How Spotify Uses ML to Create the Future of Personalization: Personalisation is a big thing in Spotify (they even have a VP of personalisation!). I've been impressed with their recommendation engine for a while now. How they take into account the listening history, the music itself, time of a day and much more to recommend the most enjoyable songs out of 70 million tracks to every single of their 380 million users. They've been experimenting with explore and exploit concepts to make the experience sustainable. Now it seems that the reinforcement learning is the way to ensure long-term satisfaction and enjoyment of the listeners. The article felt timely with coalesce conference taking place this week.

Siri, which has been a part of Apple's iPhone for several years, has a voice activation function that helped a mom call for an ambulance when her daughter stopped breathing. When a mother from Cairns, Australia needed to call an ambulance for her one-year-old daughter who stopped breathing, Apple's Siri came to the rescue. Stacey Gleeson noticed her daughter Giana was turning blue, according to BBC. While running to her daughter's aid, she dropped her phone. But, the mother shouted to activate Siri and got emergency services on speakerphone.