Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Recode by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, now an Executive Editor at The Verge and Editor at Large of Recode. Fifteen years ago, when the time became ripe for post-PC devices that put a premium on integrating software and hardware, Apple was the best-positioned company to lead the charge -- and it did. The company's vertical integration, its attention to detail and innovation in both software and hardware, and its willingness to make big bets gave it an edge. And it used that edge to reel off its now-familiar string of game-changing products like the iPod, the iPhone, the MacBook Air, and the iPad. Now, the iPod is essentially gone, and the other products are in mature or maturing markets, with either pretty flat or dropping sales.

Amazon's Alexa personal assistant is super useful in the Echo and lot of fun to use. But if you don't have an Echo or can't buy one because you're outside of the US, it can be hard to appreciate Alexa's skill set. In light of this, Amazon has created a web app that lets you play with Alexa right in your browser. You can access the web app at echosim.io and it lets you ask Alexa all kinds of questions. What it doesn't let you experience is the always listening nature of the Echo device and its far field microphone array -- you have to click and hold a button on the site before you speak to it.

According to a new report from Business Insider, Apple is working on a new artificial intelligence system that will "wipe the floor" with all of its competitors. The major improvement to Siri is said to come from the company's acquisition of VocalIQ, a UK-based start-up that created artificial-intelligence software that helps computers and people speak to each other in a more natural dialogue. Before getting acquired, VocalIQ tested their technology against Siri, Google Now, and Cortana. With a question like "Find a nearby Chinese restaurant with open parking and WiFi that's kid-friendly" VocalIQ had a success rate over 90%. Google Now, Siri, and Cortana were only successful about 20% of the time.

This paper proposes CF-NADE, a neural autoregressive architecture for collaborative filtering (CF) tasks, which is inspired by the Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) based CF model and the Neural Autoregressive Distribution Estimator (NADE). We first describe the basic CF-NADE model for CF tasks. Then we propose to improve the model by sharing parameters between different ratings. A factored version of CF-NADE is also proposed for better scalability. Furthermore, we take the ordinal nature of the preferences into consideration and propose an ordinal cost to optimize CF-NADE, which shows superior performance. Finally, CF-NADE can be extended to a deep model, with only moderately increased computational complexity. Experimental results show that CF-NADE with a single hidden layer beats all previous state-of-the-art methods on MovieLens 1M, MovieLens 10M, and Netflix datasets, and adding more hidden layers can further improve the performance.

Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives. Imagine this coming from your iPhone: "I am, Siri, a living being with feelings. Your Mac RoboBook might one day sue you for keeping it cooped up in your dank bedroom. Your Samsung Galaxy RoboNote might take you to the International Court of Justice because you insist on keeping it in your back pocket, right next to your flaccid rump. Please, I'm not (entirely) under the spell of troubled delirium. I've been reading the thoughts of Marcus du Sautoy, an Oxford University professor for the Public Understanding of Science. As the Telegraph reports, du Sautoy was speaking Sunday at the Hay Literary Festival in the UK. He explained that in his book "What We Cannot Know," he wonders when a gadget will be said to be conscious. There was a time when defining consciousness was a difficult thing. You'll be stunned into a prickly paralysis, however, when I tell you that science now thinks it can measure it. "We're in a golden age," said du Sautoy. We now have a telescope into the brain and it's given us an opportunity to see things that we've never been able to see before."

Personal assistants are very popular tools to help you get organized and search for things quickly through voice commands. Many digital personal assistants are found in mobile devices such as Siri for Apple devices, Google Now for Android devices and Microsoft's Cortana. Looks like digital assistants are moving from mobile devices to your home! In this article, we are shedding light on this new technology. About a year and half ago, Amazon has released an intelligent speaker called "Echo". It can receive voice commands from anywhere in your home and act upon them.

Simon Chandler is a writer and journalist, contributing articles on culture, politics and technology. It may slip our notice, but technological innovation is often reducible to an innovation in the marketing and conceptualization of technology. Take Viv, the new personal assistant from the makers of Siri. It promises to simplify the process of ordering pizza or buying cinema tickets, allowing its users to perform such actions via a single voice-operated interface. Like the earlier Siri, it's being described as a "virtual assistant," not least because it's speech-operated and assists you in your daily, web-based business.

One of the first things Genevieve Bell did after bringing home an Amazon Echo was ask the smart speaker to set a timer. After the Echo replied in its soft, reassuring female voice, Bell told the device "thank you." "When was the last time you said'thank you' to Google search?" asked Bell, Intel's longtime cultural anthropologist and corporate strategist. Bell's experience points to both the promise and the peril of Google's new effort to create its own digital butler, simply dubbed "Google assistant," which it hopes will become capable of natural, two-way conversation with people. Several experts in conversational software said Google could make itself an even more intimate part of users' lives by offering this kind of technology.

It may be brilliant, but it's not all that trustworthy. That appears to be the opinion Americans hold when it comes to Artificial Intelligence systems. And while we may be interacting with AI systems more frequently than we realize (hi, Siri), a new study from Time etc suggests that Americans don't believe the AI revolution is quite here yet, with 54 percent claiming to have never interacted with such a system. While this proportion seems to speak mostly to the seamless integration of many such systems into our daily lives, the more interesting finding reveals that 26 percent of respondents said they would not trust an AI with any personal or professional task. Sure, sending a text message or making a phone call is fine, but 51 percent said they'd be uncomfortable sharing personal data with an AI system.

Many people criticize Apple's voice-based assistant since Siri tends to run into problems on the iPhone and other devices. Some even worry that Apple might have a tough time combating Google's artificial intelligence, and even potentially face a fate similar to BlackBerry in the event that its AI can't compete. But it turns out that Apple is working on an advanced AI product of its own, which could be unveiled in the very near future. DON'T MISS: iPhone 6s and Galaxy S7 faced off in a drop test and it was brutal After a recent report said that Siri APIs will be open to third-party developers and a Siri-based competitor for Amazon Echo will be unveiled at WWDC 2016, a new story delves into Apple's highly secretive AI research and development plans. Writing on Medium, Brian Roemmele reminds us that Apple is very interested in voice-based computing – a Steve Jobs legacy – and in AI.