Amazon is testing a grocery pickup service in Seattle. The AmazonFresh Pickup service is currently open only to Amazon employees. Eventually, members of Amazon's $99-a-year Prime loyalty program will be able to order groceries online and drive to a pickup location, where crews will deliver items to the car. The AmazonFresh Pickup service is currently open only to Amazon employees. Eventually, members of Amazon's $99-a-year Prime loyalty program will be able to order groceries online and drive to a pickup location, where crews will deliver items to the car Amazon says orders will be ready in as little as 15 minutes after being placed. The service is being tested in two locations in Seattle, where Amazon is headquartered.

Chatbots were last year's big hype, and they are this year's big commerce and marketing frontier. Indeed, they are coming into their own as an interface for businesses to communicate with their customers, and for organizations to reach out to clients. That being said, chatbot tech solutions and strategy need some more polishing. A recent report claims that Facebook's chatbots "failed to fulfill" no fewer than 70 percent of user requests -- meaning that chatbots couldn't understand what users were saying, and in some cases humans had to step in. On the other hand, members of the millennial generation can't wait to get their hands on chatbot technology. According to a Retale poll, 86 percent of millennials said that brands should use chatbots to promote deals, products, and services, and nearly all of the 58 percent of respondents who had interacted with a chatbot said that it was a positive experience.

It's safe to say that as data sets grow and the time to create positive impressions shrinks, having compelling insights at your disposal becomes more critical to customer engagement success. Jim Sinai, vice president of marketing at Salesforce Einstein, notes how retailers are trying to build a better experience online and ultimately bridge the online and in-store experiences. "What the Salesforce Commerce Cloud with Einstein is actually helping people do is find opportunities to do product recommendations to visitors both for the web experience and the in-store experience and figure out how to bring that connected retail experience together."

You can't just assume that when an application reads each letter of a sentence that the output will make sense. Amazon Polly provides speech synthesis functionality that overcomes those challenges, allowing you to focus on building applications that use text-to-speech instead of addressing interpretation challenges. Amazon Polly turns text into lifelike speech. It lets you create applications that talk naturally, enabling you to build entirely new categories of speech-enabled products. Amazon Polly is an Amazon AI service that uses advanced deep learning technologies to synthesize speech that sounds like a human voice.

I was looking for a good use case of Xanadu, a big data platform technology that I'm now commercializing, in Machine Learning. Distributed deep learning exploiting large-scale datasets that is explained in this book in detail will be one of best use cases of Xanadu, which can show Xanadu's excellent functionality in deep learning applications. This book is an excellent reference to anyone who wants to explore the distributed deep learning for big data applications.

This book has been called "The best book on programming ever written". I'd have to agree--it is certainly the best that I've ever read. William Zinsser said, "The essence of writing is rewriting" and the same can be said for writing computer programs. Norvig's book presents this process--how the limitations of a program are overcome by revision and rewriting. What sets Norvig apart as a writer is that, amazingly enough, he can write about debugging (the most dreaded part of computer programming) and make it a fascinating read!

Artificial intelligence has seeped into the lives of everyone with an internet connection. Binge-watching television shows and online shopping carts full of suggested add-ons are commonplace, even though most consumers aren't aware of what's powering the recommendations. Algorithms are constantly hard at work, learning in real-time while users are sitting on the couch watching their favorite streaming shows or as they are adding items to their wish list at a favorite online retailer. Predictive analytics is permeating all industries as organizations start to harness the power of data collection to enable smart decisions. Artificial intelligence or AI, has become pervasive in business in every industry where decision making is being fundamentally transformed by Thinking Machines.

Jeff Bezos captured even more attention than usual when the Amazon CEO donned a giant robot suit (see below) called the Method-2. The suit made Bezos look even larger than his fortune, his foresightedness, his massive company and his ambitions already do. So who helped enlarge and empower Bezos in this case? It was a company called Hankook Mirae Technology -- and the makers of the Method-2 are awesome. It's hard to be declared the outright winner at Amazon's super cool MARS conference in Palm Springs, but Hankook Mirae was the winner this year clearly -- because Jeff Bezos in their robot suit.

Best-selling author Calum Chace writes fiction and non-fiction books about artificial intelligence. He is a regular speaker on AI and related technologies and runs a blog on the subject at www.pandoras-brain.com. Prior to becoming a full-time writer and speaker, Calum had a 30-year career in business, as a marketer, strategy consultant and CEO. He maintains his interest in business by serving as chairman and coach for growing companies. Calum studied philosophy at Oxford University, where he discovered that the science fiction he had been reading since boyhood was actually philosophy in fancy dress.

Over the next 12 months, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Augmented Reality (AR) look set to make a huge explosion into the mainstream. We've already seen the mass adoption of AR apps like Pokémon GO. After its launch in the UK on 14 July 2016, a staggering 6.1 million adults had downloaded the app just a month later. Businesses across a whole host of sectors are now exploring how AR and AI could revolutionise the way they operate. The retail sector is one industry that is leading the way in this technology revolution.