projects will have virtual AI co-developers on their team." Mendix is a digital transformation enabler platform that helps businesses to build web and mobile applications without the need to code – what's called low-code development. The company has recently launched Mendix Assist, which uses machine learning and AI analysis of over 5 million application logic flows to deliver 90% accuracy on next-step suggestions and reduce the cost of development defects by 10x. The platform allows people from across the business with no coding skills to collaborate, build and continuously improve apps at speed and scale.

Cultural biases in tech aren't just limited to facial recognition -- they crop up in voice assistants as well. The Washington Post has partnered with research groups on studies showing that Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant aren't as accurate understanding people with strong accents, no matter how fluent their English might be. People with Indian accents were at a relatively mild disadvantage in one study, but the overall accuracy went down by at least 2.6 percent for those with Chinese accents, and by as much as 4.2 percent for Spanish accents. The gap was particularly acute in media playback, where a Spanish accent might net a 79.9 accuracy rate versus 91.8 percent from an Eastern US accent. A second study showed how voice assistants would frequently mangle interpretations when people read news headlines out loud.

When Meghan Cruz says "Hey, Alexa," her Amazon smart speaker bursts to life, offering the kind of helpful response she now expects from her automated assistant. With a few words in her breezy West Coast accent, the lab technician in Vancouver gets Alexa to tell her the weather in Berlin (70 degrees), the world's most poisonous animal (a geography cone snail) and the square root of 128, which it offers to the ninth decimal place. But when Andrea Moncada, a college student and fellow Vancouver resident who was raised in Colombia, says the same in her light Spanish accent, Alexa offers only a virtual shrug. She asks it to add a few numbers, and Alexa says sorry. She tells Alexa to turn the music off; instead, the volume turns up.

Samsung is set to become the latest technology giant to vie for a place in your living room with a voice-enabled smart speaker, following similar efforts from Amazon, Apple and Google. The smart speaker is anticipated to cost around $300, making it considerably more expensive than the Amazon Echo and Google Home devices, but still cheaper than Apple's $349 HomePod. To justify this price, it will market the speaker as a high-end music player with innovative features like sound shifting, whereby the direction of the audio will be beamed at the person speaking to the device. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.