Built-in search, artificial intelligence, machine learning and a knowledge graph connecting billions of entities is how Google plans to ultimately compete and win in many markets where it isn't first today. It's easy to note the me-too items outlined at Google I/O. Android N has a few new features, but doesn't advance the ball that much. Mobile platforms have hit the service pack, incremental update mode. Google Home is Google's answer to Amazon's Echo.

MindMeld, a pioneer in conversational AI technology, is today releasing the MindMeld for TV platform, which the company bills as the first solution designed for television and over-the-top content providers -- like Netflix and Hulu -- to deliver best in class discovery through a conversational interface. That company boasts investors and customers like Google, Samsung, Intel, Telefonica, IDG, Spotify, and other major global brands. Since MindMeld provides data services and the underlying tech-for-voice interface, the company couldn't explain exactly which products in market are 100 percent powered by their technology. But the company's voice platform is fast, alarmingly accurate, and likely baked into tons of products we interact with in some form or another. MindMeld was founded in 2011 and is backed by over 15 million in funding.

Google Inc.'s latest technological marvels point to a future where you'll never need to visit websites, write a term paper or stress over what to buy for your mother's birthday. For consumers seeking convenience and speed, it all sounds great. But how will any of it make Google money? The Mountain View, Calif., company's apparent transition from go-to search engine to omnipresent virtual assistant probably will require rethinking its advertising business. By tracking Web browsing, emails, chats and more, Google has become a dominant force in digital ads.

Silicon Valley companies have long battled one another for your money, your attention, and your data. Now they are fighting one another over a new battleground: Your living room. Google on Wednesday unveiled Google Home, a voice-activated, Internet-connected speaker with a built-in virtual assistant powered by Google's smarts. Home is Google's answer to the Echo, a similar device from Amazon that has become a surprise hit with shoppers. For consumers, Google Home and the Amazon Echo can answer questions about the weather, set alarms, and manage appointments, among other tasks.

Alphabet Inc.'s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Google is reputed as having one of the most intelligent artificial intelligence infrastructure globally. Its wide reach via its Chrome browser and Android mobile operating system means its influence runs deep. The main issue is whether the company can really find the right mix to convert these enviable advantages into the next in-demand product. This is the question most attendees at the company's annual I/O developer conference. This question was partly answered by Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

After a group of researchers scraped up a dataset using open profiles on OkCupid, they argued that the data was "public" and therefore fair game. Not so, writes professor of law Woodrow Hartzog. "This justification is fundamentally wrong. Not just because we should be able to expect a certain amount of privacy in public, but because, despite frequency of use and seeming self-evidence, we actually don't even know what the term public even means," Hartzog argues. "It has no set definition in privacy law or policy."

College of Computing Professor Ashok Goel teaches Knowledge Based Artificial Intelligence (KBAI) every semester. And every time he offers it, Goel estimates, his 300 or so students post roughly 10,000 messages in the online forums -- far too many inquiries for him and his eight teaching assistants (TA) to handle. That's why Goel added a ninth TA this semester. Her name is Jill Watson, and she's unlike any other TA in the world. Jill is a computer -- a virtual TA -- implemented, in part, using technologies from IBM's Watson platform.

On Wednesday, Google formally infiltrated Amazon territory with Google Home, a small speaker capable of answering voice commands through a new digital assistant. The assistant is similar to Alexa, the artificial intelligence voice assistant powering Amazon Echo, which has surged in popularity in recent months. Although Google Home doesn't launch until the fall, there are some early indicators of how much competition Google will offer Amazon. Here's a look at three reasons Google Home is better, plus three arguments for why Amazon's Echo will continue to dominate: Because Google assistant is connected to the best search engine available, Home is going to provide much smarter results for queries. As a demo during I/O showcased, assistant will also provide better follow-up questions when seeking information.

This is the fourth article of the "Big Data Processing with Apache Spark" series. Please see also: Part 1: Introduction, Part 2: Spark SQL and Part 3: Spark Streaming. Machine learning, predictive analytics, and data science topics are getting a lot of attention in recent years for solving real world problems in different business domains in several organizations. Spark MLlib, Spark's Machine Learning library, includes several different machine learning algorithms for Collaborative Filtering, Clustering, Classification and other machine learning tasks. In the previous articles in "Big Data Processing with Apache Spark" series, we have looked at what Apache Spark framework is (Part 1), how to leverage the SQL interface to access data using Spark SQL library (Part 2) and real-time data processing & analytics of streaming data using Spark Streaming (Part 3). Compose makes it simple to deploy production-ready databases in minutes in the cloud or on your own servers. In this article, we'll discuss machine learning concepts and how to use Apache Spark MLlib library for running predictive analytics.

Google Assistant is a conversational successor to Google Now. And of course, it's also being positioned to take on Amazon's Alexa and its Echo speaker. Assistant in many ways looks like the future of Google, but at this point it's also pretty confusing. Engadget's Chris Velazco tries to figure sort out what it means in the video above.