Technology Review: Startups Focus on AI at South by Southwest

AI is back again…

A prime example is Siri, a startup that launched this February. The company was spun out of SRI International, a research organization based in Menlo Park, CA, commercializing technology developed as part of the CALO artificial intelligence project. The company offers a virtual personal assistant with impressive voice recognition, learning capabilities, and the capacity to interact with many different apps. Its founders describe Siri as "the mother of all mashups with a big brain in the front."

Other startups on the Accelerator list have less heavy-duty academic research backing them, but they are also trying to harness rapidly maturing areas of artificial intelligence. "People are looking to simplify their lives," Valentine says, and new companies are hoping to strike it rich by helping them do that.

Technology Review: Startups Focus on AI at South by Southwest