On Tuesday, Google is expected to finally unveil its answer to the Echo, alongside new smartphones and tablets. The Google Home device, which looks a little like an air freshener, is expected to go on sale later this month.
Many companies are seeing that the future of deep learning is here, and that it doesn't require a lot of money or resources to take advantage of this new industrial science. IBM's Watson Analytics offers a freemium service that allows you to upload up to 500MB, and enables you to explore your own real-life applications for deep learning. Inputting Google Adwords or other sales metrics into this tool can help even startup companies find relational and predictive information in their data.
Amazon Web Services announced that it was selling to the public the same kind of software it uses to figure out what products Amazon puts in front of a shopper, when to stage a sale or who to target with an email offer.
The techniques, called machine learning, are applicable for technology development, finance, bioscience or pretty much anything else that is getting counted and stored online these days. In other words, almost everything.
Google Sheets is getting smarter. After adding the machine learning-powered "Explore" feature last year, which lets you ask natural language questions about your data, it's now expanding this feature to also automatically build charts for you. This means you can now simply ask Sheets to give you a "bar chart for fidget spinner sales" and it will automatically build one for you.