The year was 1997. Steve Jobs fidgeted on a stool in front of the World Wide Developer Conference, chatting with the audience: “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure where you’re going to sell it. I’ve made this … continue reading
A new artificial intelligence company thinks that its breakthrough in natural language understanding can take on what machine learning experts say is an unsolvable challenge: getting machines to understand human language and its meaning. Pat Inc., which announced its private beta and US$2.5 million in seed funding this month, is developing artificial intelligence technology that … continue reading
Mac OS X is now simply macOS. The 27th annual World Wide Developer Conference kicked off this morning in San Francisco, and along with the new branding for the operating system, Apple also unveiled new features for macOS and iOS, including the Universal Clipboard, desktop sharing across devices, and enhancements to Siri. macOS and iOS … continue reading
As a way to compete with the other voice assistants, sources say that Apple will allow software developers to connect their apps to Siri for the first time, according to a report with Fortune. Another report with The Information tech news website said that Apple might even create a device that is similar to the … continue reading
When you ask Siri what she thinks of Microsoft’s personal assistant Cortana, her answers range from “I really have no opinion” to “I’d rather not say.” To any unsuspecting human, those might seem like reasonable answers, but in a girl’s world, the world of passive aggression, those are some fighting words. And that might only … continue reading
Ever since Apple launched its digital personal assistant Siri on iOS devices, companies have been trying to develop their own speech-recognition and natural-language-processing technologies. BlackBerry has the BlackBerry Assistant, Google has Google Now, and Microsoft has Cortana, for instance. The evolution of these virtual personal assistants started out as a way for these companies to … continue reading
Facebook announced it has acquired Wit.ai, a voice-recognition and natural-language processing startup with technology akin to Apple’s Siri. The Wit.ai platform and natural-language processing API, which has a community of more than 6,000 developers, will remain free and open source, according to a Wit.ai blog post The acquisition could help draw more developers to Facebook, … continue reading
Hype can be a divisive word. In terms of emerging technology, hype can be spun as positive buzz, inflated expectations, in-demand and trendy, or markedly oversaturated. But what it doesn’t translate to is real-world value. Research firm Gartner defines its yearly Hype Cycle report as a “model designed to help clients make intelligent decisions about … continue reading
BlackBerry takes on Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana BlackBerry has announced a new feature expected for BlackBerry 10.3: BlackBerry Assistant, a virtual assistant similar to Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana. The virtual assistant is voice-activated and helps manage simple tasks such as searching e-mail and calendar, sending invitations, and figuring out what’s trending on Twitter. … continue reading
