Social networks teem with harassment and trolling, so much so that companies have outsourced the work of content moderation to an army of laborers, typically overseas, often at an enormous mental and emotional toll to the workers themselves. But what if you didn't need humans to identify when online abuse was happening? If a computer was smart enough to spot cyberbullying as it happened, maybe it could be halted faster, without the emotional and financial costs that come with humans doing the job. At SRI International, the Silicon Valley incubator where Apple's Siri digital assistant was born, researchers believe they've developed algorithms that come close to doing just that. "Social networks are overwhelmed with these kinds of problems, and human curators can't manage the load," says Norman Winarsky, president of SRI Ventures.

Imagine waking up in the morning, stretching, and asking your sleeping smartphone, "Ahoy, Google, what's the weather like?" to get the local forecast. A new feature unveiled this week by mobile chip maker Qualcomm could soon make this a reality. Called Snapdragon Voice Activation, it will wake up gadgets that include the company's Snapdragon 800 processors--intended for things like high-end smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs--from standby or airplane mode once you've uttered a special voice command that phonemakers like HTC and Samsung can determine. The feature then starts up the phone's own voice-recognition software, such as Android's Google Now voice search. Such "persistent listening" technology may pick up steam as growing hordes of smartphone owners become acquainted with voice-activated search and virtual personal assistants like Google Now and Siri, and as Qualcomm and others begin adding it to chips.

If you ask Siri, the virtual personal assistant on the iPhone 4S, why it's so great, it answers with disarming humility: "I am what I am." But industry insiders say there's a little more to it than that. Siri goes well beyond voice recognition, they say, by applying powerful artificial intelligence and statistical analysis to decipher the meaning behind questioners' sometimes jumbled sentences. Add to that Siri's dry wit and you have the kind of breakout hit that will propel new uses of similar technology on your phone, tablet, and even your PC, experts say. Services like Siri are "natural language processing" apps that use statistical models to figure out what you probably meant to say when your pronunciation or word choice is garbled.

SAN FRANCISCO – Tesla Motors Inc. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk and other prominent tech executives are pouring $1 billion into a nonprofit aimed at creating artificial intelligence that augments humans' capabilities, rather than making them obsolete. The effort announced Friday, called OpenAI, joins significant investments from companies such as Alphabet Inc.'s Google, Facebook Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., which have used artificial intelligence to sharpen their businesses with services such as facial recognition or language processing. But the OpenAI founders suggested they have set their sights on bigger problems. "Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return," a blog post on Open-AI's website (bit.ly/1lBMdz9) said.

MENLO PARK, Calif.--If you've never seen a robot climb straight up an entirely flat vertical wall, I dare you not to be impressed the first time you do. That was my certainly experience when I watched a wall-climbing robot do its thing at SRI International here the other day. Indeed, my host, who had been with me through several product and project demonstrations over about three hours, noticed how excited I was by watching this little device go straight up the wall, and, I think, began to wonder if I was actually interested in any of the other things I'd seen. In fact, she shouldn't have worried. I was at SRI as part of my ongoing Road Trip at Home series and was getting a rapid-fire lay of the land at this Silicon Valley research and development--and incubation--powerhouse.

Me: Siri, how are you tonight? Siri: I'm happy to be alive! Siri: OK, one option I see is Totto Ramen which averages 4 stars and is moderately priced. Looks like I'm going to be needing a Lyft. Siri: Lyft can be there in 6 minutes.

May 27--As technologists race to invent the next big thing after the smartphone, many have overlooked what is starting to seem obvious: That the human voice is a powerful, perhaps the most powerful, mechanism for controlling the world around us. And, more importantly, speaking is a behavior that doesn't require a user manual. Now, Amazon, Google and Apple are speeding toward a not-too distant future when your voice will dictate commands to a personal assistant, powered by artificial intelligence, and ultimately supplant your PC and phone for most quotidian computing purposes. In other words, your voice -- not a screen -- will become the primary interface for accessing the Internet, and even controlling your home or car. "The entire Silicon Valley startup community was more enamored over virtual reality and augmented reality, and in the process completely overlooked the transformative nature of voice-first technology," said Brian Roemmele, a Temecula-based researcher and consultant in voice-based technologies and online commerce.