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The inventors of Apple’s virtual assistant software, Siri, have just demonstrated their secret, next-generation, artificial intelligence assistant. Created by Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer, Viv is four years in the making. She offers an open platform through which queries can connect with third-party merchants. And yesterday, during Kittlaus’s demo at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, Viv performed flawlessly as her creator gave her tasks that would likely see Siri fumbling for answers.
 
Viv’s talent is in analyzing natural language queries, breaking them down to their components to determine intent, and feeding these requests off to bots that can easily process them. In this sense, Viv is a flexible “top bot” that commands a number of very inflexible specialized bots. This enables Viv to satisfy many unique requests by delegating tasks vertically. Whereas the highly specialized, personal assistant X.ai is capable of competently managing a calendar, Viv – like Siri – is designed to handle multiple tasks at various times. However, where Siri often falls back on a search engine to answer complicated questions, Viv seems to capably find an answer by relying on the support of the company’s partners. See Kittlaus's demonstration and interview at Disrupt NY below.

Episode Summary: You’re a business, and you’ve collected data - now how do you now make sense of it? Bring in ‘sentiment analysis’, a form of machine learning that determines whether text is positive or negative. Slater Victoroff’s company Indico provides algorithms that specialize in this task.

Episode Summary: How does automation influence society today? This is an open-ended question with likely endless answers that can be observed in many different areas of society. As a Writer, Speaker, and Professor in Media Theory and Economics, Douglas Rushkoff has made it his livelihood to examine the impacts of automation in our evolving digital society. In this episode, we speak about his 'disappointment' in how automation has been used by many industries without regard for employees' long-term well being, and how a cultural shift in business' priorities may be what's needed to make automation beneficial for the majority.

1 - A Robot Monk Captivates China, Mixing Spirituality With Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence may be making the world smarter, safer, more functional and accessible. But can it make the world more beautiful? A number of researchers hope to do so by developing AI systems that can paint, write, and colorize photographs.

Big data is big business. But in an age of digital privacy paranoia, it isn’t always easy for tech companies to get their hands on information – particularly when some of the most potentially beneficial data is also confidential, locked up in healthcare and finance companies who aren’t comfortable sharing.

Episode Summary: This week's in-person interview is with Dr. Adam Coates, who spent 12 years at Stanford studying artificial intelligence before accepting his current position of Director of Baidu's Silicon-Valley based artificial intelligence lab. We speak about his ideas around consumer artificial intelligence applications and impact and what he's excited about, as well as what he thinks may be more 'hype' than reality. He gives a an idea about applications that Baidu is working, to potentially influence billions of mobile and computer users worldwide. If you're interested in the developments of speech recognition and natural language processing, this is an episode you won't want to miss.

How secure is your company’s online data?
Probably not as secure as you think. Recent statistics from a security risk benchmarking startup called SecurityScorecard suggest that the United States federal government ranks dead last among major cybersecurity industries, despite having spent $100 billion on cybersecurity measures over the past decade.

Episode Summary: People often mark progress by what they see, but there’s often much more going on behind the scenes, the up and coming, that marks actual current progress in any particular field. The same can said to be true for natural language processing, and Dr. Dan Roth’s research in this field makes him privy to the advancements that most of us are bound to miss.

1 - Bots May be Cool, but DigitalGenius Thinks it Found a Better Way

London- and New York-based DigitalGenuis released a new product this week, Human+AI Customer Service Platform, that links to customer service platforms like Zendesk and Salesforce and supplements the chatbot experience. The service analyzes customer service logs from emails, chats, and other social interactions in order to assess the most common issues and determine the best or most likely response by the automated system. Each response has a 'confidence threshold', or how likely the response is to be accurate. The customer then decides the threshold with which they're most comfortable receiving an automated response; any responses below the threshold are routed to a human agent. In addition to the rollout of its new hybrid customer service model, DigitalGenuis also raised another $4.1 million in venture funds from companies like Salesforce Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, and Singularity Investments.