Apple war has reached a turning point with the inclusion of the Google's new Pixel phone. The Silicon Valley giant is making waves in the mobile industry with its patented smartphone that blows artificial intelligence assistant Siri out of the water. In a showdown of giants, it seems Google is chalking up this round under their bedpost, as Apple scrambles to get the iPhone 7 back into the mainstream's top of mind. Pixel's main champion in the ring is not the hardware or the design, which by today's standards is nothing new or innovative. Anyone with the right tools can make a new phone, but the playing field evens out with the software add-ons they include in the package.

"Machine learning is the field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed" Arthur Smauel. We can think of machine learning as approach to automate tasks like predictions or modelling. For example, consider an email spam filter system, instead of having programmers manually looking at the emails and coming up with spam rules. We can use a machine learning algorithm and feed it input data (emails) and it will automatically discover rules that are powerful enough to distinguish spam emails. Machine learning is used in many application nowadays like spam detection in emails or movie recommendation systems that tells you movies that you might like based on your viewing history.

Data Scientists across Skyscanner have started meeting every fortnight to discuss research papers that tackle similar problems to those that we face within Skyscanner. The 2nd paper we read was: "Mining Large Streams of User Data for Personalized Recommendations" (hi Xavier!). Just like the last post, we're we're also writing up a brief, non-technical overview the problems/opportunities we discussed. Netflix famously announced a 1M prize in 2006, calling on researchers across the world to improve their movie recommender system by 10%. To create this competition, they had to make a critical decision: how could Netflix measure a 10% improvement in their system?

Robots aren't taking our jobs, but artificial intelligence is making it easier than ever to do them. "Amy" saves entrepreneur Gillian Morris about 43 productive hours a year. Morris, the founder of Hitlist, a travel app that alerts users to cheap flights, has been using Amy, a virtual assistant from x.ai for about two years, to schedule meetings. To ask for Amy's help, Morris sends an email to the person or people she wants to meet with and copies Amy. From there, Amy takes Morris out of the email chain and handles the back and forth about dates and times.

Apple is the most successful company in the world. But future success for Apple depends to a surprising degree on artificial intelligence. When you think of Silicon Valley's AI leaders, Apple may not immediately come to mind. But the company's initiatives around AI are "amazing." At least that's what the company's newest senior employee said.

Siri continues to receive criticism over at times unreliable performance although Apple's been advancing its personal digital assistant by leaps and bounds since its debut in October 2011. Google, on the other hand, is regularly praised for its powerful knowledge graph and accuracy. You probably know that the search company's exciting new feature, Assistant, recently made its debut on the new Pixel smartphones. With that in mind, YouTuber Marques Brownlee took it upon himself to pit the Pixel's Assistant against the iPhone's Siri in a cool side-by-side video comparison. Let the battle of the smartphone voice assistants begin!

Chatbots can already order read you the news, order you a takeaway, or hail you a cab. Now they're heading for your kitchen, with the launch of Jamie Oliver Skills, a virtual sous-chef developed by digital agency AKQA and the Jamie Oliver Group for the Amazon Echo. The Echo is a voice-controlled wireless speaker that is Amazon's answer to Apple's Siri, Google's Now and Microsoft's Cortana. Microphones on the device transmit your voice then a virtual assistant called Alexa--now equipped with a British accent for the UK market--responds automatically using artificial intelligence tech to create a simulated conversation. Jamie Oliver Skills is one of the early additions to Alexa's array of capabilities.

An IPO legitimize TPaaS (Telco Platform as a Service.) Huge firms seek to corner "Big Data in the Cloud." Start-ups take command of "The Internet of Things." These highly-ambiguous terms have replaced "Mobile", "Social" and "Collaboration" in the word clouds of the Digital Age. They are shiny objects with great growth potential and transformative power.

Google's new Pixel phone launched to positive reviews, largely because of the phone's new digital helper called Google Assistant. As I wrote in my review of the new Google Pixel, it's relatively easy to make a high-end smartphone these days. The real challenge is lighting it up with unique software that helps you do more. And the new Google Assistant accomplishes just that. Right out of the gate, Assistant is noticeably smarter and more capable than Siri, a stark embarrassment for Apple, which had a five-year head start on Google.

Major technology firms are racing to infuse smartphones and other internet-linked devices with software smarts that help them think like people. The effort is seen as an evolution in computing that allows users to interact with machines in natural conversation style, telling devices to tend to tasks such as ordering goods, checking traffic, making restaurant reservations or searching for information. Google is making a high-profile push into AI, with the internet titan's chief referring to it as a force for change as powerful as powerful as smartphones. Google Assistant software is being built into new Pixel handsets - aiming to outdo Apple's Siri - enabling users to organize and use information on the devices and in the cloud - to check emails, stay up to date on calendar appointments, news or ask for traffic and weather data. Google also offers AI through its Allo messaging application which can be installed on smartphones, and its Google Home hub, a stand-alone device similar to Amazon's Echo which responds to voice commands to manage tasks and fetch information where people live.