Artificial Intelligence

Amazon published its annual post-holiday press release today. While the 1900-word release provided few concrete data points related to the Dec-18 quarter, it offered a handful of notable insights: The upbeat tone, as denoted by the “record-breaking holiday season” language, runs…

We recently tested four smart speakers by asking Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, and Cortana 800 questions each. Google Assistant was able to answer 88% of them correctly vs. Siri at 75%, Alexa at 73%, and Cortana at 63%. Last year,…

Like many in the tech space, we believe robotics is changing the nature of work. However, public perception of robots is still a question mark. We developed our Robot Fear Index to measure and track the average consumer’s perception of robots. We…

Amazon announced today that it is testing Alexa Answers, a program that crowdsources responses to questions that Alexa currently doesn’t have answers to. One of the principal issues with voice assistants is that they can do a lot, but not…

A while back, I laid out an argument for why I think neurotechnology is an important and compelling field: it entails investigating, fixing, and enhancing the brain—the substrate of human phenomenological existence. Here, I want to discuss the ethics of…

Earlier this month, the first ever Facebook-branded hardware device shipped. It’s a smart, hands-free video calling device with Alexa built-in called Portal. It was built with the intention of bringing friends and families closer together when they are apart. Though not…

Google shares dropped ~4% in after-hours trading. The company missed revenues by 1% and earnings were in line with expectations. This compares to the Jun-18 quarter when the company beat revenue estimates by 2% and reported earnings in line with…

Google recently announced a milestone for its applications of deep-learning in medicine. Their algorithm for detecting metastatic breast cancer, Lymph Node Assistant (LYNA), is not only able to positively classify metastatic cancer with 99% accuracy but is also able to…

If you haven’t downloaded Apple’s new Shortcuts app, you should. Apple has long been criticized for software that limits the power of the user to tweak and customize. Before there was an App Store, or even customizable wallpaper, the iPhone…

Neurotech for Control In the first part of this series on Consumer Neurotech, we established a framework for thinking about Consumer Neurotechnologies and their value propositions. With the initial groundwork laid, we can finally dig into the technologies themselves. Here,…

We pride ourselves on contrarian curiosity. When that curiosity leads us to new conclusions, we change our minds. As part of that exploration, the areas that we find most interesting evolve over time. What was once frontier eventually becomes commonplace.…

We recently surveyed 520 consumers about smart speakers and found that over 45% of respondents own at least one smart speaker. 9% of smart speaker owners surveyed owned more than one. In a similar survey earlier this year, only 27%…