As Alexa-enabled devices continue to expand into new countries, finding information across languages that use different scripts becomes a more pressing challenge. For example, a Japanese music catalogue may contain names written in English or the various scripts used in Japanese -- Kanji, Katakana, or Hiragana. When an Alexa customer, from anywhere in the world, asks for a certain song, album, or artist, we could have a mismatch between Alexa's transcription of the request and the script used in the corresponding catalogue. To address this problem, we developed a machine-learned multilingual named-entity transliteration system. Named-entity transliteration is the process of converting a name from one language script to another.

Few people rely on Alexa, Amazon's voice assistant, to shop for them, according to a pair of recent reports. If Alexa is to become a truly successful sales-bot, it'll need to find a way to convince shoppers it's getting them best deals. According to UK digital marketing firm Code Computerlove, a survey of people who own smart speakers – more than 70 percent of which are powered by Alexa – found only seven percent have used them to make an online purchase. It might be worse: tech news site The Information reported that only two percent of Alexa-enabled device owners used the voice assistant to shop this year, citing Amazon's own internal data. Amazon disputed the numbers in that report, saying "millions of customers use Alexa to shop."

Shopping: It's not what it once was. Forget the long drive to the mall and countless hours of browsing. Customers now simply log in from the comfort of their own home to have the world at their fingertips. The massive uptake of e-commerce is an unprecedented shift in consumer behavior, expectations and purchases. The evidence is in the numbers: Internet shopping is the most popular online activity.

Mother's Day is a busy time of year for online flower delivery service Telaflora, and the brand generally sends about a billion email offers a year. To make sense of the mountains of data they were getting from customers' online behaviors, the brand used Bluecore, a data-driven tool that matches customer data to products, and Custora, a customer analytics tool, to create automated flags that would deliver customized messages for customers at every stage in the buyer's journey. Teleflora was able to use AI to accurately match the customer to the product they were most likely to be interested in, and the brand saw 50% more orders over the previous year.

Big data is disrupting the retail industry, ushering in a new era of hyper-targeting and hyper-personalization. Just as the Internet disrupted traditional retail storefronts 20 years ago, the era of big data is now upending conventional retail marketing models that relied on demographics. A wealth of structured and unstructured customer data creates the potential to understand customer intent in real time and target customers for instant sales. For many retailers, however, the true potential of this data remains untapped with no practical application. Retailers lack the capability and expertise to analyze this data fully and then translate findings into action.

Walmart-backed Flipkart has just issued a challenge to Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant. The home-grown e-commerce giant today announced that it has acquired Bengaluru-based artificial intelligence (AI) startup Liv.ai, which has developed a platform that converts speech-to-text in nine regional languages apart from English. With this move, the e-tailer hopes to soon offer an end-to-end conversational shopping experience for its users. "Given the complexities in typing on vernacular keyboards, voice will become a preferred interface for new shoppers. One does understand that building a voice interface is complex, and is especially challenging in Indian context given multiple languages and accents," Flipkart CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy said in a statement.

Strap on a virtual reality headset and start shopping as if you were in a Walmart. That's a possibility conjured by two patent applications the company filed. The Bentonville, Ark.-based retailer has applied for patents that envision a virtual showroom and a fulfillment center that would allow people to put on a headset and shop in a digital version of the store. Customers could browse and interact with merchandise through a 3D simulation that responds to their gestures, the filings indicate. And in turn, the simulations could generate sensory feedback such as the feeling of moisture, heat, force and wind, as users manipulate the items.

Almost half of UAE-based CEOs in the retail industry intend to start using artificial intelligence (AI) in the next two years to enhance the store experience for customers. This is according to the 2018 Global Consumer Executive Top of Mind survey, jointly conducted by KPMG International and The Consumer Goods Forum (CGF). Global CEOs, however, were less optimistic about the adoption of AI, with only 24 percent expressing intent to start using AI over the next few years. They were also less confident about the prospects of technology in retail, with 48 percent saying that brands would use technology to enhance the retail store experience. This is in stark contrast with UAE CEOs, who were confident of harnessing technology to transform the customer experience in-store.

Alphabet is broken out into its core Google business and a number of other subsidiaries, which it deems "Other Bets." The majority of Google's business comes from advertising revenues, which the company generates through its search engine as well as a number of other Google-affiliated and partnership websites. Outside of search and advertising, Google generates revenue from products including cloud and enterprise, consumer hardware, mapping, and YouTube. In addition to Google, Alphabet encompasses a host of other subsidiaries called "Other Bets." These companies are more experimental in nature, and as a result are not material to Alphabet's bottom line.

Can't decide what to wear? Uniqlo, the Japanese fast-fashion chain, has a solution: A chatbot that gives clothing recommendations based on human input, as well as your purchasing history and . . . The technology, which has been years in the making, is just one example of the extremes that retailers are going to as they try to build computer algorithms that can intuit the intangibles of fashion. "Instead of making something that's purely mechanical - you bought this last month, so you might like this - we're infusing humanity into the process," said Rei Inamoto, founder of Inamoto & Co., the New York-based firm behind Uniqlo's technology. "When somebody asks, 'What should I wear?' they're looking for a personalized answer."