Amazon founder Jeff Bezos says when it comes to technology, "We're on the edge of the golden era." Bezos offered a glimpse of his vision of the future during an interview Tuesday at the Code Conference in Southern California. Of artificial intelligence, Bezos says, "It's probably hard to overstate how big of an impact it's going to have on society over the next 20 years." Bezos says Amazon has 1,000 people working on its Alexa platform, which powers the company's popular voice-controlled Echo device. Bezos also owns The Washington Post and touched on other matters during his talk.

Amazon has three big pillars: the retail marketplace, Amazon Prime, and Amazon Web Services. But there certainly would be room for a fourth pillar. It's possible that Amazon Studios, which is producing original video content for Prime Video, could be that fourth pillar, but it's also possible that the Alexa voice assistant, which is packaged inside of the Echo speaker, could end up being the fourth pillar, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos told Recode's Walt Mossberg today at Recode's Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. Google revealed its own Echo competitor earlier this month, and Apple is also working on an answer to the Echo. But Bezos does not seem to be worried about that.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is very bullish on his company's artificial intelligence push. So bullish, in fact, that Amazon has invested four years of research into its key project in AI -- and stacked that project with a sizable staff. Bezos said at the Code Conference that the team on Alexa, Amazon's smart voice-assistant software, and Echo, its flagship device, is now more than 1,000 employees. "We've been working behind the scenes for the last four years," he said about Echo and Alexa. Other tech giants are moving into the space.

Where else but the Code Conference can you expect to hear from the Tech industry's biggest players like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Google CEO Sundar Pichai? Speaking to the Code conference here, Bezos, whose company has a hit on its hand with the Echo connected speaker, said "it's hard to overstate how big of an impact this will have on society over the next 20 years. It doesn't mean phones are going to go away or that voice actions will replace screens. As long as people have eyes, they have screens." The Echo speaker can turn on lights, access online music and answer queries by waking the speaker by stating the word Alexa.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos thinks that we're at the "beginning of a golden era" when it comes to machine learning and artificial intelligence. "It's hard to overstate how much of an impact it's going to have over the next 20 years," he said on stage at Vox's Media's Code Conference on Tuesday night. Not only is it the first inning, "it might even be the first guy up at bat," he laughed. Amazon currently sells a voice-controlled smart speaker called Echo that's powered by its artificial intelligence assistant, Alexa. Right now, Alexa can help users do things like order groceries, play music, or make to-do lists.

RANCHO PALOS VERDES, Calif. - The emergence of artificial intelligence and machine learning to household gadgets is "gigantic," according to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Speaking to the Code conference here, Bezos, whose company has a huge hit on its hand with the Echo connected speaker, said "it's hard to overstate how big of an impact this will have on society over the next 20 years. It doesn't mean phones are going to go away or that voice actions will replace screens. As long as people have eyes, they have screens." The Echo speaker can turn on lights, access online music and answer queries by awaking the speaker and waking it by stating the word Alexa.

"It was magical, it was a moment in history," recalls Joseph Atick of the day in 1994 when the computer he and colleagues at Rockefeller University had built was able to recognize its masters' faces. As each of the three mathematicians introduced themselves, a metallic voice responded, "I see Joseph. Atick, who now chairs an organization that promotes identification technologies, says, "We didn't realize what we'd just done." Fast-forward two decades and picture a talking mannequin that greets a shopper by name as she enters a favorite store, informing her that pants that match the blouse she bought a week earlier have just been marked down. "It's just a matter of time until we start to see this technology reach shopping malls and beyond--it's ready right now," says Werner Goertz, a Gartner analyst who has authored a report on the adoption of facial recognition and other surveillance tools by retailers, casinos, and theme parks.

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is investing in Israeli startup Twiggle to tap its search technology and solidify its lead in Chinese e-commerce, according to people familiar with the matter. The Tel Aviv-based company could help Alibaba improve the quality of online-shopping searches as the e-commerce operator expands in China and abroad, people familiar with matter said, declining to be named because the matter is private. The startup will get 5 million to 10 million from Alibaba, one of the people said. Refining search technology has proven pivotal to shopping services like Amazon.com Inc. Twiggle, led by former Google Inc. executives Amir Konigsberg and Adi Avidor, uses machine learning and natural language processing to guess what shoppers are after. When users search for the "best laptop," Twiggle will try to understand what that means: such as highest screen resolution, most memory, longest battery life and so on.

In today's guest post, Alex Casalboni and Giacomo Marinangeli of Cloud Academy discuss the design and development of their new Inspire system. Our Challenge Mixing technology and content has been our mission at Cloud Academy since the very early days. We are builders and we love technology, but we also know content is king. Serving our members with the best content and creating smart technology to automate it is what kept us up at night for a long time. Companies are always fighting for people's time and attention and at Cloud Academy, we face those same challenges as well.

Amazon has released a web-based version of Alexa, the voice-activated digital assistant that powers its Echo speaker. Called Echosim.io, the service simulates having an Echo -- to a degree. At the user's prompting, Alexa on the Echo can access Amazon Prime or Spotify music, call an Uber, check Google calendar, or listen to an Audible book. In the animation, the Echo's rim starts to pulse blue at the user's prompt. The web-based simulator is far more limited than Alexa in Echo or Amazon's smaller speakers, Dot and Tap.