Machine vision, says Utrip, TUI's chosen partner in AI, natural language processing and machine learning From being one of the first to dabble in blockchain technology to driving forward with AI-fuelled partnerships, the TUI Group is on a mission to remain a travel heavy weight. In a recent move, the world's biggest travel company has signed a deal with Seattle-based AI firm Utrip, to up its game in offering a deeply personalised experience throughout the customer journey. The idea, David Schelp, managing director of TUI Destination Services (DS), said in a press release, is to combine its "inventory of unique destination experiences with Utrip's artificial intelligence solution to provide our guests with the most personalised travel planning experience available today". TUI passed on an opportunity to hop on a call to discuss the deal further, the ever enthusiastic Gilad Berenstein, CEO and co-founder of Utrip, was keen to talk about how far his company, which launched in 2012, has come. "The power of AI today is that we can match up people's preferences with the inventory that has already been curated by TUI or by any of the partners we work with," he says.

Shenzhen-based AI and humanoid robotic company Ubtech has secured $820 million in Series C funding round, our sister site TechNode Chinese is reporting (in Chinese), setting a new financing record for the largest investment raised in a single round by an AI company. The new investment brings Ubtech's valuation to approximately $5 billion. The new funding was led by Tencent, with participation from a long list of investors including Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Haier, Telstra, China Minsheng Bank, Juran Zhijia, CreditEase, and Green Pine Capital, with additional investment from CDH Investments who led Ubtech's 100 million series B funding in 2016. Ubtech founder and CEO Zhou Jian said the new round of funding has brought in invaluable investors and the investment will be dedicated to facilitating Ubtech's future commercialization plans. Zhou said the investment will be used in three main areas including R&D, market expansion/branding, and recruitment.

This has further foisted pressure on the traditional retailers to reimagine the strategies for creating and capturing value in order to explore the optimal usage of their assets. Public policy liberalization is also one of the key factors supporting the flow of knowledge, information and resources, further generating pressure on the brick n' mortar retailers to tackle with the lowered entry barriers to the online retailers in the market. Key trend which will predominantly effect the market in coming year is rising adoption of multi-channel or omni channel retailing. In forthcoming years, the retail industry is anticipated to witness higher growth in the trend of Omni channel retailing. Artificial intelligence will be having a key role as this technology would be bridging the gap between online and offline retailing in coming future.

For two decades, Arteric has led pharmaceutical and biotech brand teams through the selection and implementation of complex emerging marcom technologies. Scouting the digital landscape and educating clients are how Arteric helps marketing teams see opportunities that others miss and to transform those events into competitive advantage. Arteric's ongoing education program will continue on May 15 at the 2018 BioPharma eMarketing Summit West, where President and Chief Strategist Hans Kaspersetz will share two case studies during his presentation titled "AI - Super Hearing for Healthcare Marketers. BioPharma eMarketing Summit West is a TED-style venue that features an audience of more than 200 marketing executives from pharma, biotech, and medical device organizations. More than 45 thought leaders from companies such as Johnson and Johnson, Pfizer, Daiichi Sankyo, and Microsoft will share insights and case studies on leading-edge issues such as: · Utilizing big data to tell stories and to streamline pipelines · Establishing metrics to understand the effectiveness of a digital marketing strategy · Capitalizing on disruptive marketing "Detecting and capturing audience signals will be a central theme emphasized throughout several Biopharma eMarketing sessions," states Mr. Kaspersetz. "At the core of every Arteric digital strategy is the integration of the reality that customers are experiencing our brands across hundreds of micro-moments.

All participants will be in listen-only mode. I would now like to turn the conference over to Steve Walsh, Director of Investor Relations. A copy of the news release is available on the Investor Relations page of our website, which can be found at investors.emcins.com. The archived audio webcast will be available for replay for approximately 90 days following the earnings call. This presentation includes some forward-looking statements about our expectations for our future performance. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and actual results could differ materially from those suggested by our comments today due to a variety of factors. Additional information about factors that could affect future results is addressed in our SEC filings, including Forms S-1, 10-K, 10-Q and 8-K.

Oslo, Norway - Latest release of Puzzel cloud contact centre solution provides new bot options including its own Chat bot, multi-channel capabilities and introduces enhanced measures to protect customer data Puzzel has announced new functionality in the latest release of its cloud-based contact centre solution, designed to extend the system's multi-channel capabilities and help organisations to meet important changes in EU data protection legislation. Users are now able to integrate third party or Puzzel's own Chat bots directly into their core contact centre solution to improve first contacts with customers and save valuable live agent time. Furthermore, Puzzel has made several adjustments to its platform in preparation for the advent of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in May this year. Christian Thorsrud, Product Manager at Puzzel commented, "Chat bots and GDPR are hot topics in the contact centre world today. On the one hand, innovations based on Artificial Intelligence such as Chat bots are creating new opportunities to expand and improve customer interactions and Puzzel's latest release is designed to make them a reality. On the other hand, the imminent arrival of GDPR is putting pressure on contact centres to review how they collect and store their own and third party data. The latest version of our cloud-based software brings renewed assurance that contact centres can rely on Puzzel to provide them with a secure and auditable framework to help meet critical new legislative requirements."

SoundHound, a voice-enabled artificial intelligence (AI) and conversational intelligence technologies company, announced news on Thursday (May 3) that it has raised $100 million in new funding from a group of strategic investors. In a press release, the company said investors in the round of funding include Tencent Holdings, Daimler, Hyundai Motor Company, Midea Group and Orange. Those companies join existing investors Samsung, NVIDIA, KT Corporation, HTC, NAVER, LINE, Nomura, Sompo Japan Nipponkoa and Recruit. SoundHound plans to use the funding to drive adoption and distribution of Houndify, its voice AI platform in the automotive, Internet of Things, consumer products and enterprise apps and services markets. The funding will also be used to open new offices in China, France and Germany.

Grocery chain Co-op is delivering shopping to customers in Milton Keynes using cute robots created by Starship Technologies. A Co-op store near Starship's headquarters in Monkston has been using the six-wheeled'ground drones' to deliver around 200 different products over the past four weeks. Customers pay the usual in-store price plus £1 ($1.36) for the delivery which goes to Starship. Earlier this month the company announced it plans to launch 1,000 bots to corporate and academic campuses in Europe and the US within the year. A Co-op member of staff - known as a'picker' - selects the items and puts them in a cooler box compartment inside the robot.

When the "Father of Android" Andy Rubin was betting on the next frontier two years ago by saying: "There is a point in time -- I have no idea when it is -- it won't be in the next 10 years, or 20 years -- where there is some form of AI, for lack of a better term, that will be the next computing platform," he was onto something. Today, the AI-powered innovations like driverless vehicles and personal assistants are already stealing the spotlight on a daily basis and making people more productive with their day-to-day tasks. The ripple –through effect of AI didn't only impact how we interact with the digital world but also it eventually hit the business interactions as well. By narrowing the scope of the digital business world, in this article, we will highlight how AI and machine learning can be applied to content management. When we inject "intelligence" into content management systems, from automating menial tasks to analyzing the tone of each piece of content, the possibilities are endless. As the Salesforce CMO said on the London leg of their World Tour: "Welcome to the age of artificial intelligence, the world will never be the same again and it's going to happen really quickly."

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Loom.ai, the provider of best-in-class mobile solutions for building and animating personalized, 3D avatars at scale, today announced a $3M seed investment from Samsung Venture Investment Corporation. The new funding will be used to fuel recruiting, additional partnerships and the continued development of its fully embedded SDK solution. "We are incredibly proud of our partnership with Samsung Venture Investment Corporation. This strategic investment represents an important step in our growth as a company," said Mahesh Ramasubramanian, co-founder and CEO of Loom.ai. "We will immediately ramp up our recruitment efforts to attract the world's top talent in deep learning and computer vision to join our journey. Augmented Reality experiences built with Loom.ai's personalized 3D avatars will unlock new mediums of communication, entertainment, and e-commerce."