Cisco is launching an enterprise-ready voice assistant designed to streamline meetings, the company announced Thursday at its Partner Summit. Billed by the company as the first AI-powered assistant meant for businesses, the Cisco Spark Assistant helps users call others in their organization, as well as start, end, or join meetings without typing or dialing according to a Cisco press release. Using MindMeld's machine learning technology, the assistant takes the voice assistant--commonly used for personal daily activities--brings it to the conference room. Leaving the call-in process up to AI may reduce the chance of human error and delay while expediting the process. SEE: IT leader's guide to the future of artificial intelligence (Tech Pro Research) "During the next few years, AI meeting bots will be joining our work teams. When they do, people will be able to ditch the drudgery of meeting setup and other logistics to become more creative than ever," Rowan Trollope, general manager of Cisco's Applications Group, said in the press release.

Seamgen LLC, a software development and design agency, has launched its Artificial Intelligence service, their newest way to help organizations, from enterprises to well-funded startups, maximize the value they bring to their customers. With a collection of the world's leading AI scientists, Seamgen is now able to help their clients effectively utilize their business data to more efficiently serve their customers. This comes at a time when Artificial Intelligence services are in high demand with businesses trying to find new ways to enhance their digital strategies. "Artificial Intelligence is one of the fastest growing sectors of the technology industry right now as companies large and small try to find new ways to inject AI into their digital strategy. Finding AI experts is not an easy task, but that's where we step in. Our AI as a Service can discover unique ways to transform data into viable business solutions," stated Marc Alringer, Seamgen's CEO and founder.

WIRE)--The world's leading Artificial Intelligence conference and exhibition, AI Expo, arrives in California for the inaugural North America event this fall. AI Expo North America will take place in the Santa Clara Convention Center, right in the heart of Silicon Valley, between 29-30th November 2017. The setting is perfect as the event will see some of the heaviest hitters in the AI space explore how the technology is disrupting the established order in sectors as diverse as Automotive, Finance, Healthcare, Government, Education, Consumer, Industrial and Enterprise sectors. The event is perfect for industry members, budding start-ups and entrepreneurs, as well as anyone with an interest in one of most hotly anticipated technological developments of the last few decades. The developments in artificial intelligence are so exciting and we want to cover as much as possible.

Aquant, a New York City-based tech company, announced it has secured $2.6 million in seed funding from World Trade Ventures, SilverTech Ventures, AngeList Syndicate led by Gil Dibner, and a group of private investors in order to expand their customer base and accelerate development of the technology's abilities. Aquant, a rising name in the tech business ecosystem, has developed sophisticated AI and machine learning technology to addresses the multi-billion-dollar problem of machinery downtime that troubles service companies. The unique aspect of Aquant's technology is its ability to locate potential failures at levels that are difficult to be predicted by humans. Companies in the service industry have gotten used to paying a fortune on a yearly basis on machinery downtime and recurring technicians' visits, due to lack of technicians' skills and wrong stocking of parts. Aquant provides service companies with a permanent solution for this problem.

Today, Amazon and the Max Planck Society announced that they intend to enter into a strategic collaboration to promote research in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Amazon plans to build an Amazon Research Center adjacent to the campus of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tuebingen. As part of the Cyber Valley initiative, the new center intends to bring together international key players from science and industry to concentrate their research activities in the field of AI. Amazon plans to invest 1.25 million Euro over the coming years to fund research groups in Tuebingen's Cyber Valley tech initiative. Cyber Valley was launched in December 2016 and focuses on AI research, such as robotics, machine learning and computer vision.

HPE Rapid Software Installation for AI: HPE introduced an integrated hardware and software solution, purpose-built for high performance computing and deep learning applications. Based on the HPE Apollo 6500 system in collaboration with Bright Computing to enable rapid deep learning application development, this solution includes pre-configured deep learning software frameworks, libraries, automated software updates and cluster management optimized for deep learning and supports NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. HPE Deep Learning Cookbook: Built by the AI Research team at Hewlett Packard Labs, the deep learning cookbook is a set of tools to guide customers in selecting the best hardware and software environment for different deep learning tasks. These tools help enterprises estimate performance of various hardware platforms, characterize the most popular deep learning frameworks, and select the ideal hardware and software stacks to fit their individual needs. The Deep Learning Cookbook can also be used to validate the performance and tune the configuration of already purchased hardware and software stacks.

The Renault Group announced today that its autonomous vehicle control system can avoid obstacles just as well as professional test drivers. The company said that in designing the system, it was actually inspired by these drivers' abilities and used them as a sort of benchmark as to what level its technology should be performing. "Despite popular belief, the reality is that human beings are pretty amazing drivers, with less than one fatality per 100,000,000 kilometers in most developed countries," Simon Hougard, director of the Renault Open Innovation Lab, wrote in a Medium post. "Reaching and exceeding that benchmark is essential to improve safety and realize our dreams of autonomous cars, providing more productivity during our morning commutes and robo-vehicle services in city centers." The technology is a result of Renault's collaboration with Stanford University Dynamic Design Lab Director Chris Gerdes, who's also a former US Department of Transportation Chief Innovation Officer, and Renault says it will help with its goal to be one of the first companies to bring "mind off" technology to the public.

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 07, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- FinancialForce, the number one customer-centric ERP cloud vendor built on the Salesforce Platform, today announced it has experienced resounding success as a result of being all in on Salesforce Einstein. Since this revolutionary, integrated set of AI technologies was debuted by Salesforce at Dreamforce 2016, FinancialForce has successfully mastered its capabilities to not only run its company on the bleeding edge of Einstein, but also bring world-class analytics and predictive capabilities to its customers. The company is currently running its internal operations on an app it created, entitled Pulse. A product of Einstein Discovery technology, Pulse quickly and easily tracks massive amounts of FinancialForce data -- everything from customer support cases, usage metrics, opportunities, survey data, financial data, communities, sales invoices, transactional data and more. Leveraging Einstein Discovery across the collected data, FinancialForce is able to unearth critical insights that help deliver specific and specialized service to customers.

A recent press release reports, "In what is believed to be a world first, Microsoft Gold Partner ICS Solutions recently announced the launch of their latest revolutionary AI One Stop Bot, the FLEX Concierge. Built from Microsoft's Azure technology, and described as the'Alexa for business', the FLEX Concierge has been designed with the future in mind. Able to interact with any number of bots on the user's behalf, the FLEX Concierge provides a one-stop experience, automating AI technology to deliver streamlined, intuitive self-service. The FLEX Concierge and the exclusive FLEX AI product line-up will be unveiled at Microsoft's annual Future Decoded Expo. Martin Neale, CEO at ICS Solutions explains, 'With the implementation of AI bots set to increase from 350 million to 1.8 billion users over the next three years, it becomes incredibly important to be able to deliver a bot experience that promotes ease-of-use and avoids cluttered digital workplaces. This is how we designed FLEX Concierge'."

Eight years after launching its self-driving "moonshot," Waymo, aka Google's driverless car company, is having its Neil Armstrong moment. The company is now running its autonomous minivans around Phoenix, Arizona, with no human inside to grab the wheel if things go bad, CEO John Krafcik announced Tuesday. And in just a few months, it will invite passengers to climb aboard the world's first driverless ride-hailing service. This launch brings up a host of unanswered questions about the details and practical elements of such a service, but what's already clear is Waymo is taking one of the final steps on the long road toward taking the human driver out of the picture, and finally cashing in on the profits and safety benefits that come with the transition to robot chauffeurs. "Fully self-driving cars are here," Waymo CEO John Krafcik said at Web Summit in Lisbon this afternoon, where he announced the move.