Chinese tech company Huawei wants to change the way people talk to their artificially intelligent voice assistants. The firm plans to make those conversations more emotionally interactive, according to senior executives. Voice-powered virtual assistants currently serve a functional role, by giving information -- "What's the weather like?" -- or completing small tasks like turning on a playlist. Huawei wants to take that a step further and create a voice companion to fulfill some of its users' emotional needs. "We want to provide emotional interactions," Felix Zhang, vice president of software engineering at Huawei's consumer business group, told CNBC at the company's annual global analyst summit in Shenzhen, China.

Chinese tech company Huawei wants to change the way people talk to their artificially intelligent voice assistants. The firm plans to make those conversations more emotionally interactive, according to senior executives. Voice-powered virtual assistants currently serve a functional role, by giving information -- "What's the weather like?" -- or completing small tasks like turning on a playlist. Huawei wants to take that a step further and create a voice companion to fulfill some of its users' emotional needs. "We want to provide emotional interactions," Felix Zhang, vice president of software engineering at Huawei's consumer business group, told CNBC at the company's annual global analyst summit in Shenzhen, China.

What do you get when you cross an A-list celebrity with a humanoid robot? A pretty awkward date, it turns out. Will Smith, who of course starred in the film adaptation of Isaac Asimov's collection of science fiction stories I, Robot, tried his hand at a spot of robot dating the other day on the Cayman Islands. In a video posted on YouTube, the actor attempted to have a date with Sophia the robot, a celebrity in her own right. She's previously spoken to the United Nations, appeared on plenty of TV shows, and even been on the cover of Elle Brasil.

Machine Learning algorithms are everywhere. They're helping you pick out your next gift on Amazon, controlling what you find on Google, they're suggesting new music for you on Spotify, and they're doing their best to keep you on their website. When trying to explain how machines learn we tend to try and describe it in human terms. Unfortunately (or fortunately) machine learning isn't based on how we teach humans. The video is a bit simple in its explanations, but it describes some important concepts.

As you read this essay, you understand each word based on your understanding of previous words. You don't throw everything away and start thinking from scratch again. Traditional neural networks can't do this, and it seems like a major shortcoming. For example, imagine you want to classify what kind of event is happening at every point in a movie. It's unclear how a traditional neural network could use its reasoning about previous events in the film to inform later ones. Recurrent neural networks address this issue.

The PR industry means different things to different people. Depending on development in technology or your unique industry, public relations can be handled in any one of a dozen different ways. What never changes, however, is that every year brings a slew of huge developments to the world of PR. And 2018's shaping up to be a big year. Join us, today, as we take a look at five of the biggest issues in the world of PR right now, and how they look set to develop over the course of the next year.

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine noticed that Amazon didn't appear to have plans to sell Blu-rays of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the most popular movie of 2017; only a digital version was up for presale. He thought he'd noticed something similar recently "with a couple of big geek films"--a "weird war against Blu-rays" that seemed to cut against the entire point of the everything store. Amazon would be foolish not to use its platform to advance its position vis-à-vis its competitors. Searching for a Google Home on the site, for example, takes you to listings of Amazon's own smart speaker, the Echo; the closest you'll get to Google's product is a self-published manual on setting up your Home that you can skim on your Kindle. Yes, it was a bit curious that Amazon was willing to cut into its own sales of Last Jedi DVDs, but perhaps blackballing the product to boost digital purchases on its video platform was worth it. Naively, I assumed Amazon's "weird war" was against itself.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the mantra of the current era. The phrase is intoned by technologists, academicians, journalists and venture capitalists alike. As with many phrases that cross over from technical academic fields into general circulation, there is significant misunderstanding accompanying the use of the phrase. But this is not the classical case of the public not understanding the scientists -- here the scientists are often as befuddled as the public. The idea that our era is somehow seeing the emergence of an intelligence in silicon that rivals our own entertains all of us -- enthralling us and frightening us in equal measure. There is a different narrative that one can tell about the current era. Consider the following story, which involves humans, computers, data and life-or-death decisions, but where the focus is something other than intelligence-in-silicon fantasies.

Artificial intelligence might be the way of the future -- or increasingly, the present -- but in order to successfully reap the benefits, executives need to ensure that purposeful steps are taken before and during the launch of the software. SAP's report, "Making the Most of Machine Learning: Five Lessons From Fast Learners," reveals the key components of deploying and maximizing machine learning."Machine "Executives need to view machine learning not as a quick fix but as an integral part of a larger strategy to give their business a competitive edge. This requires looking past the initial investment and focusing on the potential for long-term business value."To Half of the participants represented companies with $500 million or more in annual revenue.

If you've ever let Spotify DJ your party and then found yourself asking, a half an hour in, "Spotify, what are you thinking?"--well, it actually may be thinking a lot like you. Scientists reported in a new study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that they've created a machine-learning system that processes sound just like humans, whether it's discerning the meaning of a word or classifying music by genre. It's the first artificial system to mimic the way the brain interprets sounds--and it rivals humans in its accuracy. The research, published today in the journal Neuron, offers a tantalizing new way to study the brain. The researchers' model was based on what's called a deep neural network, a system whose structure is loosely inspired by neurons, or brain cells.