Apple Inc. has acquired Indian machine-learning start-up Tuplejump Software Pvt Ltd as it seeks to expand its expertise in artificial intelligence. The iPhone maker bought the Hyderabad, India-based company in June, according to a person familiar with the deal who asked not to be identified. Tuplejump's software specializes in processing and analysing big sets of data quickly. The deal was reported earlier by TechCrunch. The purchase price wasn't disclosed.

Apple has just triggered a flurry of speculations as news was confirmed that it had acquired Tuplejump Software Pvt Ltd., a machine learning company operating in Hyderabad, India. The acquisition was reportedly completed last June and it rounded up the series of Apple startup purchases dabbling in artificial intelligence. Previously, the company acquired Turi Inc. for 200 million and it was followed by Emotient for a still unconfirmed amount. This last company is known in the industry for its employment of AI on facial expressions. These purchases are widely believed to be part of Apple's drive to improve its virtual assistant technology amid growing competition with Google.

Google Home, the latest entrant in the voice-activated-assistant race, will cost 130 and include the colorful base options shown off at the company's I/O conference in May, according to Android Police. Home is Google's answer to the Amazon Echo, though the reported price means it's 50 cheaper than Amazon's flagship device. Earlier this year Amazon unveiled the Echo Dot, a smaller version of the assistant, and the second generation of this little gadget costs 50. Android Police also reports the so-called Chromecast Ultra, a 4K media streaming device, will cost 70. That's double the cost of the standard Chromecast, though the report claims that the new dongle will include HDR capabilities as well.

Even today, a hacker with a command of artificial intelligence may be able to force a self-driving car to miss a stop sign, or a facial recognition system to believe it's seeing a completely different person in a security setting. Researchers have shown that virtual personal assistants like Siri or Google Now can be tricked into visiting potentially malicious websites by audio that sounds like white noise to humans. To thwart such hackers, Elon Musk's OpenAI and Pennsylvania State University released a new tool this week called "cleverhans," that lets artificial intelligence researchers test how vulnerable their AI is to adversarial examples, or purposefully malicious data meant to confuse the algorithms. Once the vulnerability has been found, a defense to the attack can automatically be applied. The tool is meant to be a "collection of attacks and defenses, along with tutorials on how to use them," according to Nicolas Papernot, co-creator and security researcher at Pennsylvania State University, in an email to Quartz.

Visit our Marketing Nerds archive to listen to other Marketing Nerds podcasts! In this episode of Marketing Nerds, SEJ's Chief Social Media Strategist, Brent Csutoras, was joined by Heidi Young, the principle engineering lead at Oslo, an AI program, to discuss the future of conversational search and how AI could help create a true virtual assistant. Here are a few excerpts from Brent and Heidi's conversation, but be sure to listen to the podcast to hear everything. We very much are in the early stages of it, but I would say what makes today very different from even five years ago, is that technology has kind of been catching up and the market it ready for it. The fact that Google has worked so hard, over the years, to digitize the world's information, organize the world's content, and that Facebook has learned so much about you, and Amazon knows everything that there could be to know about products, you have this ocean of information that's specialized and personalized, all at the same time.

While artificial intelligence is relatively new, it has become a part of the day to day life of many individuals. People in today's world don't think twice before they use digital assistants like Siri or Alexa. Uber has even introduced self-driving cars,which take artificial intelligence to a whole new level. So why are people pushing back so much when it comes to this revolutionarily helpful technology? But it's also going to change the world we live in for the better.

Columnist Marc Saltzman explains some less well-known features of Amazon's digital assistant. A link has been sent to your friend's email address. Columnist Marc Saltzman explains some less well-known features of Amazon's digital assistant.

Apple appears to be relying on Siri to take on Amazon's Alexa-enabled Echo speaker system. The Cupertino giant is said have spent two years of research and development in making its own smart speaker technology, with Bloomberg reporting that prototypes are currently being tested. Apple's speaker system is reportedly designed to complement smart home devices that are powered by Siri. Hence, it is poised to be a worthy competitor to Amazon Echo, which turned out to be very popular among consumers. Should Apple's plan push through, the Siri-enabled speaker system would be the second new hardware offering from the company following its venture into the wearable market with its own smartwatch, the Apple Watch.

Count down three seconds in your head. I bet you did it the "one-hippopotamus way." Ask Siri to set a 3-second timer and then try to read something on the web. Exactly, it's barely enough time for a sentence, including this one. A couple of years ago, Facebook apparently set 3 seconds or less as the benchmark for actual video ad engagement.

Intelligent conversational assistants, such as Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, and Amazon's Echo, have quickly become a part of our digital life. However, these assistants have major limitations, which prevents users from conversing with them as they would with human dialog partners. This limits our ability to observe how users really want to interact with the underlying system. To address this problem, we developed a crowd-powered conversational assistant, Chorus, and deployed it to see how users and workers would interact together when mediated by the system. Chorus sophisticatedly converses with end users over time by recruiting workers on demand, which in turn decide what might be the best response for each user sentence. Up to the first month of our deployment, 59 users have held conversations with Chorus during 320 conversational sessions. In this paper, we present an account of Chorus' deployment, with a focus on four challenges: (i) identifying when conversations are over, (ii) malicious users and workers, (iii) on-demand recruiting, and (iv) settings in which consensus is not enough. Our observations could assist the deployment of crowd-powered conversation systems and crowd-powered systems in general.