CHENNAI: Federal Bank & Niki.ai on Saturday announced the launch of a chatbot-based virtual assistant on FedMobile, the bank's mobile banking application. The bank has partnered with Niki.ai for powering the artificially intelligent bot. The chatbot feature offers mobile recharges, hotel room/ bus ticket reservation, household bill payments (electricity, water, DTH, data card, landline, broadband, gas), movie booking, events booking and cab booking. A user who wants to do a mobile recharge will simply have to type on the app "recharge my mobile number for Rs 100." The intelligent chatbot will pick up automatically the mobile number, identify the mobile operator and display the details for the user's confirmation.

Along with creating a dedicated AI team at Google France, the company is also expanding its workforce by 50 percent and opening four hubs that will provide free digital literacy training to the residents of France. But Google isn't the only company growing its AI presence. While Facebook already has an AI lab in the country, it announced today that it would put €10 million towards accelerating AI innovation in France. That money will be used for scholarships, funding servers and open datasets that public institutions can use and adding 30 additional fellowship positions to Facebook AI Research Paris' PhD program. The French team will also double from 30 to 60 people.

Google announced today that it's expanding its AI research efforts, setting up a new research team in France that will work with the country's AI research community on issues ranging from health to the environment. Google says the team's work will be published and any code it produces will be open source. Along with creating a dedicated AI team at Google France, the company is also expanding its workforce by 50 percent and opening four hubs that will provide free digital literacy training to the residents of France. While Facebook already has an AI lab in the country, it announced today that it would put €10 million towards accelerating AI innovation in France. That money will be used for scholarships, funding servers and open datasets that public institutions can use and adding 30 additional fellowship positions to Facebook AI Research Paris' PhD program.

"The easier it is to communicate, the faster change happens." During an October 2015 press conference announcing the autopilot feature of the Tesla Model S, which allowed the car to drive semi-autonomously, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said each driver would become an "expert trainer" for every Model S. Each car could improve its own autonomous features by learning from its driver, but more significantly, when one Tesla learned from its own driver--that knowledge could then be shared with every other Tesla vehicle. As Fred Lambert with Electrik reported shortly after, Model S owners noticed how quickly the car's driverless features were improving. In one example, Teslas were taking incorrect early exits along highways, forcing their owners to manually steer the car along the correct route. After just a few weeks, owners noted the cars were no longer taking premature exits.

Newswire) indico, a provider of enterprise machine learning solutions for unstructured content, today announced $4 million in new equity seed funding led by Osage Venture Partners. Ventures, Boston Seed, and Hyperplane also participated. The funding follows a $1.5 million round of convertible debt financing announced in October, and the addition of veteran CEO Tom Wilde in September. Artificial intelligence and machine learning offer big opportunities for businesses, but many organizations struggle to find practical business applications for the technology due to limited access to required skillsets, insufficient data and infrastructure, and poorly designed pre-trained offerings. Philadelphia-based Osage Venture Partners focuses on early stage, business-to-business technology companies including analytics and artificial intelligence-based startups such as Automated Insights, BAInsight, SevOne, and Sidecar.

There's no doubt that technology advances faster than we can even keep up these days, and the smart home sector is one of the fastest-growing. At CES 2018, hundreds of companies showed off new smart home solutions and gadgets, from the useful and innovative to the repetitive and uneventful. As we toured the showrooms, we noticed a few different trends coming to the table for smart home enthusiasts this year. Read on to learn more about where smart homes are headed and see how leading companies are tackling these new trends. Voice commands are great and all, but sometimes maybe you don't feel like shouting over your music or talking over an important scene in the movie you rented.

Salesforce and IBM announced an expansion of their strategic partnership on Friday, with the firms combining the power of IBM Cloud and Watson services with Salesforce Quip and Salesforce Service Cloud Einstein, the firms announced in a joint press release Friday. Two top tech firms like Salesforce and IBM connecting their artificial intelligence (AI) platforms reinforces the growing value of AI and big data in the enterprise. AI, especially, is taking center stage as one of the battleground technologies for business, and this is a clear example of two CEOs making a move to reinforce that with their partnership. In the release, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty said that the combination of Watson and Einstein will "help enterprises make smarter business decisions." Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff echoed this sentiment, saying in the release that the combo will "deliver even more innovation to empower companies to connect with their customers in a whole new way, leveraging the power of the cloud and AI." SEE: IT leader's guide to the future of artificial intelligence (Tech Pro Research) Specifically, the Watson/Einstein combination will provide actionable next steps in a given process, the release said.

We've just begun to scratch the surface of the impact of machine learning on the enterprise. Organizations are applying machine learning algorithms to business processes to automate manual tasks and identify patterns in transactional data to drive strategic decisions. Many applications are focused on efficiency and automation, but that trend is shifting. More and more businesses are using machine learning to develop disruptive new business models. What does this mean for your organization?

Make your customer the focus of every merchandise, marketing, store and supply chain decision and use artificial intelligence powered prescriptions to take the right decisions for your customers, every time. Manthan is a leading cloud analytics company that has pioneered analytical applications for consumer-facing businesses. We excel in the application of decision sciences, advanced math, and artificial intelligence and have a restless ability to invent and bring ideas to life.

The "Industrial Machine Vision Market by Component (Hardware (Camera, Frame Grabber, Optics, Processor), and Software (Deep Learning, and Application Specific)), Product (PC-based, and Smart Camera-based), Application, End-User - Global Forecast to 2023" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. The overall industrial machine vision market was valued at USD 7.91 Billion in 2017 and is expected to reach USD 12.29 Billion by 2023, at a CAGR of 7.61% between 2017 and 2023. This is because of the increasing need for quality inspection and automation, growing demand for AI and IoT integrated machine vision system, increasing adoption of Industrial 4.0, development of new connected technologies, and government initiatives to support smart factories, among others. Governments of different countries worldwide are encouraging investments in manufacturing, which is necessitating the use of various automation products for structural development. Software component is expected to grow at the highest rate between 2017 and 2023.