Google's Acquisition of Wavii is a Good Move

Alexia Tsotsis, in a post for TechCrunch:​

Google has finally closed the deal on Wavii, a natural language processing startup, for a price that is more than $30 million, we’re hearing from a legitimate source. Both Apple and Google were competing for the Seattle-based startup, and Google eventually won.

If you're not familiar with Wavii, it is a startup that has produced some very cool ​natural language processing and machine learning technology that aggregates news and summarizes it in meaningful ways. Wavii has a blog post on its site that explains, in general, how its technology works. The short summary of it is that Wavii creates news feeds for news topics, so (for example) it can take information from different news sources such as "Kanye and Kim K Expecting" and "Kim Kardashian: Baby Bump" and aggregate and summarize that information into something such as "Kanye West and Kim Kardashian expecting a child". Perhaps the best part is that Wavii also maintains the original source links it used to generate the summarized information so users can dig into additional details.

Anyone who suffers from a deluge of articles about the same exact news topic will appreciate what Wavii can do for users. This acquisition is a good move for Google since it will help Google to add interesting features to its search technology as well as products such as Google Now.

Apple Needs to Improve Siri's Speech Style

Tom Cheredar, in a post over at VentureBeat:

While plenty has been said about Apple’s often sassy voice assistant feature, Siri, the technology giant thinks it can do even better, according to a recent job posting. Apple wants Siri to be more conversational, and as such, it’s seeking someone with both the technical capabilities as well as a love of words to fill a new position.

It's interesting that Apple posted this on LinkedIn.  I'm actually a fan of using Siri, and it is heartening to see that Apple is seemingly doing what it can to make Siri better.

However, it should be noted that I think Google's voice-controlled search assistant in the Google Search app on iOS provides a more 'natural' feel than does Siri.  That's not to say that Google's assistant provides better or worse results than Siri (my experience has been roughly equivalent with using both), but rather that Siri's voice doesn't sound as smooth as Google's voice.  Actually, I sometimes find Siri's voice to be a bit grating to the ear.

I hope that this job posting isn't going to be purely focused on making Siri more 'witty', but rather that the individual who takes on this role will hopefully be empowered to make Siri better as a whole (including the voice).