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Apple’s Siri Play in the Artificial Intelligence Battles

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Apples - Stand outby Angela Guess

Tom Simonite reports in the MIT Technology Review, “On Monday Apple showed off a string of new iPhone features powered by recent advances in artificial intelligence—many of them aping ones already launched by rival Google. But Apple’s announcements of features like facial recognition or software that knows what’s in your photos, made during its annual Worldwide Developer Conference, were distinct in how much they emphasized privacy. Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering at Apple, repeatedly stated that the company is using machine-learning algorithms able to understand personal data such as photos only within the confines of a person’s iPhone, not on Apple’s cloud servers. ‘We believe you should have great features and great privacy,’ he said.”

Simonite goes on, “A new version of Apple’s Photos app, coming this fall with a new version of Apple’s mobile operating system, will use facial recognition to maintain virtual albums of snaps containing people you frequently photograph. It will also look at the contents of your photos, so you can search your collection using keywords such as ‘horses’ or ‘mountains.’ Federighi said those features are powered by deep learning, a technique that underpins significant recent progress in artificial intelligence. They are also playing catch-up with Google, which introduced a photos service with those same features over a year ago (see ‘Google Rolls Out New Automated Helpers’). But Federighi said that Apple didn’t want its algorithms to spill data to Apple about the content of user photos. ‘When it comes to performing advanced deep learning and intelligence of your data, we’re doing it on your device, keeping your personal data under your control,’ he said.”

Read more here.

Photo credit: Apple

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