Google is Apple’s largest competitor in the mobile software arena, a status that has been further solidified this week with the launch of a new app that rivals Siri with data science and language models.

The search giant has taken full advantage of its reign over the web to create the technology that powers its AI service. Voice Search can predict the next word the user will say with a high accuracy rate thanks to an enormous pool of natural-language datasets to draw from – this not only makes the answers more relevant, but it also speeds up response times.

Google’s new brainchild may be better architected than Siri, but for the time being it’s limited in functionality. That may change in the coming months depending on users’ reactions.

A startup called Silver Tail System also leverages big data to make IT a more intelligent part of an organization. Its software is used by several large financial service providers and e-commerce sites to tell regular traffic apart from malicious activity, and as it turns out it also caught the attention of EMC.

The storage vendor announced an agreement to acquire Silver Tail for an undisclosed amount. Its technology  will be integrated into the RSA authentication portfolio.

Kognitio also had a big update this week. The data warehousing vendor launched a free edition of its flagship solution that enterprises can download and test before committing to an investment. The trial comes with a full feature set and no time limitations, but RAM caps at 128 gigabytes.

Finally, deduplication hot shot Permabit announced a new version of its flagship solution. Albireo has been optimized for flash-based environments and is now better suited to accommodate big data in the enterprise, according to the company.