Tim Cook's company could be expanding the use of Siri into the Messages app. Apple's latest patent application appears to be suggesting that in the future, Siri could be deeply integrated into Messages such that users would have the capacity to send messages to their friends while also communicating with Siri in a single interface. This Thursday, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Officer published a new patent application that was filed by the Cupertino giant on May 10, 2016. Such combination would enable users to do two things in one interface: communicate and command Siri via text and engage in conversations with friends. "In one example process, a graphical user interface (GUI) having a plurality of previous messages between a user of the electronic device and the digital assistant can be displayed on a display. The plurality of previous messages can be presented in a conversational view," wrote inventors Petr Karashchuk, Tomas A. Vega Galvez and Thomas R. Gruber.

Today, we are pleased to announce the public preview of the Cortana Skills Kit which allows developers to easily create intelligent, personalized experiences for Cortana. Our vision for Cortana has always been to create a digital personal assistant that's available to users across all their devices, whenever and wherever they may need an extra hand to be more productive and get things done. With the new Cortana Skills Kit, developers can join in delivering that vision and reach millions of Cortana users across platforms including Windows 10, Android, iOS and soon on even more devices and form factors -- like Xbox, the Harman Kardon Invoke smart speaker and inside cars and mixed reality devices. To build a Cortana skill, developers can create their bot's conversational logic using the Microsoft Bot Framework, and publish it to the new Cortana Channel within the Bot Framework, bringing speech capabilities to skills. Developers can understand users' natural input and build custom machine-learned language models through LUIS.ai, and add intelligence with the power of Cognitive Services.

Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella opens the US technology titan's annual Build Conference in Seattle on May 10, 2017. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella declared that "bots are the new apps" at the Microsoft Build developer conference in March 2016. Little over a year later, at the latest annual Build taking place this week in Seattle, Microsoft renewed its commitment to bots, leveraging advances in artificial intelligence and built around Nadella's vision of conversation as a platform. Chat bots are meant to model human conversation, some for social reasons, others for business and productivity purposes. Microsoft's Nadella rallies coders to prevent dystopian future Microsoft announced an expanded set of developer tools for the Bot Framework that was unveiled last year, announcing channels at Build that will let developers make use of bots through the Cortana personal assistant, Bing search engine and Skype for Business.

The foundations for artificial intelligence (AI) have been around for quite some time, however only over the last few years has there been a broader adoption of these technologies, with a steep acceleration this year. With the result that today we see a proliferation of artificial intelligence in various areas. One fast-moving segment is the combination of AI with business application software in fields such as digital customer experience, analytics, supply chain management and human resources. Artificial Intelligence is, without a doubt, the buzzword of 2017 even though it remains nebulous for most people and companies. Since it involves many different solutions and impacts all sectors, it is difficult to define precisely what AI really is.

SEATTLE: Microsoft on Wednesday unveiled new tools intended to democratize artificial intelligence by enabling machine smarts to be built into software from smartphone games to factory floors. The US technology titan opened its annual Build Conference by highlighting programs with artificial intelligence that could tap into services in the internet "cloud" and even take advantage of computing power in nearby machines. "We are infusing AI into every product and service we offer," said Microsoft executive vice president of artificial intelligence and research Harry Shum. "We've been creating the building blocks for the current wave of AI breakthroughs for more than two decades." Microsoft research has gone deep into areas such as machine learning, speech recognition, and enabling machines to recognize what they "see." "Now, we're in the unique position of being able to use those decades of research breakthroughs," Shum said.

If I were to ask how often you engage with a form of artificial intelligence (AI), what would you say? Now, what if I told you that not only do you engage with AI more than you think, but you'll rely on it more than traditional phone service five years from now? Would you agree, or think I'm plain crazy? Before you form an opinion, consider the reality in which we live. It's commonplace to engage with AI-enabled virtual assistants like Apple's Siri or Microsoft's Cortana. In fact, if you own an iPhone, you're likely part of the 98% majority who has at least tried Siri.

SEATTLE – Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella said Wednesday tech developers have a responsibility to prevent a dystopian "1984" future as the U.S. technology titan unveiled a fresh initiative to bring artificial intelligence into the mainstream. At the start of its annual Build Conference, Microsoft sought to showcase applications with artificial intelligence that could tap into services in the internet "cloud" and even take advantage of computing power in nearby machines. Nadella spent time on stage at the Seattle conference stressing a need to build trust in technology, saying new applications must avoid dystopian futures feared by some. Nadella's presentation included images from George Orwell's "1984" and Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" to underscore the issue of responsibility of those creating new technologies. "What Orwell prophesied in '1984,' where technology was being used to monitor, control, dictate, or what Huxley imagined we may do just by distracting ourselves without any meaning or purpose -- neither of these futures is something that we want," he said "The future of computing is going to be defined by the choices that you as developers make and the impact of those choices on the world."

It's no secret that today's conversational assistants leave a lot to be desired. We spend a lot of time talking about how bad they are at hearing what we say and even worse at interpreting it. But one thing that doesn't get nearly enough attention is the one-directional nature of conversations we have with Siri, Cortana and the rest. These systems don't know how to ask questions -- real inquiries that reflect a nuanced understanding of what information is known and what information is desired. Microsoft Maluuba, the research team of PhDs that Microsoft acquired back in January, has been hard at work exploring the nexus of machine learning and question generation with the aim of delivering an intelligent personal assistant that surpasses the limited capabilities of today's market leaders. In a recent paper, the team outlined its approach of using recurrent networks to generate questions from a body of text.

Users of online dating sites compete for attention from potential matches. Member profiles provide an opportunity for candidates to present information about themselves that their counterparts use to assess compatibility and desirability. In this paper, we explore how text-based similarities among users of a dating site impact their success in attracting attention. The principle of homophily predicts that to be successful, a user should be perceived as similar to the person they would prefer to date. Conversely, theories of distinctiveness suggest that standing out from the crowd should be beneficial. Using profiles, we explore how the text similarity between a user, the opposite-sex member they are targeting, and their same-sex competitors impacts the likelihood that a sender of a message receives a response conditional on initiating contact. We find that the probability of receiving a response is maximized when the user has high text similarity to the person they message, but low text similarity to the competitors that are also seeking the same individual’s attention. This suggests a balance between homophily and distinctiveness theory.

We propose a novel technique to predict a user’s movie genre preference from her psycholinguistic attributes obtained from user social media interactions. In particular, we build machine learning based classification models that take user tweets as input to derive her psychological attributes: personality and value scores, and gives her movie genre preference as output. We train these models using user tweets in Twitter, and her reviews and ratings of movies of different genres in Internet movie database (IMDb). We exploit a key concept of psychology, i.e., an individual’s personality and values may influence her choice in performing different actions in real life. We have investigated how personality and values independently and collectively influence a user preference on different movie genres. Our proposed model can be used for recommending movies to social media users.