Gigaom Minute – June 13

Transcript

• Apple recently announced the arrival of the HomePod, a device promising to “revolutionize the way users enjoy music and interact with their homes.” Competing with Amazon Echo, Google Home, and other smart speakers, HomePod can control blinds, heat, lighting, music and more. It will retail at $349. Read more.

• In related news, Apple will soon employ AI to deliver enhanced personalization on watchOS4. Using advanced machine learning technologies, Siri will automatically display relevant information on the watch face and learn as a user interacts with the watch over time. Read more.

• As reported in Wired Magazine, organizers of The Computer Human Interaction Conference, allowed those in other countries to attend the event via robot. The telepresence bots were provided by bot maker Beam, which gave the conference “a steep discount to provide enough bots to allow anyone with visa trouble to attend.” Read more.

• Two UC Berkeley students have created a Facebook Messenger bot to detect fake news stories. The chatbot named NewsBotAI uses AI to pinpoint political biases in legitimate news stories and outlets. Simply send the chatbot a link to the news article in question and wait for a reply. Read more.