A Japanese insurance company has decided to get rid of 34 jobs and instead get artificial intelligence to take over assessing medical insurance claims over the phone. Starting from January 2017, Tokyo-based Fukoku Life Insurance Mutual Company is handing over the roles of 34 human insurance agents to IBM Watson Explorer, which is a cognitive search and content analysis platform that uses machine learning and language processing to analyse data for trends and patterns. According to a press release, Fukoku Life is using IBM Watson Explorer to classify and categorise diseases, injuries and surgical procedures. When insurance policy holders call the company's hotline to make an insurance claim, the IBM Watson supercomputer is able to analyse the customer's voice and detect keywords. As part of making the claim, the policyholder has to submit a medical certificate showing what condition they have, and IBM Watson can detect the name of the injury or disease listed, as well as dates such as the hospital admission date and surgery date.

A future in which human workers are replaced by machines is about to become a reality at an insurance firm in Japan, where more than 30 employees are being laid off and replaced with an artificial intelligence system that can calculate payouts to policyholders. Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance believes it will increase productivity by 30% and see a return on its investment in less than two years. The firm said it would save about 140m yen (£1m) a year after the 200m yen (£1.4m) AI system is installed this month. Maintaining it will cost about 15m yen (£100k) a year. The move is unlikely to be welcomed, however, by 34 employees who will be made redundant by the end of March.

KHARAGPUR: Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Thursday said his organisation is "betting big" on advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in the coming years. Asked on the next big thing at Google, Pichai said: "I can't quite tell exactly but advances in AI and machine learning, we are making a big bet on that. Advances in machine learning will bring a difference in many many fields." He was interacting with students at his alma mater IIT - Kharagpur. Pichai earned his degree in Metallurgical Engineering from IIT-Kharagpur.

Ashley Madison users have already unwittingly encountered a great deal of bots, but in 2017 they are going to become more prevalent – and more transparent to the user, according to U.K.-based Juniper Research. In its top 10 predictions for the year, the organization forecasts that chatbots – virtual agents which operate via social networks and messaging platforms – will grow in presence and popularity, streamlining e-commerce activities such as booking flights and hotels, or to order items directly by speaking with a bot through an app. The research firm also expects there will be more opportunities for businesses to personalize these services, using social media analytics to provide consumers with specially tailored incentives. While acknowledging that many messaging bots have not seen a significant uptake in Western markets yet, due to their basic features and the technology not being fully-developed, Juniper noted that in Asian markets including China platforms such as WeChat have already established chatbots that aid in daily tasks. Meanwhile, North American applications such as Facebook Messenger are finally beginning to drive chatbot integration using ads. Bots won't be the only helpful technology to get more widespread use this year: With Google Assistant coming to multiple devices and Alexa, Cortana and Siri already available on several platforms, Juniper said 2017 will be the year when digital assistants become sufficiently mainstream for the device ecosystem to become a key battleground.

Not a day goes by when we don't hear of something related to artificial intelligence in the news. But AI (sometimes confused with machine learning, which is simply a technique within AI) wouldn't be where it is today if it weren't for one seminal event in 2016: AlphaGo beating Lee Sedol. In March last year, an AI program that trained itself to play the ancient game of Go beat the 18-time world champion. The reason it was such a feat for AI, was because Go is about feel, strategic judgment and winning multiple battles across the board – and a computer cannot simply memorise all possible combinations of board pieces, assess the situation, construct and execute a strategy to win, like chess. So the programmers of AlphaGo, from Google DeepMind, set up the basic heuristics of the game, allowed AlphaGo to analyse previous games and then split its brain so it could play itself millions of times.

NEVADA – It's been a while since a new TV raised any eyebrows, but Sony Corp. has just unveiled a new product that's creating a bit of buzz at the annual Consumer Electronics Show industry gathering in Las Vegas. Sony's XBR-A1E Bravia 4K is the electronics maker's first commercial foray into the niche market for televisions that use OLED, or organic light-emitting diode, technology. While the vivid, power-sipping screens have found their way onto smartphones, the cost of making them has so far limited their appeal for TVs. Only LG Electronics Inc. has made a serious effort to sell OLED TVs. Panasonic Corp. also unveiled an OLED TV at this year's CES.

NEVADA – Toyota Motor Corp. has unveiled a concept car with built-in artificial intelligence and autonomous driving technology designed to interact with the driver. The Wednesday unveiling of the Concept-i, which the automaker says can read its driver's personality and emotions, came ahead of the opening Thursday of the Consumer Electronics Show, an annual global trade show held in Las Vegas. By learning about the driver through "chats" using its AI system and monitoring facial expressions, the car will engage in conversations on topics that suit the driver's taste and propose driving routes that include their favorite areas, the carmaker said. The car will also flash lights if it detects a certain level of driver fatigue, play relaxing music to reduce tension and shift to autonomous driving if the driver is at risk. Toyota is aiming to build an experimental vehicle that features some aspects of the Concept-i within the next several years and test its performance in Japan.

Discussions during Swift's annual Sibos conference in Geneva were dominated by talk of open banking and open APIs, which create both opportunities and challenges for banks. This is the first of five key takeaways from the event explored in Finextra's review of Sibos 2016, produced in association with SAP, and published today. It was clear from Finextra's interviews with industry leaders during the event as well as from the discussions on the main stages of the conference that banks increasingly understand open banking, underpinned by open APIs, is an opportunity for them. However, as the new report details, it was also clear that banks face a challenge in ensuring their systems can handle open APIs. Open banking will be a spur to further collaboration between banks and fintechs – as will a number of other key drivers shaping the industry currently, as the report examines.

Extreme Computing in the Cloud...How to Get It for FREE! Extreme Computing is the ability to leverage highly performant infrastructure and software to accelerate Big Data, machine learning, HPC, and Enterprise applications. High IOPS Storage, low-latency networks, in-memory databases, GPUs and other parallel accelerators are being used to achieve faster results and help businesses make better decisions. In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Michael O'Neill, Strategic Business Development at NVIDIA, focused on some of the unique ways extreme computing is being used on IBM Cloud, Amazon, and Microsoft Azure and how to gain access to these resources in the cloud... for FREE! Speaker Bio Michael O'Neill is an established leader for NVIDIA.

Amazon's Alexa and Google's virtual assistant have already made their way into our living rooms, but Chinese tech giant Baidu is betting that verbal answers may not always be enough. The company is launching a new home-centric computer that includes a screen for displaying helpful information in response to voice commands. Baidu is teaming up with Chinese consumer tech company Ainemo to launch the device, called Little Fish, which is being positioned as a voice-centric home robot. Ainemo created the hardware, while Baidu created the operating system that powers it. The computer, about the size of a lamp, is designed to handle many of the same tasks one might expect from such a device: managing calendars, answering questions, getting news updates, and ordering food, among other tasks.