AI developers are making amazing advances. Witness the excitement around AI's progress in search, cancer diagnosis, genomic medicine, autonomous vehicles, Go, smart homes, machine translation, and even lip reading. Progress in such complex problems raises hopes for the development of general-purpose AI that can be deployed in a wide range of intelligent, open-ended interactions with people like computer interface, customer service, planning and advice. It is easy to imagine an enhanced Apple Siri, Amazon Alexa or IBM Watson that engages in conversations with people to answer questions, fulfill commands and even anticipate needs. In fact, unless you watch marketing videos with a very critical eye (like the latest one for Alexa shown below), you might even believe that AI has already reached this point.

Amazon's Alexa platform continues to be the go-to voice assistant not just for the home, but also vehicles. But it looks like the online-retailer's helper in a cylinder was just given its greatest feature ever: The wake word "computer." That's right, you can now pretend you're in the Star Trek universe. The new wake word joins, "Amazon," "Alexa" and "Echo" as things you can yell at the Alexa platform in order to get it to listen to you. Just don't expect the device to help you locate dilithium crystals to get your starship to travel faster than light.

Since Home arrived a few months ago, Google has been regularly adding new features to the compact speaker and its virtual assistant. Today, the company announced that the connected device can now be used to control smart home gadgets from Belkin's WeMo line and Honeywell. This adds more options for controlling lights, switches, thermostats and more with a simple "Ok Google" voice command. Google Home already plays nice with the likes of Nest, Philips Hue and Samsung SmartThings to help you control connected home devices. It also works with audio and TV gear from Vizio, LG and Sony to keep tabs on music and visuals with a hand from Chromecast.

I found these two papers – in of all places the presentation which Emil Kirkegaard and John Fuerst are presenting in London this weekend, which they claim is preventing them from responding to the can of worms they have opened by publishing a large, non-anonymized database of OKCupid dating profiles. This seems like it may become an important case in research ethics and data privacy. You may want to look into it. I recommend starting with this post by Oliver Keyes, but Vox, Vice and Thomas Lumley have all picked up the story. At any rate, the culprits cite these two papers that look quite good, and the second is the lead in to a whole special issue on cumulative science from Psychological Methods in 2009.

While AI initiatives such as IBM Watson, chatbots and digital assistants have garnered much attention over the past year, the current applications only scratch the surface of the technology's potential. For companies, AI will be used to predict customer needs in near real-time, helping them retain customers. The importance of AI to customer interactions is reflected in Forrester's findings, such as that 37% of companies plan to implement intelligent assistants in the next 12 months, and 35% have their sights on cognitive product launches for customers. Some of the other ways AI will be used going forward include leveraging speech recognition for customer interactions, machine learning for making predictions, image recognition in combination with machine learning, robotics and self-driving cars. Already this year, there are signs that robots in stores could revolutionize the customer experience. However, because AI comes with a number of ethical, political and social issues attached, it will be important for companies to develop a plan and have foundational elements in place as they test and learn, per Forrester.

Apple plans to introduce a much smarter version of Siri this year, leveraging a bunch of machine learning technologies it recently acquired with Turi, Tuplejump, Perceptio, VocalIQ and other AI-focused acquisitions, Digitimes claims. The report seems to suggest Apple plans to introduce these features alongside introduction of a future iPhone, though it is not clear if this will be this year, or the next. However, this makes little sense given Siri is now available across all Apple's platforms – while the capabilities may differ (Siri behaves a little differently on a Mac, for example), the basic tech is similar. That's why I can't imagine new Siri features being introduced as an iPhone exclusive. The report also states other smartphone vendors, "are likely to introduce models featuring AI (artificial intelligence) applications as a means to ramp up market shares in 2017, according to industry sources."

To keep up in the AI race against Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant, Apple is working on an enhanced version of Siri for its iPhone 8 launch, Digitimes reported Tuesday. Supply chain sources suggest Apple is responding to increased competition among smart assistants after the Amazon Echo and Google Home assistants gained popularity. The sources say Apple's next iPhone lineup is expected to feature a better version of Siri. In an effort to boost Siri's capabilities Apple acquired Australian start-up Turi last August for $200 million. Turi lets developers create apps with machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities.

Machine learning is the subfield of computer science that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed (Arthur Samuel, 1959).[1] Evolved from the study of pattern recognition and computational learning theory in artificial intelligence,[2] machine learning explores the study and construction of algorithms that can learn from and make predictions on data[3] – such algorithms overcome following strictly static program instructions by making data driven predictions or decisions,[4]:2 through building a model from sample inputs. Machine learning is employed in a range of computing tasks where designing and programming explicit algorithms is infeasible; example applications include spam filtering, detection of network intruders or malicious insiders working towards a data breach,[5] optical character recognition (OCR),[6] search engines and computer vision. Machine learning is closely related to (and often overlaps with) computational statistics, which also focuses in prediction-making through the use of computers. It has strong ties to mathematical optimization, which delivers methods, theory and application domains to the field. Machine learning is sometimes conflated with data mining,[7] where the latter subfield focuses more on exploratory data analysis and is known as unsupervised learning.[4]:vii[8]

Amazon quietly added a new option to the wake words on Amazon Echo devices that will make the dreams of every Star Trek fan come true. If Echo users open the Settings area of the Alexa app they should see a fresh wake word option: Computer. Yes, soon everyone can live the dream of saying, "Computer, what are the current environmental conditions of this Class M planet?"--though I can't promise Alexa will come up with an appropriate response. If you don't see the option in the Alexa app yet, it should appear in the coming days.

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