If you've watched movies like Iron Man, featuring virtual assistants, like JARVIS, which you can just have a conversation with and control your home, you probably think that such virtual assistants belong in the realm of science fiction. Earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg, who runs Facebook set a personal challenge to create a JARVIS style assistant for his own home. "My personal challenge for 2016 is to build a simple AI to run my home and help me with my work. You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man." He may be closer to his goal, as he may be giving a demo something this month. For those that don't have an army of engineers to help them, what can be done today?

Here's our guide on how to use the new Siri and Maps app for the iPhone and iPad in iOS 10. Apple opened Siri up to third party developers for this update, which allows you to control a bunch of apps using just your voice. You can send messages on LinkedIn, WhatsApp, and Skype just by asking Siri to do so. But first, you need to update your apps to do this. Go to your "App Store" app and tap "Updates" on the bottom, and scroll through the list of available updates.

This post is authored by Jaya Mathew & Hong Lu, Data Scientists at Microsoft, in collaboration with the team at ServusNet. Governments worldwide are actively promoting the use of renewable energy because of the growing concern over climate change and carbon emissions. Among the available renewable energy sources, harnessing energy through wind turbines offers a compelling alternative. There are a growing number of wind farms throughout the world now, and, as the industry matures at a rapid pace, it is increasing its focus on operational efficiency and cost-competitiveness. Given the inherent variability in wind energy production, the ability to analyze the data generated by wind turbines to characterize historical behavior and create a framework to predict future performance can be a critical asset and business differentiator.

We need the following manual steps to complete the data factory.

The Amazon Echo, a voice-controlled virtual assistant, is seen at it's product launch for Britain and Germany in London, Britain, September 14, 2016. What's all the fuss about the voice-activated home speaker that Amazon is due to release in the UK and Germany in late September? This gadget has been available in the US for over a year and has proven a minor hit, with sales estimates between 1.6m and 3m. But these figures belie the potential impact this kind of artificial intelligence device could have on our lives in the near future. Echo doesn't just let you switch on your music by voice command. It's the first of what will be several types of smart home appliances that work beyond simple tasks like playing music or turning on a light.

This story was delivered to BI Intelligence Apps and Platforms Briefing subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here. A team of Microsoft researchers has achieved the lowest error rate for speech recognition on record at 6.3%, overtaking prior record holder IBM Watson's 6.9%. The news brings the company one step closer to getting computers to understand speech as well as a person, and helps in its efforts to provide conversation as a service through tech like Cortana, Skype Translator, and other language-related cognitive services. Voice is going to emerge as a dominant computing interface.

When I moved from New York to Los Angeles recently I hoped to turn that luck around in a city that is teeming with beautiful, intelligent, available women. I decided to give Tinder a try. After messages sent to aspiring models, actresses and comedians, agents' assistants and non-industry normals, I managed to land a first date. Most of our initial conversation was done over text. Talking and banter was easy, so we set a date for dinner in West Hollywood.

Earlier this month Microsoft shared news of new bots in the Skype Bot Shop, including new ones from StubHub, Hipmunk, and IFTTT. Also released that day but not publicized was Your Face, a bot created by Microsoft that combines computer vision, emotion recognition, and facial recognition APIs from Microsoft Cognitive Services. Your Face doesn't have a name like Siri or Cortana but he has the face of an old man and is a pretty salty curmudgeon. Upload any photo or GIF and the bot will guess the age, analyze expression, and share a few opinions about the face sprinkled with salty curmudgeonness. Upload a photo or GIF of your own face and it will probably insult you.

The uses of artificial intelligence (AI) that get the most press are usually the big, splashy ones. Whether it's IBM's Watson beating Ken Jennings at Jeopardy, DeepMind besting Lee Sedol at Go, the massive influx of news about self-driving cars, the growing personal marketplace, or Elon Musk's increasingly public trepidation, these kinds of AI stories have a way of capturing public attention. But quietly, AI powers search and recommendation engines at places like Google and Netflix, filters out obscene images on your favorite social networks, and proves complex mathematical theorems. You probably hear far less about AI applications in retail. However, AI in retail is something that will affect everyone who shops online in the coming years.

These high-end home automation service providers may not sound familiar, but they're the names that typically dominate the headlines coming out of the Custom Electronic Design & Installation Association's yearly tech expo for luxury AV gear and the dealers who provide it. "What are we doing here?" "We want to partner with all of you." Kindel is one of the minds behind Amazon Alexa, its cloud-based, voice-activated computing service. Kindel put it another way, though, describing how developers at Amazon often start by writing a press release for the product they want to develop, complete with a crisp vision statement at the top.