MICROSOFT IS JOINING Google and Amazon in the race for your home. This week, at an event in China, the venerable tech giant trumpeted the arrival of Project Evo, a sweeping plan to build hardware devices that work a lot like Google Home or the Amazon Echo.

Source: Wired Magazine

Date: December 16th, 2016

Link: https://www.wired.com/2016/12/microsofts-project-evo-way-living-room/

Discussion

1) “The prize is more than just the best home digital assistant. The biggest spoils go to the company that rides its assistant to artificial brains that are far smarter—and creates a market for using these brains to do just about anything.”  This “rise of the robots” seems to be a little scary.  What is a good way to think about this?

2) “s these companies develop services for speech recognition and natural language understanding, they’re also using many of the same underlying technologies—loosely called deep learning—to build all sorts of artificial intelligence. They will slip this AI into their own apps, and offer it to a world of other companies via cloud computing services so that these companies can build AI into their own apps.”  How can you better place yourself to understand this emerging technology?