LONDON, ENGLAND - AUGUST 03: The Apple logo is displayed on the back of an iPhone on August 3, 2016 in London, England. Apple is continuing to make inroads into artificial intelligence. The Cupertino, Calif.-based tech behemoth bought Turi, a machine learning platform, for 200 million, according to sources at GeekWire. Apple would not confirm the move to USA TODAY, but said the company buys smaller technology companies "from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans." The Cupertino-based tech behomouth appears to be coming to terms with slumping demand for the iPhone by expanding into other markets, including artificial intelligence.

Have you ever talked to your computer or smartphone? Maybe you've seen a coworker, friend or relative do it. It was likely in the form of a question, asking for some basic information, like the location of the best nearby pizza place or the start time of tonight's sporting event. Soon, however, you may find yourself having entirely different interactions with your device – even learning its name, favorite color and what it thinks about while you are away. It is now possible to interact with computers in ways that seemed beyond our dreams a few decades ago. Witness the huge success of applications as diverse as Siri, Apple's voice-response personal assistant, and, more recently, the Pokémon Go augmented reality video game.

The company also found that conversations with GIFs were two times longer than those without, and since the feature was enabled in 2016, more than 100 million GIFs have been sent around the world in the app. Tinder's sociologist Dr. Jess Carbino told Engadget that she regularly interviews the company's users. She believes starting conversations is challenging, and that GIFs and emojis are a good way to break the ice, because "people are very attracted to art and things that are visual," she said. When asked if the animated images could be used as a crutch, Dr Carbino argued, "GIFs are a good way to assess compatibility and sense of humor." The GIFs aren't just used by young people, either.

Apple CEO Tim Cook was the subject of an in-depth interview published over the weekend in The Washington Post in which he talked about a wide range of issues, including augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence (AI), the future of the iPhone, and the company's North Star. In the interview, Cook dismissed the idea of the iPhone accounting for two-thirds of Apple's revenues being problematic, calling the smartphone's dominance a privilege and expressing his belief that one day, every person on earth will own a smartphone. Cook also defended the company's progress in AI technology, pointing to the expanding capabilities of Siri, the digital assistant that Apple launched in 2011. Apple is opening up Siri to third-party developers so the technology can be used by other applications -- such as Uber or Lyft, as Cook pointed out -- to help users complete tasks faster and more efficiently. Earlier this month, the company reportedly bought Turi, a Seattle-based startup company and the latest purchase in a string of acquisitions aimed at bolstering its machine learning and AI capabilities.

Apple's plan to tackle the great iPhone sales slump is for it to produce, yes, more iPhones. CEO Tim Cook, in a scripted Q&A with the Washington Post, dismissed the six-month drop-off in sales of iPhones – and slowing smartphone sales in general. Apple is now expected to release the iPhone 7 in September. Cook reckons smartphones are equivalent to TVs, in that people will own more than one, with consumers unable to resist buying them thanks to features such as Siri. In a swipe at Wall Street, which has punished Apple's stock price on the back of falling iPhone sales, Cook reckoned this is a long haul.

A lot of chatter recently has been going around about how artificial intelligence will affect our lives for the better, understanding what are things that A.I. would take over in our lives. LinkedIn last week asked few influencers' the question "What is the first thing in your office AI will take over?" I've highlight below some of the replies they had on A.I. and how would it affect our life, starting of is: - "The microphone on your laptop or computer would be the first thing a A.I. will take over, it will listen to your ability in meeting and talking and will record things in order to help you take notes and suggestion action items for you" "First things that A.I. will take over is Scheduling meetings, where the language input is easy were they are contained (You say you want to schedule a meeting between Wednesday and Friday) it's a complex sentence but it's something companies are trying to figure out and fix." "It will be every aspect of my Scheduling and every aspect of my meetings and all the notes taking in meetings and the follow up that can be executing by A.I. cutting meeting massively and making it more efficient. I hope they are as kind as the executive assistance I had for the past decade" "Email that's the first thing A.I. will take in the office, I dictate most of the emails that I send every day because we can speak 3 times more then we can type its far more efficient" Majority of these great influencers kept going back to the same topic of Email and Scheduling because that's what we all do, it doesn't matter if you're a Developer, Sales, Account manager, Project manager at the end of the day you are 100% going to be checking your emails and you will always be on either side of a meeting whether its creating one or receiving an invite to one. Another Valid point was about having a Personal Assistant I think that's great and I wish we can all have one, life would be so much easier.

In the musical "Hamilton," George Washington exclaims: "We are outgunned, outmanned, outnumbered, outplanned. We gotta make an all-out stand. Ayo, I'm gonna need a right-hand man." I recently saw this performance and the remark made me think to myself: Like George and his nascent collection of militia trying to defend New York City from a British armada and 32,000 troops, are clinicians about to face an overwhelming onslaught with respect to digital health and cognitive computing? Closer than ever I now wonder if these technologies have matured to a point where a convergence is happening.

This post is part of a series covering the exercises from Andrew Ng's machine learning class on Coursera. The original code, exercise text, and data files for this post are available here. We've now reached the last post in this series! It's been an interesting journey. Andrew's class was really well-done and translating it all to python has been a fun experience.

An anonymous reader writes: Google is working on a competitor to the Amazon Echo, the smart speaker that has proved to be a sleeper hit for Amazon. The device, which will resemble an OnHub router, has not been officially named yet but is internally known as the Chirp. It has long been suspected that Google was working on a voice-controlled speaker that could integrate with Nest, since Google acquired Nest two years ago. While the Chirp isn't ready for release at next week's Google I/O developer conference, it will most likely receive honorable mention as the conference will highlight voice control, personal assistance, and virtual reality.

You can hardly talk to a technology executive or developer today without talking about artificial intelligence, machine learning or bots. Madrona recently hosted a conference on ML and AI, bringing together some of the biggest technology companies and innovative startups in the Intelligent Application ecosystem. One of the key themes for the event emerged from a survey of the attendees. Everybody who responded to the survey said that ML is either important or very important to their company and industry. However, more than half of the respondents said their organizations did not have adequate expertise in ML to be able to do what they need to do.