Google is known for seemingly wild investments like stratospheric Internet balloons and face computers. This week it began a project that is less flashy but bolder: rethinking the conventional search engine that has become embedded into daily life and provided the revenue that made Google into a 546 billion behemoth. On Wednesday the company launched a virtual helper similar to Apple's Siri. Called Google Assistant, the awkwardly named aide exists only as a "preview" inside Google's new messaging app Allo, and early impressions show that it still needs work. But Google is committed to rolling out Assistant much more widely, in a bid to make us as dependent on it as we are on the search box.

SAN FRANCISCO-- LinkedIn Corp. LNKD 0.04 % rolled out new technology and products Thursday aimed at keeping members on its network longer, a move that could help generate more data and make it more valuable to Microsoft Corp. MSFT 0.10 % LinkedIn, which agreed to sell itself for 26.2 billion to Microsoft in June, debuted training, messaging and news feed features designed to keep LinkedIn's 450 million members using the social network more often and longer. If successful, members will be more likely to keep their profiles up-to-date, add new connections, and post items that offer insight into their work interests. "There's a flywheel there," LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner said in an interview. "The more we understand who you are…, the more personal an experience we can create." One feature is LinkedIn Learning, training videos to help professionals learn new skills, such as computer coding, for their careers.

Apple says their voice recognition app Siri is improved. USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham puts Siri through a few tests to find out. A link has been sent to your friend's email address. Apple says their voice recognition app Siri is improved. USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham puts Siri through a few tests to find out.

Apple released its new Mac operating system, Sierra, earlier this week, which is available to all Mac users as a free download through Apple's Mac App Store. The update notably adds Siri to the Mac and also many of the features from iOS 10, including enriched messages. That's a new name change from Apple, but loyal Mac users will find everything pretty familiar. Sierra is a big update, and there are lots of little things that you may not necessarily find on your own, hiding just below the surface. Here are a handful to help you get the most of the update.

In the hundreds of researcher and executive interviews we've been fortunate enough to conduct in the last three years, few artificial intelligence applications are brought up more than marketing and advertising. During talks with execs and researchers from companies ranging from Facebook to Baidu, and IBM to AT&T, marketing has been a perennial theme in conversations of AI's hottest applications. We'll begin with examples of what's currently viable in the AI marketing world: Below are seven extremely prevalent example applications that we've decided to highlight for this article, accompanied by a brief description of how the AI approach works, and companies currently leveraging the application. In this section of the article I've aimed to stay away from (a) applications with limited traction (speculative or burgeoning applications are reserved for the next section), and (b) AI applications that have only partial overlap with marketing today (IE: fraud and security could / should be considered to be their own category, and will not be referred to here as a marketing application). A complete list of currently viable AI marketing applications would be much more broad, but we've decided to focus on some of the most popular uses in marketing today: In 2005, if you "searched" an eCommerce store to find a product, you'd be unlikely to find the result you had in mind unless you knew it's name or title exactly.

This month Stanford launched a 100-year study of AI (AI100) with a report: Artificial Intelligence and Life in 2030. The 16 member study panel issuing the report sees increasingly useful applications of AI, with potentially profound positive impacts on our society and economy over the next decade. The study identifies eight domains where AI is already having or is projected to have the greatest impact: transportation, healthcare, education, low-resource communities, public safety and security, employment and workplace, home/service robots and entertainment. Let's start with public safety and a few emerging AI applications. Google's AI artificial company DeepMind announced an app that generates human-like speech.

Even taking into consideration the latest smartwatch models introduced recently by Apple and Samsung, it has to be admitted that these gadgets haven't been doing as well as vendors hoped. It could be that the size and weight are still off-putting to many users -- or it could be that many don't want to pay several hundred dollars for what can be viewed as a glorified Fitbit. However, that hasn't put off a number of vendors who are still hoping to make a name for themselves in the Dick Tracy sweepstakes. One that made a bit of a splash on crowdfunding site Indiegogo has just made its appearance in the market: the CoWatch, with hardware from a tech startup called iMCO, software from a company called Chronologics, and the ability to access Amazon's Alexa voice controller. I had a chance to try out the CoWatch and found it to be a highly interesting project -- one that feels not quite complete but that may have a good deal of potential. One admission before I start: While I've handled other smartwatches, this is the first that I've had a chance to spend extensive time with.

First via a messaging App called Allo, later in the fall via Google Home to provide a competitor to Amazon Alexa and Siri. In Adage: " ... Watch Out, Siri and Alexa: Google's New Digital Assistant Is Here ... " More on the release of the Google Allo App. And how Google plans for leadership in assistant AI. (Update) "It's really important for Google, as the company has bet its entire future on A.I.," said Patrick Moorhead, an analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy. "Their CEO Sundar Pichai said at I/O his company is no longer a mobile company, but an A.I. company. Allo needs to go really, really well.

You might not know her name, but you would probably recognise her voice because it speaks to millions of people every day. Reacting to the launch of the latest'NoPhone' - a phone replacement made of nothing but air- the lady behind the voice of Siri said she thinks people need to start putting down their phones. Susan Bennett, the voiceover actor responsible for the female voice of Siri, says'Everybody is running around taking 15 million pictures of their own face'. She said this is making their minds wander and they cannot relate to other humans. In a study published in June, mobile research firm dscout found the average person swipes, taps and pinches their display about 2,617 times a day, for a grand total of one million times per year.

Tucked within Google's unremarkable Allo messaging app is a real treasure: Google Assistant, which injects Google Now with an eager-to-please personality that finally provides the give-and-take other digital assistants lack. We've always talked about Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, and Google Now as the three digital assistants from the top smartphone platforms. But the truth is that Google Now was little more than a series of informative cards, while Siri and Cortana preferred a text-based approach with a bit of sass. Google Assistant retains its visual approach, but within a messaging context that really nails it in how you interact with the app itself. Google announced Google Assistant this past May, and the preview version of it is live in Allo, which itself can be used on Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) on up.