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Samsung is joining the growing market of voice-assisted speakers that is currently being dominated by Amazon Echo. For its entry to this market, the South Korea company is designing a Bluetooth-connected speaker that has its own microphone for quick and easy detection of voice commands. The Galaxy Note 7 maker has already submitted documents about its upcoming speaker to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, so it won't come as a surprise when the electronics giant announces the device and its release date soon. According to VentureBeat, included in the documents Samsung sent to the independent government agency on Monday are a manual and photos of the speaker that is dubbed as "Scoop." In addition, the site noted that Samsung's speaker is designed to be mobile and easy to carry around, since it comes with a strap -- a portability feature that is not that different from Amazon's Tap.

MetaMind joins PredicitonIO, an open source machine learning server and developer community, which was acquired by Salesforce in February, and the machine learning powered analytics startup BeyondCore in August. This follows the acquisition of MinHash - the company behind the AI virtual assistant AILA - in December 2015, and smart calendar app Tempo.ai in June last year, an acquisition which almost certainly led to the recent Salesforce Inbox Calendar product. Speaking to Computerworld UK earlier this year, CTO Adam Evans said: "AI is technology that Salesforce is incredibly interested in. At Salesforce we have moved from systems of record to systems of engagement and now we are moving towards systems of intelligence."

Every once in a while, a product comes along that changes everyone's expectations of what's possible in user interfaces. Alexa belongs in that elite group of game changers. Siri didn't make it over the hump, despite the buzz it created. Neither did Google Now or Cortana, despite their amazing capabilities and their progress in adoption. But Alexa has done so many things right that everyone else has missed that it is, to my mind, the first winning product of the conversational era.

Having robots in our lives is an inevitability. We already have artificially intelligent voice assistants on our phones like Cortana, Siri and Google Now. But how will we interact with robots when they look and act like us? Researchers at the University College London and University of Bristol experimented with a humanoid robot to find out how humans instinctually interact with robots. Users took each robot's apology well, and were especially receptive to robot C's sad facial expression as it reassured people that it "knew" it made a mistake.

AI will kill jobs in India, Are government policies a viable solution? Dissident artist Ai Weiwei says work was pulled from Yinchuan Biennale due to'political sensitivity' Apple claims there's a lot of "hidden" AI already in iOS

Steven Levy has published an in-depth article about Apple's artificial intelligence and machine learning efforts, after meeting with senior executives Craig Federighi, Eddy Cue, Phil Schiller, and two Siri scientists at the company's headquarters. Apple provided Levy with a closer look at how machine learning is deeply integrated into Apple software and services, led by Siri, which the article reveals has been powered by a neural-net based system since 2014. Apple said the backend change greatly improved the personal assistant's accuracy. "This was one of those things where the jump was so significant that you do the test again to make sure that somebody didn't drop a decimal place," says Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of internet software and services.Alex Acero, who leads the Siri speech team at Apple, said Siri's error rate has been lowered by more than a factor of two in many cases. "The error rate has been cut by a factor of two in all the languages, more than a factor of two in many cases," says Acero. "That's mostly due to deep learning and the way we have optimized it -- not just the algorithm itself but in the context of the whole end-to-end product."Acero

Apple wants you to know it already does great AI -- but it's'subtle' South Africa's CLEVVA is making AI-powered virtual advisors a thing Polly.ai

Microsoft on Monday announced it bought a startup to boost its artificial intelligence capabilities, and rival Apple confirmed it has boosted... Microsoft did not disclose financial terms of its deal to buy Genee, which specialises in using machine smarts to handle the time-sucking task of scheduling meetings. "Genee uses natural language processing and optimised decision-making algorithms so that interacting with a virtual assistant is just like interacting with a human one," Outlook and Office 365 corporate vice president Rajesh Jha said in a blog post. For example, Genee can be copied into an email exchange to act as a virtual assistant of sorts to pin down a time for a business or social meeting. Jha touted Genee as having designed "an intelligent virtual assistant specialised in the appointment decision." The technology was expected to be put to work in Office 365 software that Microsoft offers as a service in the internet cloud.

Practical artificial intelligence has made its way out of the labs and into our daily lives. And judging from the pace of activity in the startup community and the major IT powerhouses, it will only grow in its ability to help us all get things done. Most AI solutions today are fielded by the big players in IT. For example, Apple's Siri or the capabilities Apple embedded directly in iOS9, Google's many savvy search solutions, Amazon's very smart recommendation engine, and IBM's Watson. We expect to see a new wave of AI solutions that deliver value from smaller start-up companies as well.