Mobile Technology Science / News

(Reuters) – I.am , the tech startup founded by pop star and entrepreneur will.i.am, has raised $117 million in venture funding, the company told Reuters on Monday as it announced its entry into the corporate computing market with a voice assistant for customer service. The company, founded in 2012, initially focused on consumer electronics devices such […]

GUEST: The phrase “Sputnik moment” refers to the October 4, 1957, launch of Sputnik 1, the first artificial Earth satellite, by Sergei Korolyov for the Soviet Union. It was this American fear of the technological gap between the United States and the U.S.S.R. that ignited the space race to put a man on the moon. Nowadays […]

Below find a carefully chosen selection of five Alexa skills worth trying from new, trending, and otherwise noteworthy voice apps available in the Alexa Skills Store on Amazon.com, which now has more than 20,000 skills. In case you missed it, Alexa Routines for the creation of scheduled tasks or custom commands launched for the first […]

GUEST: While there is nearly universal agreement that artificial intelligence offers the promise of revolutionary benefits, recent survey findings from Gartner reveal almost 60 percent of organizations surveyed have yet to take advantage of the benefits of AI. Perhaps even more surprisingly, only a little more than 10 percent of surveyed businesses have deployed or implemented […]

Cisco announced plans Thursday to bring voice control to its Cisco Spark Room series hardware, the first step in a larger plan to make an AI-powered meeting assistant available across all Cisco hardware. The Cisco Spark Assistant uses natural language processing and machine learning to understand what a person wants by harnessing technology from MindMeld, the […]

GUEST: Not long ago, reaching audiences through technologies like email was considered breakthrough. Fast forward to today, a hyper-accelerated existence in which the average human checks their smartphone over 150 times daily. This phone-fiddling translates into the average enterprise dealing with somewhere between 200 and 300 million digital signals per day, yet most can barely handle […]

GUEST: Technology has changed our lives in countless ways — there are more smartphones and other mobile devices in use in the United States and its territories than the entire population of the country, and we are just on the cusp of seeing driverless cars on our roads and highways. As the field of artificial intelligence […]

One of the most important things I have learned while reporting on AI is that systems built on machine learning may be able to beat humans, or approximate their results, but they can often fail in ways that humans never would, and with unintended consequences. Consider the tale of a Redditor who asked earlier this week whether […]

GUEST: Give any respectable machine learning algorithm a concrete scenario to optimize and it will blow human-based heuristics out of the water. But we as humans should continue to focus on what we do best — thinking creatively, building empathy for other humans — in order to guide machines in the right directions. A friend asks […]

GUEST: Machine learning and artificial intelligence are timely subjects that spark the public imagination. In 2016, between $26 billion and $39 billion was invested in AI, according to recent estimates from the McKinsey Global Institute, a leading private-sector think tank. That number is three times the amount spent just three years prior, an increase driven by […]

GUEST: One of the most well known tropes in startup and tech culture is that your business is only as good as the team behind it. You can’t do anything without having a strong team, and the most important job for every manager is to hire quality talent that fits into the preexisting team dynamics. The […]

GUEST: The market for AI-driven personal assistants and bots will almost double in 2018, reaching more than $12 billion by 2020 with 1.6 billion active users, according to Statista. Today, pretty much every tech giant is making digital agents for their customers. Amazon’s Alexa is getting new looks and perks, Microsoft’s Cortana has just inhabited a brand […]

GUEST: We may not notice it, but both artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things are driving massive innovation in consumer and business environments. The smartphones in our pockets, for instance, are equipped with some 9 to 13 sensors and have been running machine learning and deep learning via on-device firmware and in the cloud for […]

Amazon’s Alexa is getting the ability to respond to custom phrases, schedule actions by smart home appliances, and give you a rundown of the weather, traffic, or news. Routines first began to roll out to Echo device users a few days ago, an Amazon spokesperson told VentureBeat. Customizable voice commands and routines can be made […]

GUEST: In the technology adoption lifecycle, law firms can be laggards. From email and websites to cloud computing and video conference calls, the new technologies that other businesses generally accept quickly were slow to find traction at law firms. However, with clients demanding more efficiency and millennials taking more leadership roles in law firms and in-house […]

GUEST: While the repercussions of a fully AI-driven world remain a mystery, it is gradually becoming evident that AI could soon be providing us with more accurate solutions for health issues that earlier went undetected. Though the digital transition in health care remains slow and cautious, in the past five years more than 90 percent of hospitals have transferred […]

GUEST: The coming advent of super-intelligent AI has some of the greatest minds of our time crying apocalypse. Stephen Hawking co-authored an article on the topic which darkly quipped that “success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history—unfortunately, it might also be the last.” Bill Gates has likewise voiced concern. Elon Musk […]

GUEST: The healthcare industry is abuzz over consumer engagement and empowerment, spurred by a strong belief that when patients become more engaged in their own care, better outcomes and reduced costs will result. Nevertheless, from the perspective of many patients, navigating the healthcare ecosystem is anything but easy. Consider the familiar use case of booking a […]

GUEST: Bots are breaking into the most human industry on earth: healthcare. Just look at Microsoft — it recently launched a new division to address the healthcare-AI intersection. That’s not to say AI will be replacing doctors anytime soon, but the integration of AI into regular healthcare tasks is upon us. From surgical assistance to patient education to imaging analysis, robots are already […]

GUEST: Smart home and AI devices aren’t just convenient — they can also make your home a safer place. And thanks to the proliferating internet of things (IoT), good security practices are becoming less of a chore. It’s a little like the iPhone’s touch ID fingerprint reader, or now face ID — it’s more secure than a […]