Topic: AI
Is Amazon late to the mobile voice assistant game? – iMore (Jan 11, 2017)
This is satire and opinion, but it’s very relevant to two prevailing narratives – that Apple is behind in AI and that Amazon is ahead in voice. Rene’s piece here does a good job of framing the discussion, and the two essays on this site which I just linked to take a similar stance: Amazon is very good at what it does with Echo, but it does a very limited number of things, and for today still does them mostly in the home. Siri has two orders of magnitude more users, but also gives users a variety of other ways to interact with their device. Any analysis that doesn’t take into account those factors when comparing the two is insufficient.
via Is Amazon late to the mobile voice assistant game?!?! | iMore
Why Apple’s Critics Are Right This Time – WSJ (Jan 8, 2017)
This piece rehashes all the recent stuff that’s been said about Apple without really adding anything new. AI is mentioned a few times, and that’s the ostensible focus, though it’s not clear that AI is really what’s meant – it’s mostly about voice assistants specifically, and this article repeats a lot of the prevailing narrative about Amazon being ahead in voice, a situation that’s significantly more nuanced in reality. But in some ways the key point here is that we’re starting to see a steady drumbeat of this kind of thing lately, and that’s notable in its own right.
via Why Apple’s Critics Are Right This Time – WSJ
Nvidia and Mercedes-Benz to bring an AI car to market within a year | TechCrunch (Jan 7, 2017)
Though lots of the fuss about AI in cars relates to autonomous driving, the reality is that we’re many years from broad scale autonomous driving, and so what we’ll get in the meantime is lots of technology that assists human drivers rather than doing the driving itself. This Nvidia-Mercedes partnership is very much in this category, though we don’t know all the details yet, but we’ll see lots more of this kind of thing in the next few years, which in turn will help train AIs to take over the driving later on.
via Nvidia and Mercedes-Benz to bring an AI car to market within a year | TechCrunch
Huawei’s Mate 9 will be the first phone with Alexa preinstalled – The Verge (Jan 5, 2017)
I’ve been saying for months now that where Alexa really needs to make progress is in phones, because unless an assistant is with you all the time, it’s not truly useful. Well, here’s the first phone with Alexa, and it’s an Android one, as you’d expect, though the announcement here feels a little half baked. The news leaked due to a prematurely unfurled banner at CES, and even now it’s out there some of the details are unclear. But this is a blow to Google and yet another CES win for Amazon.
via Huawei’s Mate 9 will be the first phone with Alexa preinstalled – The Verge
DeepMind is thrashing some of the world’s best Go players – Business Insider (Jan 4, 2017)
I tweaked one part of the headline – it later emerged that Alphabet’s DeepMind subsidiary’s AlphaGo technology was the one beating all comers. This is the best possible kind of publicity for AlphaGo, DeepMind, and Alphabet around AI – creating massive organic buzz before it is even known the company is behind it. Alphabet’s Go experiments have been great advertising in general, but of course the key remains putting this same technology to work in ways that benefit ordinary people in their everyday lives.
via An unknown entity is thrashing some of the world’s best Go players – Business Insider
Vivint Smart Home Delivers on the Promise of Artificial Intelligence for the Home – Press Release (Jan 4, 2017)
Vivint is one of the companies that’s closest to my vision for what needs to happen in the smart home, a space that’s currently characterized by lots of disconnected islands and a retail DIY model that’s fine for early adopters but lousy for mainstream users. I wrote about Vivint’s vision a few months back after I was briefed on it, and they’ve now announced the actual product off the back of it. This, and not Amazon’s Echo/Alexa, is what a truly smart home assistant looks like.
via Vivint Smart Home Delivers on the Promise of Artificial Intelligence for the Home – Press Release
Mattel Is Building An Alexa For Kids | Fast Company Design (Jan 3, 2017)
We’ve arrived remarkably quickly at the specialization phase of voice assistant technology – this usually only arrives once the generic version of a technology has gone mainstream. This device looks clever – though the article is frustratingly silent on when or where it might be available – but the broader point is that we’re going to see lots of companies playing in this space, leveraging Microsoft, Amazon and other platforms and technologies combined with their own expertise. Voice is hot, and that means a rapid entry into the market of dozens of new competitors, many of whom won’t survive there long.
via Mattel Is Building An Alexa For Kids | Co.Design | business + design
At CES 2017, Amazon revs Alexa everywhere strategy | ZDNet (Jan 3, 2017)
Amazon has done enormously well with the Echo over the past couple of years, but its biggest challenge remains letting it leave the house. It looks like CES is going to be a showcase of many third party integrations, some of which will make sense and many of which won’t. This is a big success for Amazon, but the big question is still whether it can get Alexa into the most personal and portable of devices: the smartphone. Until that happens, Alexa will be competing with assistants like Siri and Google Assistant which are truly ubiquitous.
via At CES 2017, Amazon revs Alexa everywhere strategy | ZDNet
Hyundai Collaborates With Google Assistant In Further Connecting Homes To Cars – Hyundai (Jan 3, 2017)
This integration allows a Google Assistant user to remotely control their Hyundai through its Blue Link connected car system. We’re going to see more and more integrations between various voice assistants and cars, though of course Siri won’t be part of that yet because its third party integrations are limited to a handful of specific categories. Google is slowing ramping up its API efforts around the Assistant, which should add value in interesting ways.
via Hyundai Collaborates With Google Assistant In Further Connecting Homes To Cars – Hyundai
Snapchat Is Beginning to Use Machine Learning to Improve Ad Targeting | Adweek (Dec 30, 2016)
One of the big goals for Snap in the coming months is driving faster revenue growth, which means making the tough transition from a niche spending category to a mainstream one for advertisers. That, in turn, means better tools for selling and measuring the performance of ads. It seems some basic machine learning is at play here, which is an interesting advance from Snap too.
via Snapchat Is Beginning to Use Machine Learning to Improve Ad Targeting | Adweek
This Is How Google Wants To Make The Internet Speak Everyone’s Language – BuzzFeed News (Dec 30, 2016)
This is a great example of putting AI to work doing something useful. Too much of the conversation in the tech industry around AI is still about specs and methodologies rather than real, tangible benefits, but this is a wonderful exception. Companies need to show rather than tell around their AI capabilities if they want the message to stick.
via This Is How Google Wants To Make The Internet Speak Everyone’s Language – BuzzFeed News
The Verge 2016 tech report card: Microsoft – The Verge (Dec 29, 2016)
This is a good summary of Microsoft’s 2016, which was the year in which a significant turnaround or even a comeback seemed to become plausible. The company made some big advances in key areas, although there was no real advance in first-party tablets or laptops, and it all but killed off its Lumia smartphone business. There’s lots of potential here, but we’ll see in 2017 both whether Microsoft can really turn around its consumer business, and whether it can make its hardware business grow again.
via The Verge 2016 tech report card: Microsoft – The Verge
Apple Publishes Its First Artificial Intelligence Paper (Dec 26, 2016)
Apple announced at a conference a few weeks ago that it would begin allowing its AI researchers to publish, a move intended to attract those in the field for whom this is standard practice. This is also part of Apple’s broader push to establish its AI credentials, countering the popular narrative that it’s behind big competitors like Google and Microsoft.
via Apple Publishes Its First Artificial Intelligence Paper
America’s Big 5 tech companies increase patent filings, Microsoft holds lead in AI technologies – IPWatchdog.com | Patents & Patent Law (Dec 22, 2016)
Interesting and valuable analysis. But clearly an oversimplification to make patents held the arbiter of a “lead” in AI. Ultimately, whether you lead in AI comes down to the customer benefit you drive from it, not the patents themselves.
Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and the Economy | whitehouse.gov (Dec 20, 2016)
A report from the White House on artificial intelligence and how it will affect the economy in years to come. The impact of AI on the economy and people’s lives is certainly an emerging narrative, but one where there’s very little consensus so far.
via Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and the Economy | whitehouse.gov
Voice Is the Next Big Platform, and Alexa Will Own It – Backchannel (Dec 19, 2016)
I disagree with the second statement in this headline, and would want to qualify the first too, but this headline fits perfectly in our Voice and Assistants narrative, which has more analysis on why. Simply put, the insistence that Amazon somehow owns voice because it has an effective voice device in the home is overblown, and voice itself will be only one of many ways we’ll interact with our devices.
via Voice Is the Next Big Platform, and Alexa Will Own It
Wynn Las Vegas to equip 4,748 hotel rooms with Amazon Echo: It’s ‘seamlessly delicious,’ Steve Wynn says – GeekWire (Dec 14, 2016)
I wrote a post once in which I said anything relating to home automation is really tough to market, because you can never really show people how it will work in their own home in a store environment. Hotels may be one exception to that, and this deal with Wynn seems like a fantastic way for Amazon to market Echo and the Alexa functionality among a fairly high-end clientele.
Apple will break with tradition and start publishing AI research – The Verge (Dec 6, 2016)
This is a big policy change for Apple, whose famous penchant for secrecy has hampered its efforts to hire and retain top AI researchers. We won’t see future Apple products and services leaked through this research, obviously – it will either be generalized enough to offer no clues, or will be published after the related consumer-facing products are released. But it should help ease the hiring challenges somewhat and neutralize one of the frequent criticisms of Apple’s AI efforts.
via Apple will break with tradition and start publishing AI research – The Verge
Accelerating Innovation and Powering New Experiences with AI | Facebook Newsroom (Nov 8, 2016)
This is (mostly) an example of the “tell, don’t show” problem with tech companies and AI – too much about models and methodologies, and not enough about real consumer benefit. There are some examples sprinkled in here, but it definitely feels like this post is intended for engineers, not the general public. Facebook undoubtedly has serious AI chops, but needs to do a better job telling the consumer side of this story (while avoiding anything creepy, often a challenge with Facebook’s new technologies).
via Accelerating Innovation and Powering New Experiences with AI | Facebook Newsroom