Nerd Nightly News:
[image: etsy]
IBM has banned employees from using Apple's Siri personal assistant on their corporate networks, fearing that speech-to-text logs from the app might give away corporate secrets.
To be allowed on an IBM network, a device first has to be configured with remote data wipe capabilities and have any file-transfer apps -- like Apple's iCloud -- disabled and replaced with IBM's own MyMobileHub. Because Siri voice queries are sent to Apple's servers to be converted from speech to text, and also analyzed to help improve Siri's accuracy, IBM is worried that employees who use it might be revealing more information than they realize.
Sure, it seems unlikely that some guy at IBM is asking "Siri, can you give me driving directions to the skunkworks lab?" but it's better to be safe than sorry.
[dvice.]
IBM's Jeopardy!-winning supercomputer, Watson, has done game shows and diagnostic medicine, and now it's moving on to Wall Street.
IBM is hiring Watson out to Wall Street firms, where it will provide analysis of risks, portfolios, and clients. Citigroup is the first firm to sign up for its services, which IBM hopes will generate "billions" in profit.
According to Bloomberg, Watson can "comb 10-Ks, prospectuses, loan performances and earnings quality while also uncovering sentiment and news not in the usual metrics before offering securities portfolio recommendations," as well as monitoring news sources and social media for fresh intelligence.
Its major weaknesses thus far are its lack of fluency in languages other than English and "sluggish" processing of social media feeds.
IBM hasn't commented on whether the Watson avatar that appeared on Jeopardy! will be outfitted with a power tie and a Gordon Gekko voice module.
