Earlier this year, a report from Consumer Intelligence Research partners (CIRP) pegged the sales of Amazon’s Echo at more than 3 million units. Echo of course uses Amazon’s cloud based AI “Alexa” to answer questions, play music/games, control smart devices including home automation systems and of course re-order products off Amazon. More importantly, awareness of this device and others like it continues to accelerate.
It’s search Jim, but not as we know it. The dream of an ultimate personal assistant isn’t a farfetched sci-fi fantasy like the interactive computing systems in Star Trek.
In Seoul, South Korea, a Google-created artificial intelligence has been squaring off against a mortal man in the 2,500-year-old strategy game, called Go, that’s several orders of magnitude more complicated than chess. When it was finally over, Google’s AlphaGo won four out of five matchups, making AlphaGo a role model for young artificial intelligences everywhere. How did the robot pull off such a decisive win?
Today, Microsoft released the developer preview of Windows Phone 8.1 and with that, the ability to play with a preview of Cortana, Microsoft’s answer to Apple Siri and Google Now. Both Gizmodo and CNet have released video demos comparing Cortana & Siri & Google Now. I like the Gizmodo..
Rumored for months, Microsoft has formally announced its answer to Apple’s Siri and Google’s Voice Search/Google Now: Cortana. Danny Sullivan is at the Microsoft Build Conference and live blogging it