Apple has bought Tuplejump, a machine learning technology company with operations in both India and the United States, TechCrunch reports. Apple continues to buy companies with machine learning expertise. The reason the company had its eyes on Tuplejump was for its "FiloDB" project, according to the report. The lead engineer on FiloDB has been working at Apple since this May, according to his LinkedIn. The purchase price is unknown, although it's almost certainly lower than Apple's last machine learning purchase, Turi, which was bought for around 200 million earlier this year.

Warning: There are spoilers ahead for "Westworld." The second episode of "Westworld" made a significant leap when it came to explaining "glitches" in the robotic hosts' programming. One of the programming employees, Elsie, expressed concern to Bernard about Peter Abernathy (the host who went "crazy" in the premiere). Peter Abernathy began reciting threatening lines from his old narratives. "Let me at least pull the hosts who had contact with him," Elsie asks Bernard.

Samsung Electronics has announced that it has agreed to acquire Viv Labs, "the intelligent interface to everything." Viv has developed an open artificial intelligence (AI) platform that gives third-party developers the power to use and build conversational assistants and integrate a natural language-based interface into applications and services. It claims to be well advanced over other language interfaces like Siri or Google Now where accuracy cannot be relied on. Viv's creator, Dag Kittlaus should know as he co-created Siri too. He said, "Viv would breathe life into the inanimate objects of our life through conversation."

A jury in Australia has heard an audio recording of a woman pleading with her Tinder date to be allowed to leave his apartment, before she fell 14 floors from the balcony and died. Warriena Wright met Gable Tostee for the first time on the night she died. There is no allegation that he pushed her - rather it is believed she was trying to climb down. The court also saw photographs the couple took together. They had been chatting on the dating app Tinder and met in person at a seaside resort called Surfers Paradise, on Queensland's Gold Coast.

Hinge has killed its freemium product and, in an effort to get serious daters only, is offering a new service for 7 a month. There is a startup in the love industry that promised to help people find real relationships -- not just sex. The app became yet another hookup app. Today, after 10 months of soul-searching, the startup is making a very public commitment to change. It's called Hinge, and it's based in Manhattan's Flatiron District.

Google has hired comedy writers from Pixar and The Onion in a bid to make its smart assistant more likeable. It hopes to use their talent to'infuse personality' into its AI helper, which will be used in the firm's new Pixel phones, Duo app and Home speaker. The ultimate goal is to make users feel more emotionally connected to their personal software agent and the firm believes a livelier disposition could make this happen. In a world of order-taking machines, Google Assistant aims to be a comedian. The search giant has recently hired comedy writers from Pixar and The Onion, a satire newspaper, in order to'infuse personality' into its virtual assistant that will live in Google Home (pictured) Earlier this month, Google unveiled its Pixel smartphones and eagerly awaited Home speaker that will both be designed with the smart assistant.

Future conversations with your intelligent gadgets may be co-authored by your favorite comedy writers. It's not too great a leap: according to a Wall Street Journal report, comedy and joke writers from Pixar movies and the Onion are already working on making Google's upcoming Assistant AI voice service feel more loose and vibrant. The development of compelling voice AI will need to start drawing from deeper, more entertaining wells, especially as these home hubs try to have conversations all day long. Current voice AI like Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa on the Echo try to engage with personality, and they even tell jokes (usually, bad ones). But, as these services aim to be entirely voice-based, like the upcoming Google Home hub, they'll need to feel more alive and less canned. Google Home debuts this November, and the upcoming Google Pixel phone, arriving in stores and online on October 20, is the first Google product featuring the new Assistant voice service.

Conversational UIs (CUI) have been gaining rapid prominence this year. If web applications enabled new user conveniences (like self-service travel booking and e-commerce) in the 1990s, Mobile apps opened up different set of conveniences since 2007 (like GPS navigation, ride hailing, and messengers). Over the past two years, CUIs like Amazon Alexa have begun to enable another interaction mode that has the potential to unlock new set user conveniences and use cases like never before. Conversational UIs include both text based and voice based UIs. The focus of this blog post is on voice based UI.

Babak Hodjat is a co-founder and the chief scientist of Sentient. Artificial intelligence is all around us, from searching on Google to what news you see on social media to using Siri. And with the momentum around AI growing every day, it's not surprising that some of the most innovative retail sites have recently been experimenting with the use of AI, as well. Businesses that ignore this growing trend will find themselves playing catch-up for years. The big question is how exactly is this new technology going to change retail. E-commerce is a space with a lot of potential, in part because it's such a data-rich industry, and, there's some momentum around AI gathering already.

Investments in the future will be based on algorithms and patterns charted by robot. Emerging as one of the hot sectors in fintech, robo-advisory can come across as the next big disruption in the space. According to YourStory Research, there are close to 50 Indian early-stage startups flocking around this sector. A Deloitte research paper states that the top 11 firms in this segment globally have seen explosive growth since market entry, managing close to 19 billion Assets Under Management (AUM) in 2014. This disruption in the personal wealth management space is called robo-advisory, which leverages client information through algorithms, automating and recommending tailored investments to individuals.