Apple's biggest move was to open up the talking iPhone assistant to third-party developers for inclusion in their apps, paving the way for users to hail a ride from Uber [UBER.UL] or send a message with Tencent's ( Tencent Holdings Ltd) WeChat using voice commands. Experts in artificial intelligence applauded the move as an important step forward, in part because the more people use an artificial intelligence system, the better it becomes. But some wondered why Apple had not made Siri an open platform much sooner, noting that competing products including Amazon.com's ( Amazon.com, Inc.) Alexa, Microsoft's ( Microsoft Corporation) Cortana and the Google ( Alphabet Inc) app are already open to developers. "Is it too little too late?" "Siri is five years old and still trying to learn how to play well with others."

Apple's wisecracking digital assistant Siri could have a big role as the company's annual software conference opens in San Francisco. As voice technology has improved, people are getting more comfortable with services like Siri and the service Google calls "assistant" to interact with online services for entertainment, shopping and the like. A report by venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins says nearly two-thirds of U.S. smartphone owners used a voice assistant last year -- more than double the rate in 2013. Even so, many people are still reluctant to use voice-enabled services in public settings, like the office or the street. That makes the home an important battleground.

Analysts are saying that Apple's upcoming updates to its Siri voice assistant should help the company address criticisms that it can't compete on artificial intelligence. Apple is now opening Siri to apps made by other companies, and like Google and Microsoft, it's bringing the digital assistant to desktop and laptop computers. It's also making Siri smarter by using what Apple calls differential privacy. Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy explains it as Apple using non-personal information in aggregate to teach Siri new tricks, then having all the personalization take place on the individual device. It's in contrast to Google's approach of doing everything over the internet -- that is, in the "cloud."

To hold its own against digital assistants from Google, Microsoft and Amazon, Siri needs an IQ boost Last month, Google took the stage in Mountain View, California, to show off improvements to its digital voice assistant. Its signature ability is to have a conversation with it like you would a normal person.

SAN FRANCISCO – Apple is working to make its iPhone and other gadgets smarter, responding to competitors' recent moves by building more artificial intelligence into its Siri digital assistant, photos, maps and other online services. The tech giant kicked off its annual software conference by announcing new software features for the Apple Watch and Apple TV, as well, while unveiling a new design for the Apple Music service. It's also extending Apple Pay to the web, so users can pay for purchases made on their Mac computers using the fingerprint authorization on their iPhone or Apple Watch. Most of these new features won't arrive until this fall. At a time when sales of its flagship iPhone are slowing, Apple seemed determined to show that it can make its gadgets indispensable, or at least as useful as its competitors' products.

After watching Apple's keynote at the Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday, you'd be forgiven for thinking you've seen some of these features before. Here are some of the features in iOS 10 and Mac that take inspiration from Google -- and others. With Apple's release of iOS 10, the Photos app will use machine learning and facial recognition to automatically group together photos of common faces or subjects without you needing to tag anything. The Memories feature organizes photos into categories like trips, events and can even make videos with music that matches the mood. Yet these were features that have already become commonplace with Google Photos when it launched in 2015.

The gunman who attacked a Florida LGBT nightclub had attended the club before the attack and had used a gay dating and chat app, witnesses said. Kevin West, a regular at Pulse nightclub, said Omar Mateen messaged him on and off for a year before the shooting using the gay chat and dating app Jack'd. West was dropping off a friend at the club when he noticed Mateen – whom he knew by sight but not by name – crossing the street wearing a dark cap and carrying a black cellphone about 1 a.m., an hour before the shooting. "He walked directly past me. I said, 'Hey,' and he turned and said, 'Hey,'" and nodded his head, West said.

Kevin West, a regular at Pulse, said Omar Mateen messaged him sporadically over the last year using the app Jack'd. West was dropping off a friend at the club when he noticed Mateen crossing the street wearing a dark cap and carrying a cellphone at about 1 a.m., an hour before the shooting. "He walked directly past me. I said, 'Hey,' and he turned and said, 'Hey,'" and nodded his head, West said. At least four regular customers of Pulse told the Orlando Sentinel on Monday that they believe they had seen Mateen there before.

The purpose if this master's thesis is to study and develop a new algorithmic framework for Collaboartive Filtering to produce recommendations in the top-N recommendation problem. Thus, we propose Lanczos Latent Factor Recommender (LLFR); a novel "big data friendly" collaborative filtering algorithm for top-N recommendation. Using a computationally efficient Lanczos-based procedure, LLFR builds a low dimensional item similarity model, that can be readily exploited to produce personalized ranking vectors over the item space. A number of experiments on real datasets (MovieLens10M, Yahoo!Music) at different density levels indicate that LLFR outperforms other state-of-the-art top-N recommendation methods from a computational as well as a qualitative perspective. Our experimental results also show that its relative performance gains, compared to competing methods, increase as the data get sparser, where there is not enough data for the system to uncover similarities and generate reliable recommendations. More specifically, this is true both when the sparsity is generalized - as in the New Community Problem, a very common problem faced by real recommender systems in their beginning stages, when there is not sufficient number of ratings for the collaborative filtering algorithms to uncover similarities between items or users - and in the very interesting case where the sparsity is localized in a small fraction of the dataset - as in the New Users Problem, where new users are introduced to the system, they have not rated many items and thus, the CF algorithm can not make reliable personalized recommendations yet.

"I think you will see us open up more in the future," Apple CEO Tim Cook said the AllThingsD D11 conference in 2013. Now, roughly three years later, we have the clearest picture yet of what a more open Apple looks like. During its Worldwide Developers Conference on June 13, Apple announced a slew of changes to some of its apps and services that allow them to work with third parties. Siri, iMessage, Apple Maps, and the Phone app are among the Apple services that developers will be able to tap into. This means iPhone owners will be able to do things like call an Uber through Siri, order food without leaving the Messages app, and make reservations in Apple Maps.