The "Hey Siri" feature allows users to invoke Siri hands-free. A very small speech recognizer runs all the time and listens for just those two words. The "Hey Siri" detector uses a Deep Neural Network (DNN) to convert the acoustic pattern of your voice at each instant into a probability distribution over speech sounds. It then uses a temporal integration process to compute a confidence score that the phrase you uttered was "Hey Siri". If the score is high enough, Siri wakes up. This article takes a look at the underlying technology.

Jefferson Graham tests the Google Pixel 2 XL smartphone camera--is it the best one ever, as some have said? He compares to the Apple iPhone 8 Plus in a beach shootout on #Talking Tech. LOS ANGELES -- OK Google, we love the new Pixel XL 2 smartphone as a camera, but alas, for photos and videos, our hearts go to the Apple iPhone 8 Plus. With each new smartphone release, critics are quick to dub a new one as the best mobile camera out there. We said just that last year about the then-new Google Pixel, which won our 2017 shootout. Months have gone by, and many new mobile cameras have been released.

Ever since the inception of Artificial Intelligence, humans have been in a constant battle with the modern thinking-machines. AI has touched many industries, by showing outstanding results and even outperforming humans. As statistics show, 62% of millennials aged 17-24 and 35% of people over 55 trust the super abilities and the future of AI. It is also interesting that 71% of people over 50 believe that intelligent virtual assistants will simplify their lives in the future. Meanwhile, the history of the Brains vs AI battle contains many examples of where one defeats the other.

Motorola has announced a new Moto Mod for its Moto Z smartphones that brings Amazon's Alexa voice assistant. Called the Moto Smart Speaker with Amazon Alexa, the new Moto Mod allows users to experience Alexa like they have an Amazon Echo speaker wherever they are. The new Moto Mod was promised by Motorola and Amazon earlier this year. Back in February during the Mobile World Congress, the two companies revealed that they were working together to bring Alexa to Moto Z smartphones as a Moto Mod accessory. The new Amazon Alexa Moto Mod is pretty much what most would expect.

Hooking up 30,000 feet in the air has been made easier with a somewhat-accidental in-flight dating app. This week, Qantas unveiled the Boeing Dreamliner that's being added to its fleet. And while the 787-9 comes with a bunch of fancy things like bigger seats and larger windows and fewer greenhouse emissions, there's an unassuming feature that's far more impressive and will revolutionize the dating world. The function has been around on some planes for a few years now but this is the first I've heard of it and honestly, I don't know why I haven't read more feature stories about couples who've met on this unofficial dating app. The feature, which appears on the tiny screen on the back of your headrest, allows you to message anyone around the plane as long as you know their seat number.

In what appears to be a first, Amazon's Alexa will act as a guide for a board game called When in Rome, according to the startup Sensible Object. Due out in March 2018, When in Rome will be the first of six voice-augmented games Sensible Object plans to release next year. Each game in the series called Voice Originals will cost $24.99, CEO Alex Fleetwood told VentureBeat in a phone interview. When in Rome serves up trivia questions from locals in 20 cities around the world.

To compete with the likes of Google Assistant and Amazon's Alexa, Samsung has to get its own version of a smart voice-powered assistant, Bixby, to as many devices as possible. It also needs to make Bixby work as well as its competitors, something Samsung has had trouble with since launch. At the Samsung Developer Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, the tech company announced two initiatives that will do just that: Bixby 2.0 and Project Ambience. The Bixby update brings Samsung's digital assistant to more devices like smart TVs and refrigerators and adds "deep linking capabilities and enhanced natural language abilities," along with a way to recognize multiple users -- a feature that already exists on Assistant and Alexa. Along the same lines, Project Ambience, a hardware dongle or chip, will let users add the Samsung vision of the Internet of Things -- with Bixby ascendant -- to any connectable device.

Apple's machine learning team published an all-new research paper today that dives deep into how Apple uses AI to power one of the most basic Siri commands. In order to keep the'Hey Siri' command from running on the main processor all day, Apple's new publication reveals that the company uses a tiny, low-power auxiliary processor that's embedded in the Motion Coprocessor just to listen to the phrase. In the paper published on its blog today, Apple also discusses how it found unique ways to use machine learning to prevent false triggers of the'Hey Siri' command. To detect when someone actually wants to trigger Siri, Apple converts your voice using a Deep Neural Network into a probability distribution over speech sounds. A confidence score is then created and if it's high enough, Siri wakes up.

Ever wanted to have an Amazon Echo speaker with you wherever you are, rather than relying on your phone's built-in voice assistant? Motorola is betting you do. As promised, it's releasing an Alexa-powered Moto Mod (the Moto Smart Speaker with Amazon Alexa, to be exact) that slaps an Echo-like device on the back of compatible phones like the Moto Z2 Force or Z Play. The key, as you might guess, is that it delivers that across-the-room voice control in a way your phone can't by itself. The large dedicated speaker is clearly one advantage, but there are also four mics to make sure it picks up your voice in relatively noisy environments.

Artificial intelligence is where the competition is in IT, with Microsoft and Google both parading powerful, always-available AI tools for the enterprise at their respective developer conferences, Build and I/O, in May. It's not just about work: AI software can now play chess, go, and some retro video games better than any human -- and even drive a car better than many of us. These superhuman performances, albeit in narrow fields, are all possible thanks to the application of decades of AI research -- research that is increasingly, as at Build and I/O, making it out of the lab and into the real world. Alexa and Samsung Electronics' Bixby may offer less-than-superhuman performance, but they also require vastly less power than a supercomputer to run. Businesses can dabble on the edges of these, for example developing Alexa "skills" that allow Amazon Echo owners to interact with a company without having to dial its call center, or jump right in, using the various cloud-based speech recognition and text-to-speech "-as-a-service" offerings to develop full-fledged automated call centers of their own. Some of the earliest work on AI sought to explicitly model human knowledge of the world in a form that computers could process and reason from, if not actually understand.