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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Early in the summer, The Semantic Web Blog introduced readers to Nara, an advanced neural networking service to automate, personalize and curate web dining experiences for users. (See that story here.)

The service is moving ahead with the launch today of its mobile version, as well as in other respects. “We’re now doing a full-on consumer launch of a polished product on both the web and mobile [platforms],” says CTO Nathan Wilson. “People really are clamoring for the mobile component, especially for this [dining] use case.” Versions for both the iPhone’s iOS and Android operating systems are available.

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Dollars to donuts most folks haven’t ever found a place to eat courtesy of neural networking technology before. Generally, Internet searches for spots to have a bite come courtesy of friends’ Facebook recommendations, services like Yelp, and even some semantically-powered offerings such as BooRah, now an Intuit company.

But the collection of neuroscientists, computer scientists, astrophysicists, and creative artists behind Nara, launching into public beta today, have taken the advanced neural networking route to automate, personalize and curate web dining experiences for users – though there’s more to come on the future menu. President and CEO Tom Copeman says of the company, which in April secured $3.6 million of a $4.5 million equity offering, that its cutting-edge neural network and proprietary and patented algorithms and process for analyzing tons of web data, and personalizing it, including considering user feedback on the suggestions it offers, is creating a whole new category.

That is the pure-play digital lifestyle brand that “creates an emotional connection between us and the Web. We’re trying to change how people think about the web, and from sense of what it means to me, and makes sense to me, and how personal it is to me.”

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Yesterday The Semantic Web Blog discussed how personalized mobile assistance came up on the lists of a bright future in the eyes of semantic web experts (see here). Sharing that vision is the team at Vital.AI, the NYC-startup founded by Marc Hadfield.  Its Thrive.AI app, also a contender at SemTech’s Startup Competition, is a personalized semantic shopping agent for the iPad, but the underlying Vital.AI platform on which it is built provides an integrated suite of components for a variety of knowledge-centric, intelligence-rich, Big Data-driven applications.

The e-commerce agent, Hadfield told attendees at SemTech in San Francisco last week, was the company’s own foray into figuring out what it needed to add to the platform to make it easier to build apps that bring semantic technologies and Big Data together.

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