Rapidfy, an on-demand platform that connects customers with service professionals and small and medium enterprises is looking to improve how these professionals interact with customers. The firm announced today (Sept. Rapidfy's Live Chat feature will allow customers to communicate via a service professional's website, Facebook or the Rapidfy platform. The chatbots will use artificial intelligence to help service professionals reach and communicate with customers in an affordable way. Just last week, Facebook announced 30,000 bots would soon be payment-enabled for the 900 million users of its Messenger platform.

Rapidfy, an on-demand platform that connects customers with service professionals and small and medium enterprises is looking to improve how these professionals interact with customers. The firm announced today (Sept. Rapidfy's Live Chat feature will allow customers to communicate via a service professional's website, Facebook or the Rapidfy platform. The chatbots will use artificial intelligence to help service professionals reach and communicate with customers in an affordable way. Just last week, Facebook announced 30,000 bots would soon be payment-enabled for the 900 million users of its Messenger platform.

CORALVILLE, Iowa--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Cognonto, a new start-up in knowledge-based artificial intelligence (KBAI), announced today the dual release of its Cognonto Platform and KBpedia, a computable knowledge structure to automate much of the effort needed for machine learning. KBpedia leverages six large-scale knowledge bases -- Wikipedia, Wikidata, GeoNames, OpenCyc, DBpedia and UMBEL -- into a single structure expressly designed to support artificial intelligence (AI) within enterprises. "Many of the AI advances in recent years, such as question answering on smart phones or systems that beat human contestants in Jeopardy, are built around Web knowledge bases like Wikipedia," said Michael Bergman, a co-founder of Cognonto. "But these are one-off systems that only the largest tech firms or research outfits can afford," he said. "The idea behind Cognonto is to democratize this process such that any enterprise can afford to train their own machine learners or gain the advantages of knowledge-based artificial intelligence."

Salesforce (CRM), the Customer Success Platform and world's #1 CRM company, today unveiled Salesforce Einstein, bringing the power of artificial intelligence to every Salesforce user. With Salesforce Einstein, any company will be able to deliver more predictive and personalized customer experiences across sales, service, marketing, commerce and more. Salesforce Einstein is a breakthrough innovation that embeds advanced AI capabilities in the Salesforce Platform--in fields, objects, workflows, components and more--so everyone will be able to build AI-powered apps that get smarter with every interaction, using clicks or code. "With Salesforce Einstein, we are delivering the world's smartest CRM," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, Salesforce. "Einstein is now every customer's data scientist, making it easy for everyone to take advantage of best-in-class AI capabilities in the context of their business."

A new press release reports, "Today Tractica announced the launch of its new Artificial Intelligence Advisory Service, a subscription-based market research and analysis suite that provides independent and objective market intelligence and strategy insights for companies engaged in the rapidly evolving artificial intelligence (AI) market. As part of the service, Tractica's global industry analyst team provides strategic and quantitative analysis focused on the market opportunity for AI technologies in enterprise, consumer, and government markets." Managing director Clint Wheelock commented, "Artificial intelligence technologies are already beginning to have a disruptive effect on established business models across virtually every industry, while simultaneously enabling new business processes that were not previously possible… Rapid advances in AI technologies like deep learning, machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing (NLP) are being enabled by more powerful hardware, sophisticated algorithms, and a virtually limitless ocean of data to analyze and interpret." The release goes on, "As part of its Artificial Intelligence service, Tractica's industry analysts offer timely and actionable market insights, covering specific technology and industry sectors as well as overall market conditions and trends. Research reports include an in-depth examination of AI business models, use cases, technology issues, and key industry players in addition to detailed market sizing, segmentation, and forecasts. Tractica's Artificial Intelligence Advisory Service examines use cases and business models for the application of artificial intelligence technologies in enterprise, consumer, and government markets."

IBM Research (NYSE: IBM) today announced a multi-year collaboration with the Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences at MIT to advance the scientific field of machine vision, a core aspect of artificial intelligence. The new IBM-MIT Laboratory for Brain-inspired Multimedia Machine Comprehension's (BM3C) goal will be to develop cognitive computing systems that emulate the human ability to understand and integrate inputs from multiple sources of audio and visual information into a detailed computer representation of the world that can be used in a variety of computer applications in industries such as healthcare, education, and entertainment. The BM3C will address technical challenges around both pattern recognition and prediction methods in the field of machine vision that are currently impossible for machines alone to accomplish. For instance, humans watching a short video of a real-world event can easily recognize and produce a verbal description of what happened in the clip as well as assess and predict the likelihood of a variety of subsequent events, but for a machine, this ability is currently impossible. Beginning in September 2016 in Cambridge, the BM3C collaboration will bring together leading brain, cognitive, and computer scientists to conduct research in the field of unsupervised machine understanding of audio-visual streams of data, using insights from next-generation models of the brain to inform advances in machine vision.

Beginning in September 2016 in Cambridge, the BM3C collaboration will bring together leading brain, cognitive, and computer scientists to conduct research in the field of unsupervised machine understanding of audio-visual streams of data, using insights from next-generation models of the brain to inform advances in machine vision. The vision is that this integrated cross-disciplinary research will lead to advances that are likely to change both our personal and professional lives - from helping clinicians improve elderly and disabled care to helping organizations maintain and repair complex machinery as well as a host of cross-industry applications. "In a world where humans and machines are working together in increasingly collaborative relationships, breakthroughs in the field of machine vision will potentially help us live healthier more productive lives," said Guru Banavar, Chief Scientist, Cognitive Computing and VP at IBM Research. "By bringing together brain researchers and computer scientists to solve this complex technical challenge, we will advance the state-of-the-art in AI with our collaborators at MIT." The BM3C will be led by Professor James DiCarlo, head of the Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences (BCS) at MIT, who will be supported by a team of faculty members, researchers, and graduate students from both the Brain & Cognitive Sciences department and the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL).

CRM company Salesforce, powered by the artificial intelligence of Einstein, is making additional in-roads into the contact center. Salesforce today unveiled Salesforce Einstein, which is being described as not only providing artificial intelligence for every company, but as creating the world's smartest customer relationship management (CRM) software. Whenever I cover a vendor announcement on No Jitter, one of my goals is to deliver value beyond the press release. And after listening to an hour long pre-briefing for press and analysts on the announcement last week, I was eager to get to work on coverage... Then I saw the press release. In 1,600 words, the Salesforce team has done an impressive job of laying out the Einstein vision and story.

As real-time, connected vehicle prognostics move rapidly into consumer and commercial transportation, they pave the way for the progression of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), greater OEM profits and increased customer loyalty. ABI Research forecasts that there will be more than seven million prognostics-enabled, commercial vehicle solutions connected globally by 2021. Vehicle prognostics are able to predict and inform, in real time, future component deviations or failures in advance of any performance impact. As these capabilities move rapidly, automotive prognostics will positively impact the supply chain from manufacturers to repair shops to third-party software providers. "Automotive safety is shifting the industry toward a machine learning focus," says Susan Beardslee, Senior Analyst at ABI Research.

The global cognitive computing market is expected to reach 12.5 billion in 2019, up from 2.5 billion in 2014, at a CAGR of 38%. Cognitive computing is another way of describing machine learning, an area of computer science which sees machines recognizing patterns and learning new material -- without being explicitly programmed by a human. As more businesses identify benefits of cognitive computing, the machine learning market is growing. Possible applications of machine learning are vast and varied. A survey from 451 Research outlines future initiatives that will impact the growth, use of, and quality of data under management, which is a critical component of machine learning and AI. Additionally, the report defined use cases that enterprises consider for employing machine learning.