YouTube has long had an automatic captioning system that, thanks to Google's machine learning advances in recent years, has gotten pretty good at automatically transcribing spoken words in a video. As the company announced today, its technology is now able to take this a step further by also captioning some of the ambient sounds like [LAUGHTER], [APPLAUSE] and [MUSIC]. For now, the automatic effects captioning is actually restricted to those exactly these three sounds. The reason for this, Google says, is due to the fact that these are also exactly the sounds that most video producers manually caption right now. "While the sound space is obviously far richer and provides even more contextually relevant information than these three classes, the semantic information conveyed by these sound effects in the caption track is relatively unambiguous, as opposed to sounds like [RING] which raises the question of "what was it that rang – a bell, an alarm, a phone?,"

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to Accenture's Second Quarter Fiscal 2017 Earnings Conference Call. During today's conference all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. Instructions will be given at that time. I would now like to turn the conference over to Managing Director, Head of Investor Relations, Angie Park. Thank you, Shannon and thanks everyone for joining us today on our second quarter fiscal 2017 earnings announcement. As Shannon just mentioned, I'm Angie Park, Managing Director, Head of Investor Relations. With me today are Pierre Nanterme, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and David Rowland, our Chief Financial Officer. We hope you've had an opportunity to review the News Release we issued a short time ago. Let me quickly outline the agenda for today's call. Pierre will begin with an overview of our results. David will take you through the financial details, including the income statement and balance sheet for the second quarter. Pierre will then provide a brief update on our market positioning before David provides our business outlook for the third quarter and full fiscal year 2017. We will then take your questions before Pierre provides a wrap up at the end of the call. As a reminder, when we discuss revenues during today's call, we're talking about revenues before reimbursements or net revenues. Some of the matters we'll discuss on the call, including our business outlook are forward-looking and as such, are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties, including but not limited to those factors set forth in today's News Release and discussed in our Annual Report on Form 10-K and Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and other SEC filings. These risks and uncertainties could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed on this call.

Hardware that responds to voice commands is already out there and probably in your hand or house right now. Whether it's a smartphone, smart speaker or wearable, it has to connect to the cloud to deliver answers. Now, a startup called Mythic (formerly known as Isocline) is launching a chip and software that will change all that, putting voice control, computer vision and other kinds of AI into our devices locally, no cloud required. Headquartered in Austin, with offices in Redwood City, Calif., Mythic has raised $9.3 million in venture funding, including angel capital and a Series A round, according to CEO and co-founder Mike Henry. Mythic's Series A round was led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson joined by Lux Capital, Data Collective, and AME Cloud Ventures.

SYS-CON Events announced today that Cloudistics, an on-premises cloud computing company, has been named "Bronze Sponsor" of SYS-CON's 20th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Cloudistics delivers a complete public cloud experience with composable on-premises infrastructures to medium and large enterprises. Its software-defined technology natively converges network, storage, compute, virtualization, and management into a single platform to drive unprecedented simplicity in the data center. Customers can start with a base infrastructure and scale to multi-site and multi-geo infrastructures with predictable economics and performance. With open and secure virtual networking, elastic storage, application orchestration and SaaS management, Cloudistics is the blueprint for application-optimized on-premises cloud infrastructures.

On Monday, Google announced plans to launch a new peer review journal and "ecosystem" for machine learning. Scientists need to develop notations, analogies, visualizations, and explanations of ideas. It's deeply tied to the heart of science. "That's why, in collaboration with OpenAI, DeepMind, YC Research, and others, we're excited to announce the launch of Distill, a new open science journal and ecosystem supporting human understanding of machine learning. Distill is an independent organization, dedicated to fostering a new segment of the research community. "Modern web technology gives us powerful new tools for expressing this human dimension of science.

On Monday, Walmart said that it's launching a tech incubator to invest in robotics, augmented and virtual reality, machine learning, artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies. Walmart has invested in or bought other startups in the past, but the company said the latest initiative is about "making big bets on the ideas that will transform the future of retail." The innovation hub is called Store No. 8, after an early experimental store Walmart founder Sam Walton used for new ideas. "We are creating an ecom incubator and budgeting capital to build startups," Marc Lore, president and CEO of Walmart.com and founder of Walmart-acquired Jet.com, said at the Shoptalk conference in Las Vegas. "It'll be wholly owned by Walmart but made of independent companies."

SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced it was ranked as a leader in "The Forrester Wave: Predictive Analytics And Machine Learning Solutions, Q1 2017." According to Forrester, "SAP offers comprehensive data science tools to build models, but it is also the biggest enterprise application company on the planet. This puts SAP in a unique position to create tools that allow business users with no data science knowledge to use data-scientist-created models in applications. SAP's solution offers the data tools that enterprise data scientists expect, but it also offers distinguished automation tools to train models." A finding in the report is that the predictive analytics and machine learning (PAML) market is forecasted to experience a 15 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2021.*

European adtech company ADYOULIKE, which offers a AI-driven native advertising platform, today launched a US operations in New York, along with debuting a new server-to-server (S2S) header bidding solution. The company said the new solution assures native ads are placed with the maximum contextual relevance available and is the first to incorporate semantic targeting powered by IBM Watson. Among the first companies to offer S2S for native ads, and the first to leverage AI to enhance their solution, Adyoulike said the development of the new S2S solution is a continuation of the company's ongoing commitment to using emerging technologies to drive advances in programmatic advertising. Publishers using the solution to manage their inventory will have the ability to create private marketplaces and package deals for buyers that include more precise targeting based on context and sentiment. This added relevance, says Adyoulike, increases value both for the publisher, and for the brand.

Samsung has finally announced its artificial intelligence-based voice assistant, Bixby on Monday. The assistant is expected to be one of the features of the Samsung Galaxy S8, when it is announced on March 29. "Bixby will be our first step on a journey to completely open up new ways of interacting with your phone. At the launch of the Galaxy S8, a subset of preinstalled applications will be Bixby-enabled. This set will continue to expand over time. Our plan is to eventually release a tool (in SDK) to enable third-party developers to make their applications and services Bixby-enabled easily," InJong Rhee, executive vice-president, head of research and development, software and services said in the official press release.

At Adobe Summit, Adobe (Nasdaq:ADBE) introduced significant enhancements to the Adobe Cloud Platform, the underlying, cross-cloud architecture that unifies content and data and leverages Adobe Sensei, Adobe's AI and machine learning framework. Advancements announced today include new Sensei capabilities for enterprise customers as well as new tools and partner integrations to help developers reduce time to market and better integrate Creative Cloud assets into enterprise workflows. Adobe also announced Adobe Experience Cloud (see separate press release) as well as the availability of the first set of solutions that integrate with Microsoft's Azure, Dynamics 365 and PowerBI offerings (see separate press release). Advancements in cloud services have fundamentally altered the computing landscape. The next decade will bring even more disruptive changes in how brands create, immerse and engage their customers in their experiences.