Tag: Machine Learning

The Google Photos site is now starting to show an option to allow you to merge faces in your library.  Photos since the beginning has had facial recognition built into it and has done a reasonable job of helping you identify people in your albums and tagging them.  The challenge with it has come with age progression of children and photos of peoples at odd angles.  It seems that the Photos team have be doing a bit of work on the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning algorithms on the feature.

On the Google Photos site, if you go to the Albums tab and click on People & Pets album, you will see a banner at the top of the page with suggestions of faces to merge under the tag for that person or pet.

Through the use of Machine Learning to detect apps that impersonate, have inappropriate content or malware, Google removed over 700,000 rogue apps from the Google Play Store, taking 100,000 repeat offender developers along with them.  The injection of ML can find patterns that detect bad behaving apps quicker than human inspectors, resulting in a 70% increase in removing of apps from the Play Store over the previous year.

Not only did we remove more bad apps, we were able to identify and action against them earlier. In fact, 99% of apps with abusive contents were identified and rejected before anyone could install them.

The end result is that the Play Store, while still not perfect, is a far safer place than it was this time last year and it will only get better as the Machine Learning models get smarter.

Microsoft has rolled out another update to Microsoft Cortana, their personal assistant app & service, for Android.  The update is version 2.9.10 for those keeping score at home and should be hitting devices with the Assistant installed over the course of the next few days.

There are several improvements in this update, the most visible of which is and enhanced upcoming view for better calendar and missed reminders management.  Now calendar events are more discretely listed in the Upcoming page which makes it easier to find upcoming events and reminders.  There is also a new “Here’s what I can do” card at the top of the Upcoming tab to help you with some of the commands that you can give to Cortana.

Smart Suggestions for tasks have also been improved in this update.  These include the ability to have a reminder added or an event added.

In a Business Insider report that was published today, Microsoft Cortana only trails Google Assistant in overall answer accuracy as well as the number of questions asked.  In fact, Assistant and Cortana were well ahead of Apple Siri and Amazon Alexa in both categories.

The report focused on the news from earlier this week that Apple is replacing Bing as the default search engine for Siri in MacOS High Sierra and iOS 11 and points out that the move, which will have Siri leverage Google Search APIs, will likely dramatically help Apple’s assistant in its use and accuracy.

A new beta of Microsoft Cortana, the personal assistant AI from the Redmond company, is out for Android and with it comes a pretty nice new feature.  In the beta, you can allow Cortana to have access to your Lock Screen.  Why is that a big deal?  You could ask Cortana for information without having to actually unlock your phone.  It appears to function in nearly an identical way to Google Assistant in the Google Pixel Launcher or the Google Now Launcher.

Cortana, the AI character from the Halo series, is perhaps the most forgotten of the AI assistance out there, behind Apple’s Siri and Google Assistant.  But it is a solid performer and is integrated into Windows 10 and in Windows 10 Phone.