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Wolfram, creator of Siri’s knowledge base, releases impressive new Image Identification tech

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Wolfram Research, the company behind the Wolfram Alpha knowledge base that Apple’s Siri taps into, is today releasing new artificial intelligence tech to answer the question, “What is this a picture of?”

Wolfram is showing off what the Wolfram Language Image Identification Project is capable of using this web app accessible on desktop and mobile devices. You simply drag any photo into the app and the image identification AI attempts to detect what it is (as pictured above).

Now I’m excited to be able to say that we’ve reached a milestone: there’s finally a function called ImageIdentify built into the Wolfram Language that lets you ask, “What is this a picture of?”—and get an answer…. It’s a nice practical example of artificial intelligence. But to me what’s more important is that we’ve reached the point where we can integrate this kind of “AI operation” right into the Wolfram Language—to use as a new, powerful building block for knowledge-based programming.

And the new ImageIdentify function will be accessible to developers to create APIs or apps that tap into the feature through Wolfram Language“And if one had lots of photographs, one could immediately write a Wolfram Language program that, for example, gave statistics on the different kinds of animals, or planes, or devices, or whatever, that appear in the photographs.”

Wolfram has a lengthy, interesting read on the backstory of the project and more about how everything works behind the scenes.

Siri now lets users access the entire Best Buy product catalog

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As noted by RazorianFly, Siri can now help users retrieve the best deals for consumer electronics and gadgets sold at Best Buy. How does she handle this, you might ask? Well, Siri gets some of its answers from the acclaimed answer-engine Wolfram|Alpha.

Wolfram Research announced yesterday they are leveraging data from Best Buy’s public application programming interface, allowing users to browse more than 35,000 appliances and consumer electronics products sold by Best Buy.

Third-party applications and services that integrate with Siri automatically benefit, so Siri is now able to deliver answers to your product-related queries sourced from Best Buy’s vast database.

In addition, taking into account Wolfram|Alpha’s clever decision-making and analysis engine and Siri’s natural-language interface, you can ask her to, let’s say, list plasma TVs larger than 50-inches. Even though Best Buy-sourced answers are laid out as any other information Siri sources from the web, Apple could -in the future- take advantage of Best Buy’s public APIs to produce rich results sporting product images, categories, more meta data and so forth.


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