Frederic Lardoinois of Tech Crunch reports, “Maluuba, the Waterloo, Canada-based Siri competitor and TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2012 Battlefield finalist, today announced that it has added two new features to its voice-powered personal assistant app for Android and Windows Phone: sports and TV schedules. With this, Maluuba users in the U.S. and Canada can now ask it for near real-time sports results and query the service for TV listings in their area by name, genre or channel. One aspect of the service the Maluuba team has always been proud of is the fact that it has managed to add additional domains to the service quickly. The service started out with 18 domains, including restaurants, movies and general knowledge queries, but the team has continued to expand the range of topics it can handle since then. It has also rapidly expanded internationally since its launch and launched its Windows Phone 8 app earlier this year, too.” Read more

Stuart Dredge of The Guardian writes, “Google has launched its Google Now service for iOS devices, as an update to its existing Google Search app. Accessed by swiping upwards from the bottom of the app’s homescreen, Google Now learns about its user through their activities and their history in various Google services. It then serves up weather forecasts, traffic reports, boarding passes, sports scores and other information when they may be relevant. On iOS, it’s the sole new feature in version 3.0.0 of the Google Search app. Available for Android devices since the Android 4.1 Jelly Bean software was released in 2012, Google Now’s iOS incarnation has been subject to speculation this year.” Read more

Seen anything good on TV lately? If the answer is ‘No,’ then maybe the problem is that you and your TV just aren’t communicating as well as you could be. The same may be said of your experience across other viewing mediums, like smartphones, tablets and PCs.

Veveo wants to change the picture, so to speak. “We want the TV to be as friendly as possible so you and the TV can have a really productive relationship,” says CMO Sam Vasisht. The company, which earlier this month exhibited its Conversational Interface Technology at TV Connect 2013 in London, says there’s a need for a universal interface based on natural language capability, so that people more intuitively can grasp what is available from where in a world of fragmented content sources, including how to better search for that content and manage their viewing experiences with greater speed and ease.

“Voice is probably the most natural way for us to deliver this experience,” says Vasisht. Veveo wants to be the platform that enables service providers and OEMs and video programmers to give their audiences the power of speech. Read more

Image Courtesy Flickr/ Sean MacEntee

It’s April Fool’s Day on the Web, and we’re sensing some semantic allusions and downright sentiment analytics assertions in today’s pranks. Have a look:

• Head over to your Google search engine and you’ll be teased to find out what that smell is with Google Nose. or, as they describe it, the new scentsation in search.  Go beyond type, talk, and touch for a new notation of sensation, it promises. The Internet sommelier, Google explains, comes with an expertly curated Knowledge Panels to pair images, descriptions, and aromas. While it credits new technologies such as StreetSense (responsible for Google inhaling and indexing millions of atmospheric miles), and Android Ambient Odor Detection (which collects smells via the mobile OS), it seems to me that the Knowledge Graph had to have a hand in this one.

Anthony Ha of Tech Crunch reports, “Sherpa, a personal assistant app that launched initially in the Spanish-speaking world, just announced that it has raised $1.7 million in funding from undisclosed angel investors. Sherpa users can speak or type their requests, and the app answers them by collecting information from around the web. The company has also partnered with PayPal and other services, so that users accomplish tasks like making travel reservations and transferring money.”

Ha continues, “The technology was developed by founder and CEO Xabier Uribe-Etxebarria. He actually stopped by the TechCrunch office last fall to show off the app and to compare the results to what you would find in Siri and in Wolfram Alpha. There were, in fact, a number of cases where he’d asked some factual questions and get more complete and relevant answers from Sherpa than the competition. (To be clear, that was a pretty limited test. Read more

Seevl, the free music discovery service that leverages semantic technology to help users conduct searches across a world of facts-in-combination to find new musical experiences and artist information, has launched an app for Deezer that will formally go live Monday.  (See our in-depth look at Seevl here, and a screencast of how the service works here.) Deezer is a music streaming service available in more than 150 countries – not the U.S. yet, though – that claims more than 20 million users.

Seevl, which late last year updated its YouTube plug-in with more music discovery features and better integration with the YouTube user interface, models its data in RDF. In a blog post earlier this year, founder and CEO Alexandre Passant explained how the Seevl service uses Redis for simple key-value queries and SPARQL for some more complex operations, like recommendations or social network analysis, as well as provenance. As for the new Deezer app, it provides the same features as the YouTube app for easily navigating and discovering music among millions of tracks, Passant tells the Semantic Web Blog.

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The NY Times reports today that Google acknowledged it had violated people’s privacy during its StreetView mapping project. Thirty-eight states had brought a case against Google on the grounds that the project resulted in people’s passwords and other personal information being unknowingly recorded by the search giant. Google has agreed to settle it by paying a $7 million fine as well as by becoming more aggressive in ensuring that its employees’ efforts don’t violate privacy and informing the public about how to avoid having their privacy compromised.

In its discussion of the settlement, the article brings up that the way now is paved for another privacy battle, this time over Google Glass. Concerns are that Google Glass eyewear also can be used to record photos, videos and audios of the wearer’s surroundings, without the permission of the individuals featured in those surroundings. With Google Glass, users can use their voice to input commands to take a picture or make a video, as well as to take steps less likely to compromise privacy, such as search for facts about landmarks or events.

How that privacy question plays out is yet to be seen. But concerns aren’t stoping the project – which was demonstrated at last week’s SXSW conference – from moving ahead. Google yesterday announced that the glasses will accommodate frames and lenses that match users’ eye prescriptions, for example.

Getting Google Glass to respond to voice commands and searches appears to leverage capabilities it has developed for its Voice Search App for Android, as well as its semantically-driven Knowledge Graph database of hundreds of millions of entities and billions of facts, and their relationships to each other.

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Rip Empson of TechCrunch reports, “Ginger Software is on a mission to become the go-to spell-checking tool for Android. This week, the Israeli makers of natural language technology designed to help native and ESL speakers better express themselves, released its latest free mobile app for Android, called the Ginger Keyboard.  Simply put, the Keyboard is a straightforward, easy-to-use proofreading app that allows users to correct full texts with one click. While there are plenty of proofreading and grammar apps to be found in Google Play, most of them are educational apps, grammar exercises and dictionaries. However, Ginger’s new app is meant to your cross-app proofreading tool, as it integrates with any and all Android apps you have installed on your phone, whether it be SMS, email, Twitter or Facebook.” Read more

Whisk, the U.K.-based service for matching online recipes with online ingredients-shopping, went live in a big way at year’s end, with a partnership with TV channel and recipe publisher Food Network. As its iOS and Android apps rolled out to accompany its browser plug-in, Food Network in the U.K. featured a button on its recipe search engine for a widget that taps into the service, which is underpinned by semantic technology and a cloud infrastructure. A recent second round of angel funding also has taken the service’s total investment to more than £500,000.

Whisk co-founder Craig Edmunds reports about 12,000 app downloads so far, and about a 1.5 percent steady click-through from the button on the publisher’s site – right where it expected to be at this point, he says. Getting the big-name Food Network signed on actually changed plans a bit for the service, which The Semantic Web Blog covered earlier here, and whose co-founder Nick Holzherr was a keynote speaker at the London SemTech event.

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In the fall Google updated its Google TV platform to Version 3.0, touting features like its new Voice Search. This week, expect to hear about a slew of new products with the technology onboard launching at the CES show in Las Vegas.

Google recently reported on its Google TV blog that new partners added to its Google TV list include Asus, Hisense, and TCL.  LG, Sony, Vizio and others will have refreshes of their set-top boxes, integrated TVs, and IPTV boxes with the latest Google TV platform on board.

Consumers that buy into these offerings also will be increasing their exposure to Google’s Knowledge Graph. The Google TV platform’s advanced voice control for changing channels or finding content of personal interest to watch (live or via Internet streaming), its new programming guide app, and its other smarts deliver results with the help of the vendor’s own Knowledge Graph, according to GIGAOM. With the Knowledge Graph, search queries run against a database of entities and relationships — it’s the search engine’s way of, as Google says, understanding “things, not strings.”

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