SAN FRANCISCO – Alphabet Inc.'s Google on Tuesday announced a new Pixel smartphone and a virtual reality headset, making a concerted move into home electronics and challenging Apple Inc.'s iPhone at the high end of the more than 400 billion global smartphone market. The string of announcements, including the 649 Pixel, a new Wi-Fi router and its voice-activated digital assistant for the living room, Home, is the clearest sign yet that Google intends to compete directly with Apple, Amazon.com and even its own Android mobile operating system customers to create a world of integrated devices and services that meet every digital need. The moves also show Google is taking tighter control of its products. Google lets Android device makers modify software almost without limit, which has helped make Android the most-used mobile operating system in the world. But company executives boasted that the Pixel was developed in-house from start to finish and gives it a direct hand on a platform for the distribution of its internet-based services.

Google, ubiquitous in internet search but trailing in consumer hardware, is expected Tuesday to reveal details of its latest efforts to infuse smarts into more of its product offerings. The Alphabet Inc. GOOGL 0.22 % unit aims to integrate its work in artificial intelligence, which allows software to make inferences and decisions, to make products more useful with voice commands that may represent the next step in search. The Mountain View, Calif., company foreshadowed its strategy in May when it announced a device called Home to rival the Echo speaker, Amazon.com Inc. AMZN -0.43 % 's surprise hit that allows users to ask a virtual assistant named Alexa questions and to perform tasks. Home, a voice-controlled speaker, will be powered by what the company calls Google assistant.

AI is uniquely able to provide a text-free shopping journey, one that transforms mobile shopping into a wordless visual conversation. As much time as we spend on our cellphones, we actually don't use them to buy all that much. According to eMarketer, while mobile phones boast about 30% of all retail traffic, they only account for 11% of revenue. We browse on our phones, sure, but when it comes to buying, we actually use our desktops or head to a brick-and-mortar location that carries products we're interested in. So why is that exactly?

Technology has been good to 1-800-Flowers. The company has long pioneered new ways of retailing, a toll-free number, direct sales via the internet. So when, in 2009, it opened its online store on Facebook the company was expecting another tech-based success. Like many others they found Facebook was a tough sell. "We were one of the first to actually have a Facebook store, and we did have big expectations, but it turned out to be not very successful," recalled Jon Mandell, vice-president of marketing at the flower and gift seller.

Jot Russell and his brilliant co-authors have crafted a uniquely profound universe in "Science Fiction Consortium". The human drama behind each story is as compelling as the stories I hear from some real space travelers I have the pleasure of knowing. There is much we can all learn about ourselves from the adventures told in "Science Fiction Consortium". This is an eye-opening book that will change your perception of the world we live in on so many levels.

There is good content in this book, but its reliability is called into serious question by some very irritating and careless errors. In more than one place, the book gives a link for "extras" that are allegedly available. This link is invalid; there is no such page at the dummies.com This is so egregiously over the line that I am being generous in giving this book more than one star. How careless can you be not to ensure that a link on your own site works?

Machine learning is a discipline aimed at having computers discover patterns or trends in some set of data without being explicitly programmed to recognize the pattern or trend. A counter example will help to explain the technique. Target is famous in the retail industry for having employed statisticians and data scientists to use purchase behavior to identify shoppers who were pregnant and then market to them. Presumably, those statisticians and data scientists used data from Target's baby registry system to identify pregnancy-driven buying patterns. These patterns were then used to write algorithms that could identify pregnant shoppers and offer discounts or coupons that were likely to make that shopper more loyal to Target.

This book is probably best for those of you who have read the theory, but are not quite sure how to turn that theory into something useful. Or for those who simply hunger for a survey of how machine learning can be applied to the web, and need a non-mathematical introduction. My area of strength happens to be neural networks (my MS thesis topic was in the subject), so I will focus on that. In a few pages of the book, the author describes how the most popular of all neural networks, backpropagation, can be used to map a set of search terms to a URL. One might do this, for example, to try and find the page best matching the search terms.

Investors poured a record high 1.05B into artificial intelligence startups in Q2'16, and AI is already affecting more areas of our lives than many people realize. Even retail and e-commerce companies are increasingly integrating the technology. Recently there's been a rush of AI announcements and acquisitions by major retailers: Just last week, Etsy acquired Blackbird to enhance its search functionality through AI, followed the very next day by Amazon acquiring Angel.ai And earlier this month, e-commerce unicorn Houzz (see our full unicorn tracker here) announced a deep learning initiative to help users find and buy products by clicking on images. Using CB Insights data, we dove into the wide array of AI startups focused on retailers and e-commerce businesses, including AI-powered personal shopping apps, natural language processing and image recognition tools for shopping websites, predictive inventory allocation tools, and more.

The way humans interact with machines is at an inflection point and conversational artificial intelligence (AI) is at the center of the transformation. Alexa, the voice service that powers Amazon Echo, enables customers to interact with the world around them in a more intuitive way using only their voice. The Alexa Prize is an annual competition for university students dedicated to accelerating the field of conversational AI. The inaugural competition is focused on creating a socialbot, a new Alexa skill that converses coherently and engagingly with humans on popular topics and news events. Participating teams will advance several areas of conversational AI including knowledge acquisition, natural language understanding, natural language generation, context modeling, commonsense reasoning and dialog planning.