Join NewVoiceMedia and Call Centre Helper as they discuss the effects of Artificial Intelligence on the contact centre. Artificial Intelligence has been threatening to transform the Contact Centre. But, how much of this talk is hype? And, how much is likely to happen? Could this lead to the decline of contact centres as we know it?

On Monday, Anthony Levandowski, co-founder of self-driving-truck startup Otto and now head of Uber's autonomous vehicle program, was interviewed on stage at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Surprisingly, the interviewer didn't mention the controversy that's rocking the autonomous vehicle world: the accusation by Google that Otto, which Uber acquired last year, was built, in part, on patented trade secrets stolen by Levandowski. Before starting Otto, Levandowski was a senior engineer in Google's self-driving vehicle team. In October, I interviewed Levandowski for a Forbes cover story about Uber. Part of the interview focused on how self-driving technology has morphed from a seemingly crazy idea spun up by Google into something scores of car companies, and even startups like Otto, are capable of implementing.

Lily Robotics, which promised an autonomous flying camera, is shutting down operations. Lily Robotics, the hyped drone startup that shutdown last month amid a consumer-protection civil suit from the San Francisco District Attorney's office, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Monday. In documents submitted to a U.S. district court in Delaware, Lily Robotics outlined its intentions to auction off intellectual property and refund customers, which it said was its first priority. "[Lily] wants to ensure no customers are harmed in this process," wrote Curtis Solsvig, a managing director at Goldin Associates who is named as the company's chief restructuring officer. Lily amassed more than $38 million in pre-orders from 61,450 customers in more than 80 countries, according to the filing.

This article was contributed by Mark Edmondson and Peter Meyer, both from IIH Nordic, specialists in online marketing and web communication headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark. Many analytics specialists agree that Machine Learning is going to revolutionise the digital analytics industry in the future, as all the major vendors battle to provide Machine Learning APIs that offer to surface interesting features of your data. These APIs offer cloud solutions that you can use to both scale up your own models, or take advantage of pre-trained models. Following our presentation at Superweek Hungary 2017, we wanted to show how you could start using these services today to enhance your own digital analytics capabilities. Among all Machine Learning techniques, we chose Sentiment Analysis since it is a common use case, but the same code with small modifications could be used for any of the machine learning APIs offered by the services we chose, Algorithmia and Google Natural Language API.

Recent American news events range from horrifying to dystopian, but reading the applications of our fast.ai I was blown away by how many bright, creative, resourceful folks from all over the world are applying deep learning to tackle a variety of meaningful and interesting problems. Their passions range from ending illegal logging, diagnosing malaria in rural Uganda, translating Japanese manga, reducing farmer suicides in India via better loans, making Nigerian fashion recommendations, monitoring patients with Parkinson's disease, and more. Our mission at fast.ai is to make deep learning accessible to people from varied backgrounds outside of elite institutions, who are tackling problems in meaningful but low-resource areas, far from mainstream deep learning research. Our group of selected fellows for Deep Learning Part 2 includes people from Nigeria, Ivory Coast, South Africa, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Singapore, Israel, Canada, Spain, Germany, France, Poland, Russia, and Turkey.

People always express a distaste for lawyers but nobody really elaborates as to why. The main reason is that lawyers know you have to use their services so they do stupid isht like charge ridiculous rates and bill you just to have a conversation with them. When we think about lawyers, we often think about that dude in the bathroom at the nightclub who is trying to hand you paper towels after you wash your hands. He's trying to interject himself into your life in hopes that you'll tip him a dollar for handing you a paper towel and offering you some cologne. He's nothing special because any other dude like him could offer the exact same service.

Zoho today unveiled Zia, the new Zoho CRM intelligent sales assistant, powered by AI, that detects anomalies, suggests workflows and macros, and advises salespeople the best time to contact a prospect. Zoho also launched Blueprint, a Zoho CRM tool for building and implementing business processes. In addition, the company has included a host of new features in its award-winning customer relationship management software, Zoho CRM, such as scoring rules and the SalesSignals platform, to help boost sales productivity. "Salespeople put work into their CRM. But does the CRM work in return to make it easy for salespeople?"

The new iPhone is going to change its charging point again, making most accessories defunct in one swift move. Apple will drop the Lightning Port that's currently used to put charge into the phone and get data out of it, and instead use USB-C, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal. USB-C is quickly becoming the standard for the bottom of phones, and is used in rivals including Google's Pixel and even in Apple's own laptops. But the change would come just a few years after the Lightning Port was introduced with the iPhone 5. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

Artificial Intelligence may still be in its infancy, but it's already forcing leadership teams around the world to reconsider some of their core structures. Advances in technology are causing firms to restructure their organizational makeup, transform their HR departments, develop new training models, and reevaluate their hiring practices. This is according to Bersin By Deloitte's 2017 Human Capital Trends Report, which draws on surveys from over 10,000 HR and business leaders in 140 countries. Much of these changes are a result of the early penetration of basic AI software, as well as preparation for the organizational needs that will emerge as they mature. "What we concluded is that what AI is definitely doing is not eliminating jobs, it is eliminating tasks of jobs, and creating new jobs, and the new jobs that are being created are more human jobs," says Josh Bersin, principal and founder of Bersin by Deloitte.