Artificial intelligence is already getting close, and we may be even closer with Snips, a mobile AI company from the collective minds of three Ph.D.'s. Today, the company launched its AI platform for iOS, claiming to be the only technology of its kind that is "private by design." While technology's primary goal seems to be making our lives easier, that convenience often seems to come at the price of security. But with Snips, the founders say that the platform's design ensures that a user's personal data never leaves their device, and more importantly, that no one -- including Snips -- can collect any sensitive information. This means that the user and the user alone has full control of his or her data. The platform is meant to mimic the human brain, drawing inspiration from the way in which our memory stores information.

French startup Snips is launching its first product today, an iOS app that is supposed to make your life easier by letting you view and search your data more easily. Snips is a personal assistant that helps you know where you need to be and when. When you first launch the app, Snips wants you to grant access to your location, calendars, contacts, motion sensor and Gmail account.

French startup Snips is launching its first product today, an iOS app that is supposed to make your life easier by letting you view and search your data more easily. Snips is a personal assistant that helps you know where you need to be and when. When you first launch the app, Snips wants you to grant access to your location, calendars, contacts, motion sensor and Gmail account. Then you're good to go. The main screen shows a tiny map at the top, a search bar in the middle and a list of events at the bottom.

At Retail Assist, we understand the importance of always having one eye on technology, in order to stay ahead of the curve. We've been researching the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to bring you our opinion on consumer adoption of AI. In the news recently, we've noticed that the makers of Apple's iconic digital assistant, Siri, Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer, have released a new AI platform, Viv. The key difference between their "next generation" tool and other AI platforms is that it isn't constrained by service provider, i.e. Being cross channel, it can "speak" in a device agnostic manner to vendors and third party suppliers in order to provide the most relevant information based on the request, i.e. to purchase relevant goods at the cheapest price.

The secret to Viv is the system actually writes it's own code. In contrast to any other similar system, It is a profound and monumental giant leap forward. The structure of the Voice First world is held together by Intelligent Agents. Intelligent Agents use AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning) to decode volition and intent from an analyzed phrase or sentence. The AI in most current generation systems like Siri, Echo and Cortana focuses on speaker independent word recognition and to some extent the intent of predefined words or phrases that have a hard coded connection to a domain expertise.

HANNOVER, GERMANY - MARCH 02: Robots play football in a demonstration of artificial intelligence at the stand of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer Kuenstliche Intelligenz GmbH) at the CeBIT Technology Fair on March 2, 2010 in Hannover, Germany. CeBIT will be open to the public from March 2 through March 6. (Photo: Sean Gallup/Getty Images) Artificial intelligence or AI is among the most favorite subjects today. With AI's versatility and flexibility, you can find them anywhere. There are already companies run by AI and factories with robots operating the machines. But did you know that AI robots also suffer stereotypical sexism in the workplace?

Move over, Siri and Tay, and make room for a new female virtual agent set to invade the enterprise: Amelia. Things are happening fast in the new world of artificial intelligence (AI) development, and a new industry partnership just announced today aims to help enterprises adopt the complicated and potentially game-changing technology with Amelia. Accenture, a professional services consultancy, is teaming up with IPsoft, an autonomic and cognitive computing specialist that invented Amelia, "to accelerate client adoption of artificial intelligence to improve business outcomes and create new growth opportunities for their businesses." The importance of AI in the enterprise -- along with ancillary technologies like machine learning (ML) and cognitive computing -- was highlighted recently by no less than Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in keynote addresses at their respective developer conferences. Their companies are helping to spearhead AI programming, with early efforts centered around bots, or chatbots, or virtual agents.

Artificial Intelligence is starting to turn invisible from the outside in - and vice versa. The exact effects and workings of AI technologies are becoming more challenging to perceive and comprehend for humans. Even the experts themselves don't always fully understand how an AI system operates. Hey, iPhone users, are you tired of Siri not being able to do much besides pull up search results? No need to despair: The team behind Siri has recently built Viv, a virtual assistance with actual artificial intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence is starting to turn invisible from the outside in - and vice versa. The exact effects and workings of AI technologies are becoming more challenging to perceive and comprehend for humans. Even the experts themselves don't always fully understand how an AI system operates. Hey, iPhone users, are you tired of Siri not being able to do much besides pull up search results? No need to despair: The team behind Siri has recently built Viv, a virtual assistance with actual artificial intelligence.

Google is set to bring updates to many of its product lines at this year's I/O developer conference Google's annual developer conference I/O (short for "input/output" in computer science lingo) is set to take place this year in Mountain View, California from Wednesday, May 18, through Friday, May 20. And with the arrival of the conference comes the possibility of new products from the search company. While Google is known for releasing products and updates throughout the year, some of its biggest releases are often saved for the I/O conference. Last year's Google I/O 2015 brought fans Android M, Google Cardboard on the iPhone, and Now On Tap -- a smartphone feature that surfaces the right information at the right time. We can't know for sure what the company (which is now technically a subsidiary of the larger conglomerate known as Alphabet) will announce, but some hints have dropped.