Tech giant Microsoft has acquired artificial intelligence (AI)-based scheduling service Genee that simplifies the scheduling and rescheduling of large group meetings for companies. Microsoft will integrate the AI technology into Office 365 before shutting down Genee. Co-founders Ben Cheung and Charles Lee, who plan to join Microsoft, started Genee in 2014 to simplify the time-consuming task of scheduling (and rescheduling) meetings. "It is especially useful for large groups and for when you don't have access to someone's calendar," Jha added. Genee uses natural language processing and optimised decision-making algorithms so that interacting with a virtual assistant is just like interacting with a human one.

Earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg revealed he is dedicating his year to making a home AI butler. Now, he has revealed the project is already coming to fruition - and promised to reveal it next month. While at a Facebook'town hall' event in Rome, he told an audience'I'm making progress - I hope to have a demo next month.' Pope Francis meets Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, second from left, and his wife Priscilla Chan, at the Santa Marta residence, the guest house in Vatican City. However, Zuckerberg later revealed his wife doesn't have access to his home AI system.

Consumer adoption of artificial intelligence-powered virtual assistants will increase, but some brands don't see the capabilities fully replacing humans. The number of active users of virtual assistants will grow to 2 billion consumers in 2021, up from 390 million last year, according to new research from Tractica. Global revenue generated by virtual assistants will grow to 16 billion by 2021, up from 2 billion last year. The majority (75%) of revenues will come from the consumer side of the market, according to Tractica. The Asia Pacific region will lead the market in revenue and multiply in value by 10 times to account for more than 5 billion by 2021. "The consumer and enterprise use cases for virtual digital assistants are proliferating rapidly thanks to accelerated innovation and scalability of underlying technologies, such as natural language processing and artificial intelligence," Mark Beccue, principal analyst at Tractica, said in a statement.

The term "machine learning" covers a grab bag of algorithms, techniques, and technology that are by now pretty much everywhere in modern life. However, machine intelligence has recently started to be used not just for identifying problems but to build better products. Amongst the first is the world's only beers brewed with the help of machine intelligence, which went on sale a few weeks ago. The machine learning algorithms uses a combination of reinforcement learning and bayesian optimisation to assist the brewer in deciding how to change the recipe of the beer, with the algorithms learning from experience and customer feedback. Perhaps the most obvious intrusion of machine learning into the physical world is the voice recognition that drives Apple's Siri, or Amazon's Alexa.

While major players keep betting on the producer vs explorer model to access data, a revolution is on its way fuelled by three main factors: startups, machine learning and natural language. Here is how entrepreneurs and technology are changing how we do business intelligence and shifting the paradigm of an old industry. "Over the next few years, BI vendors are expected to start playing a quick game of catch-up with the virtual personal assistant market. Initially, BI vendors will enable basic voice commands for their standard interfaces, followed by natural language processing of spoken or text input into SQL queries. Ultimately, "personal analytic assistants" will emerge that understand user context, offer two-way dialogue, and (ideally) maintain a conversational thread."

The Photon ML Tutorial is a Jupyter notebook and web app developed to demonstrate how you can use generalized linear mixed models (GLMix) to personalize a recommendation system. We originally presented this tutorial at KDD 2016, and prepared the following introductory slides providing an overview of the recommender system at LinkedIn and how is GLMix implemented within Photon's GAME module: Our tutorial runs in Docker. You will need to install Docker or Docker Toolbox on your system to use it. After you have installed Docker, launch the Docker daemon (this happens automatically on some systems). The next step is to install and launch the Photon ML Tutorial Docker image.

In summer 2014, Apple completely changed how Siri works. The secretive Cupertino, California, company adapted Siri's voice recognition to use a cutting-edge artificial-intelligence technique called neural networks and switched it over on July 30, 2014, according to an in-depth feature by Steven Levy of Backchannel. Neural networks is a type of AI inspired by the human brain that has become especially useful thanks to today's powerful computers. Before that, Siri recognized human voices using more rudimentary AI techniques that have been around for decades. It was the biggest change to Siri since it launched in 2011.

Stories about racist Twitter accounts and crashing self-driving cars can make us think that artificial intelligence (AI) is a work in progress. But while these headline-grabbing mistakes reveal the frontiers of AI, versions of this technology are already invisibly embedded in many systems that we use everyday. These everyday uses include everything from fraud detection systems that monitor credit card transactions to email filters that learn not to swamp your inbox with spam. You've probably already interacted with an AI system today without even knowing it and probably enjoyed the experience. One increasingly common form of AI can be found in chatbots, a type of software that lets you interact with it by having a conversation.

The blending of home-based diagnostic platforms with medical care at home is arriving. The Tricorder XPRIZE competition is well underway, with several teams set to compete in the final stages. Leading contenders include CloudDx and Scanadu, a company started at our first Exponential Medicine program, have successfully leveraged crowdfunding to enable their clinical trials. Gale by 19Labs is a next generation "first aid kit meets home health center" (see the below video for a demo) exemplifying how integration of home diagnostics paired with menu-driven (and potentially AI-driven) assistance and optional telemedicine connectivity can provide increased access to home-based diagnosis, triage and management of minor bumps and scrapes and also more complex medical conditions. Interactive and engaging, from coaching on diet and nutrition to reminding you to take your medications or offering psychological support and follow up -- the chatbots are on their way.

Over the past few years, Siri's functionality and reliability has improved by leaps and bounds. Not only is Siri's feature-set more expansive than ever, but it operates much more quickly and does a much better job at understanding and processing language. To this point, Medium last week published a fascinating and detailed profile on how Apple's advancements in the field of AI and machine learning have helped take Siri's performance to the next level. In fact, Siri Senior Director Alex Acero boasted that advancements in Siri's underlying technology has cut down the error rate "by a factor of two in all the languages" and "more than a factor of two in many cases." DON'T MISS: Apple's iPhone 8 will feature the radical redesign we've been waiting for "That's mostly due to deep learning and the way we have optimized it," Acero added, " not just the algorithm itself but in the context of the whole end-to-end product."