Amazon.com Inc said on Tuesday that it has partnered with Marriott International Inc to help increase guest access to amenities with Alexa, through its voice-controlled device Echo, in an attempt to expand its presence in the hospitality industry. Alexa for hospitality would assist in providing services ranging from ordering room service to requesting housekeeping or calling the concierge for dinner recommendations without picking up the phone. The company said the partnership will start this summer at Marriott's select properties and the service will be available by invitation to other hotel chains. Several media reports had said that Marriott had tested both Apple Inc's Siri and Amazon's Alexa to select what was best suited for its hotels. Marriott did not comment specifically on Apple, but said it has "great relationships with a number of technology companies and is always open to exploring opportunities to innovate and better the guest experience."

These and other efforts might help, but brick-and-mortar retailers have learned they need to do more to collect customer data in order to lure them away from the "one click" convenience Amazon offers. "It's all about trying to understand who these people are that are spending money," retail sales consultant Bob Phibbs, CEO of The Retail Doctor, told Salon. "It's much different than in the old days where you take out an ad targeting a million people and hope some of them buy from you. Now it's about owning the customer who has bought from you." As anyone who uses its site well knows, Amazon has been automatically directing its repeat buyers toward items they're more likely to purchase based on data it has collected about them.

Bangalore: Artificial intelligence (AI) is the next big step for retail and FMCG companies following the implementation of advanced big data and analytics (BDA) solutions, which can unlock huge data volumes in an automated way in real-time and ultimately lead to maximum profitability, according to GlobalData. The company's Disruptor Database revealed that although retailers have grown to their current size by capitalizing on profitable bits of digitalization, they are often challenged in understanding what their customers need at scale. There is a colossal amount of customer data with enterprises, but only a handful are able to generate value deemed from low conversion rates of below 5% overall. This broadens the scope for retailers and consumer goods companies to use predictive analytics to enhance decisions related to supply chain management, customer behavior, staff allocation and the likelihood of goods being damaged, lost or returned. "While most analysis related to understanding market trends, achieving greater customer personalization, and improving operational efficiency can be performed with BDA methods, AI in many cases is less cost intensive and faster - at times even instant.. Intelligent machine learning systems can replace expensive armies of data scientists and provide solutions or product recommendations in an automated way. The timing of the analytics is crucial, since opportunities for cost savings or additional sales are frequently limited to minutes or even seconds," said Rena Bhattacharyya, Technology Research Director - GlobalData.

In the Create a Question and Answer Bot with Amazon Lex and Amazon Alexa blog post, we showed you how you could create a QnABot (pronounced "Q and A Bot") for a situation in which your users have questions and you have answers. Now, what if this situation were reversed? What if you could ask users questions using quizzes, polls, surveys, and tests? These are valuable ways to drive user engagement and collect actionable feedback. Our most recent QnABot update includes the new Questionnaire Bot feature, which allows content designers to rapidly create quizzes for users and integrate them with existing QnABot content.

Why it matters: Alibaba says that over the last year, it has redone about 1 million mom and pop shops like the Huangs' across China. It has done the same with about a hundred superstores. Big and small, these outlets buy all their goods through Alibaba's platform and pay using its affiliate Alipay app. A picture of the future: These stores are examples of an expanding battleground among China's cutthroat tech giants, and petri-dishes of the future of business around the world. Among the central ideas is that in the future, shoppers will not view e-commerce and brick-and-mortar as distinct things, but as a single merged organism -- as simply "commerce."

Whether Father's Day, Mother's Day, a birthday or simply "just because," buying gifts can feel like counting grains of sand -- i.e., it's not easy. Meanwhile, there are 250,ooo -- 300,000 e-commerce companies in the U.S. all vying for the attention of shoppers. How are consumers possibly expected to decide where to spend their hard-earned money? And how can retailer s create a more personalized shopping experience, rather than facing the same demise as the 6,700 retail locations that closed their doors in 2017? In short, the retail sector is in a sticky wicket.

Voice shopping using smart speakers and smartphone apps is starting to gain traction among consumers, opening up a new "conversational commerce" channel and potentially disrupting the retail sector. Devices such as Amazon's Alexa-powered speakers and Google Home, which use artificial intelligence (AI) to respond to voice commands, are offering new choices to consumers who are looking for more convenient ways to order goods and services. Voice shopping is expected to jump to US$40 billion (S$54 billion) annually in 2022 in the United States, from US$2 billion today, according to a survey this year by OC&C Strategy Consultants. "People are liking the convenience and natural interaction of using voice," said Ms Victoria Petrock of the research firm eMarketer. "Computing in general is moving more toward voice interface because the technology is more affordable, and people are responding well because they don't have to type."

Automation Anywhere has opened its Bot Store to machine learning and AI developers, allowing them to offer up their bots for developing new applications and services. The company has added its cognitive IQ Bot tech into the mix, to help turn unstructured data into structured data for developing business processes such as financial data. Integrating automation into invoicing, payments and purchase ordering will enable verticals struggling with innovation to concentrate on being art eh forefront of their industry rather than dealing with reams of paperwork. Bot Store has grown rapidly as a resource for developers to share their plug'n' play, off the shelf robots. In fact, Automation Anywhere says the marketplace has grown 100% just two months after launching.

These are the names we call out now, perhaps more often than we call out those of friends and family members. Over the past decade we've become accustomed to the idea that when we call a customer service line, we must often pass through a gauntlet of voice-activated technology before reaching a human. The fact that we are willing to shout "representative" repeatedly in order to talk to a person shows both the limits of AI in its current state and our desire to connect to another human being. In business, the human factor is often the difference between a one-time user and a lifelong customer. It's a fact that luxury department store owners have known for years.

Echo devices misinterpret human commands, and, say, start recording private conversations without permission? Two senators want to know. In a letter dated June 11, Sens. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.) The letter was first reported by Wired. The senators, who lead the Judiciary subcommittee on privacy, technology and the law, framed the letter around a recent incident involving a family that discovered that their Echo had recorded a private conversation and sent it to a random person in their contacts.