Posted by Lance Olson, Partner Director of Program Management in the Data Group at Microsoft. Cortana Intelligence with Bing Predicts preview is an end-to-end consulting program that brings the power of Microsoft's unique corpus of social, search and web data to let customers enrich and augment their Cortana Intelligence Suite solutions resulting in more accurate outcomes across a wide variety of business problems. The program springs from the highly successful and well-regarded Bing Predicts consumer experience, where Bing correctly predicted every knockout game of the 2014 soccer World Cup and 95% of the 2014 US mid-term elections. This program was born when we saw the opportunity to take the unique data assets that we have from our consumer businesses and help our commercial customers. Our team interprets these datasets to help you gain unique insights such as localized consumer preferences, user sentiment, customer demographics, macroeconomic indicators predictions and industry trends.

Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) is reportedly developing two Android Wear watches that will focus heavily on the Google Assistant, the company's artificial intelligence offering. Citing an unnamed "reliable source," Android Police said the watches, codenamed Angelfish and Swordfish, will be released after the launch of the next Nexus phones, likely in the next several months. One model is said to be larger and support LTE, GPS and heart-rate monitoring, while the other will offer fewer features and lack mobile data. It's unclear whether the gadgets will feature Google's Nexus brand. While the report is unconfirmed, Google is clearly showing a renewed interest in developing its own mobile devices.

Apple has released the first public test version of iOS 10 and Sierra, its new MacOS software. The iOS update brings a new look complete with a radical overhaul of the messages app offering new animations and emoji, while Sierra brings Siri to the Mac for the first time. The products, available as free updates, were announced at Apple's WWDC event in September. The iOS update brings a new look complete with a radical overhaul of the messages app offering new animations and emoji, while Sierra brings Siri to the Mac for the first time. To sign up for Apple's beta program, simply visit the beta site.

The popular app is looking to launch a special feature called BumbleBuzz that will aim to match those looking to connect in a professional capacity, a la LinkedIn. You'll be allowed to create a profile for those encounters alone, which will be kept completely separate from your dating profile, which will offer information such as the type of industry you're in, your education level and other tidbits that can be used to help find you a match. A special algorithm will be utilized for these purposes, which will not include gender. This means there may often be same-sex matches in addition to those of the opposite sex. Keeping true to Bumble's origins, however, women are expected to initiate a conversation after a match is made even in this professional mode.

Google is internally building two Android Wear smartwatches, according to Android Police, and they could be Nexus-branded. The report says one of the smartwatches will be larger, with a diameter of 43.5mm, and features LTE, GPS, and a heart-rate monitor. The smaller Android Wear smartwatch will not include LTE nor GPS, and it has a diameter of 42mm. Android Police, citing multiple sources, adds the two smartwatches could feature Google Assistant integration -- the platform Google unveiled at Google I/O 2016 -- as a way of users gaining contextual information through "an ongoing two-way dialogue".

The relentless march to the August 2 public release of the Windows 10 Anniversary Update continued today with the release of build 14383 to the Windows Insider Program Fast Ring. The new build is available for PCs and for mobile devices. The most noteworthy feature of the new release is something you can't see at all: In earlier preview releases, the build number appears in the lower right corner of the display as a persistent watermark. In this build, it's gone. The other big change is also invisible, affecting the way Cortana responds to speech onput.

Amazon's voice activated digital assistant Alexa appears to know more about Prime Day than she's letting on. All she'll do at this point is recite a cryptic poem pointing to a possible deal on July 8, 2016.

Every year, Apple fans around the world line up to buy the newest iPhone the minute it goes on sale. But Apple's software updates for the iPhone, which the company usually reveals during its annual developer's conference, are met with far less fanfare. This is largely because Apple's new software releases, as important as they may be for keeping your iPhone fast and secure, have recently been minor upgrades. Apple's iOS 8 introduced iCloud Drive for accessing files across multiple devices and a new Health app to house fitness data from several fitness apps; iOS 9 brought Apple's streaming music service and a slightly improved version of Siri. While helpful, these additions didn't alter the overall iPhone experience in a significant way.

People are always complaining that dating apps haven't helped them find anyone worth dating. So, why are we only using them for dating? If we started using them for other things, dating apps could reach their full potential. To help get things started, we put together these potential benefits of dating apps and would like to recommend them to marketing teams for dating apps everywhere. Focus on swiping right on people in your career field, and then ask them all about their jobs.

If you've been following the news recently, you've probably heard a few of the breaking stories about robots beating humans in fairly complex tasks. It started with game show contestants, evolved into outperforming human instinct, and now computers are even outperforming fighter pilots in tactical simulations. What does this all mean for you? Although Hollywood loves to depict artificial intelligence as robots out to destroy humans, that's far from the case in the real world. Chances are you've been using artificial intelligence for awhile and haven't even noticed.