One of the latest was last week's AWS re:Invent, where Amazon announced a new suite of AI-enabled technology designed with businesses in mind. And while these new products, features, and tools come with a host of opportunities for the developers, marketers, and others who plan to use them, they also raise a few questions. What are they designed to do? How can they help you? Let's take a look at some of these AI announcements from AWS re:Invent and dig deeper into just what they mean.

Apple TV has grown up a lot since its iTV days. It's not just for iTunes rentals anymore--Apple TV handles just about anything we watch, from House of Cards to Game of Thrones and Major League Baseball games, and now that includes 4K content. Since Apple opened up its tiny streaming box to developers, it's gone from fun to indispensable. With an extensive library of apps, Siri support, and a drop-dead simple interface, Apple TV is one of the underrated players in Apple's lineup. Just like all those years ago, it's still the device that "completes the story" of Apple's entertainment ecosystem, and even without some of the bells and whistles of its competitors, Apple TV is still one of the best streaming boxes you can buy--from SD to HD to brilliant 4K.

Chatbot could be utilized to automate business-to-client interactions such as for creating customer service application. Not every task could be handled by the bot though, but it could handle a lot of tasks before some of the more complex ones are delegated to human. However, a lot of heavy-lifting is required to create the AI the bot, such as processing the input of the users, implementing the language understanding, training the machine, testing it, etc. Sometimes, we just want a simple bot that answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs). But different people ask differently, right? And maybe we are wondering how are we able to make our bot understand different questions that might have the same meaning and context.

Google uses a machine-learning artificial intelligence system called "RankBrain" to help sort through its search results. Wondering how that works and fits in with Google's overall ranking system? Here's what we know about RankBrain. The information covered below comes from three original sources and has been updated over time, with notes where updates have happened. First is the Bloomberg story that broke the news about RankBrain (See also our write-up of it).

Deliver lightening fast customer support at scale requires a lot of resources and this is why you want your end users or employee to be able to self serve as much as possible. Bots have been around for a long time, but recent advances in natural language processing drove huge adoption over the last year. They are now being used to enhance a broad set of experiences with customer service being one of the most relevant. In this article we're going to learn what does it take to save time to our customer support team. To do this we'll build a chatbot to automate answers to frequently asked questions, eventually saving precious time to your customer support operators so they can focus on more complex requests.

'Hostbot' is a text message bot from Burner that has been introduced to save Airbnb hosts the trouble of answering frequently asked questions over and over again. When an Airbnb guest arrives in a new city or country, they are bound to have tons of questions like: "What's the Wi-Fi password?" Hostbot makes it possible for an Airbnb host to fill in some of the questions that they are asked often and link the chatbot to their Burner phone number. This way, when a guest has a question, the bot auto-responds with the appropriate answer. This way, a host is able to focus on parts of the hosting experience that a bot can't assist with.

In our previous tutorial on customer support bots, we trained a bot using the Custom Collection API to direct customers to the team member who is best suited to assist them with their problem or query. The bot improved our team's response times as we no longer had to rely on a human facilitator (who also plays many other roles in our company #startuplife) to do the job. However, we're generally only able to respond during our office hours of 11am-7pm EST, so there's still lag for inquiries outside of that period. How can we improve this? Build a bot to answer frequently asked questions, reducing lag time for more customers and ensuring our engineers don't need to spend more time than necessary away from the products we're building for you:).

I spoke with Michael Johnston, Lead Inventive Scientist at Interactions, about frequently asked questions about AI and Machine Learning as they apply to customer care. How do you define Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning? Artificial Intelligence refers to the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior. Put another way, AI technologies are algorithms that attempt to mimic things that humans do. Machine Learning, on the other hand, is the science and engineering of giving computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed -- algorithms that learn from data.

In Universal Chat, we've implemented a chatbot which can be trained by anyone effortlessly. The logic is simple; just give it your questions and answers, and the bot will reply to any customer who asks something similar. In this paper, I'll show you how we've done it so you can do the same. To start, I've tested many different Machine Learning frameworks out there -- Wit.AI, Microsoft Cognitive services, I had a peek at Luis… for me, it turned out that API.AI was the correct choice. It was totally free with a good response rate, it had a great user interface for development, and it was easy to setup, get started with and expand.

People looking for an easier path to integrating with Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant have good news on the horizon. NoHold, a company that builds services for making bots, unveiled a project that seeks to turn a document into an Alexa skill. It's designed for situations like Airbnb hosts who want to give guests a virtual assistant that can answer questions about the home they're renting, or companies that want a talking employee handbook. Bot-builders upload a document to NoHold's Sicura QuickStart service, which then parses the text and turns it into a virtual conversation partner that can answer questions based on the file's contents. Right now, building Alexa skills is a fairly manual process that requires programming prowess and time to figure out Amazon's software development tools for its virtual assistant. People who want to change the way that a bot behaves have to go in and tweak code parameters.