The site launched about a week ago and the app hasn't even been released yet, but the concept has already proven popular, NBC News reported. Thousands of people have already signed up to nab a spot on the waitlist and this past Friday, the site had 200 sign-up requests an hour. "This is about finding the right partner and not caring if they're on the other side of the border," CEO Joe Goldman explained to The Guardian. "You should go to a place where you'll be happy. For a number of Americans, in the event of a Trump presidency, that place would be Canada."

VIV is defined by its founders as the simplest way for the world to interact with devices, services and things everywhere. Behind the scene are the founders of Siri, the famous vocal assistant bought by Apple in 2010. We were recently talking about vocal recognition on the blog and introducing the possibilities brought by Echo. Viv goes one step further. It is able to understand common natural language requests but also complex questions.

With the creators of Siri offering up a new personal assistant that won't just tell you what pizza is but can order one for you, artificial intelligence is showing a huge leap forward. Viv is an artificial intelligence (AI) platform built by Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer, the creators of the AI behind Apple's Siri, the most well-known digital assistant in the world. Siri is known for answering questions, like how old Harrison Ford is, and reminding you to buy milk on the way home. Earlier this week during an onstage demo at Disrupt NYC, Kittlaus showed off Viv. This created an online buzz about the assistant's ability to not just answer questions or fire up a timer on a smartphone, but to answer complex questions and to interact with third-party services as well as online businesses. "Assuming we can take the founders at their word, Viv is more than just an evolutionary step in the development of personal assistants.

Machine learning is at the top of the "hype curve" for emerging technologies and is one of the top 10 strategic technology trends for 2016 according to Gartner. A method of data analysis that automates analytical model building, machine learning can benefit almost any business that gathers data with the intention of acting upon it. It's safe to say that most of us are already interacting with machine learning applications on a daily basis, whether it's Apple's Siri, Facebook's face detection, Amazon and Netflix personalized recommendations, or iOS's autocorrect. What can we learn from this growing trend? What can we do with such a widely applicable technology and how can we maximize its potential?

"We're going to use this technology to breathe life into the inanimate objects and devices of our life through conversation," said Siri co-founder and CEO Dag Kittlaus. Viv (which means "life" in Latin) offers an experience akin to the AI in the film Her. When Kittlaus asked, "Will it be warmer than 70 degrees near the Golden Gate Bridge, after 5 p.m., the day after tomorrow?" Viv quickly retrieved the correct hourly forecast from the Weather Underground app. When I posed the same question to Siri on my iPhone 6S, it pulled up the daily forecast from San Francisco for the next week, but it's unclear if it actually gave me predicted temperatures after 6pm.

The team behind Apple's voice assistant Siri have revealed their latest independent project "Viv", an AI bot that lives on your phone and aims to be "the intelligent interface for everything." Viv was unveiled at Techcruch's Disrupt conference, where a 20-minute demo wowed the audience with a real-time demonstration of its capabilities. The company behind Viv has dubbed it "The Global Brain", and its strength lies in tight partnerships with popular services, and a unique way of understanding human queries. Unlike Siri, Viv's approach is much closer to Amazon's Alexa or Facebook's Messenger bots, offering the ability to connect with third-party merchants and vendors so that it can execute on requests to purchase goods or book reservations. "Will it be warmer than 70-degrees near the Golden Gate Bridge after 5pm the day after tomorrow?"

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 on IBM's Watson platform.

TORONTO – A dating website is pledging to match Americans who can't live with a Donald Trump presidency to Canadians looking for love, facilitating the pledge often made by U.S. voters to move to Canada if the real estate billionaire is elected. "Maple Match makes it easy for Americans to find the ideal Canadian partner to save them from the unfathomable horror of a Trump presidency," the Maple Match website reads, before offering a waiting list for interested singles. Trump's bombastic campaign to lead the Republican Party to the November presidential election has alarmed some Americans, both liberals and those in his own party, and the pledge by some to move to Canada if he is elected has gathered steam. In February, the island of Cape Breton on Canada's Atlantic coast marketed itself as a tranquil refuge for Americans seeking to escape should Trump capture the White House. The Maple Match website allows users to add their name to a wait list matching dismayed U.S. voters with interested single Canadians, adding "We'll let you know the next steps soon!" Officials with Maple Match did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but Chief Executive Joe Goldman told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. that more than 10,000 singles and about 2,500 Canadians had signed up for the website's waiting list as of Tuesday morning.

Some knowledge workers fear they are next in line to be made obsolete by artificial intelligence (AI). Automation, which impacted manufacturing and blue collar jobs, is beginning to encroach on areas previously considered strictly within the realm of human intelligence and judgement -- advisory services for financial services firms, fraud identification, disease diagnosis, editing and structured article creation, and language translation. When first introduced, sophisticated tax software appeared to threaten the jobs of income tax preparers. But it turned out to only be effective for relatively uncomplicated returns. According to the Washington Post, tax preparers -- most using intelligent software to do their work -- completed the same number of returns in 2011 as they did a decade earlier.

Some AI proponents argue that Artificial Intelligence will usurp human intelligence or even make us obsolete. That kind of talk must stop, before we lose control of AI. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the leading Internet trends of 2016, particularly with large companies like Google and Facebook pouring resources into it. While there are many benefits to AI -- for example, Facebook using it to make our news feeds smarter -- the hype is getting hubristic. I'm particularly concerned about the language AI proponents are using.