The company confirms its AI assistant will have its own side button on the S8. Eventually, you'll be able to boss it around on more than just a phone. What's Samsung planning to do with you?" Bixby is Samsung's new digital voice assistant, and it will debut on the upcoming Galaxy S8. It will have its own dedicated button on the side of the phone, letting you communicate with the artificial intelligence in a sort of a walkie-talkie way. But Samsung's plan for Bixby, which it views as a "bright sidekick" to control your phone, doesn't stop there, said Injong Rhee, head of R&D for Samsung's mobile software and services operations. Injong Rhee, Samsung's head of R&D for mobile software and services, has led the development of Bixby. "We start off with the phone and can quickly expand into other devices," said Rhee, a Samsung exec known for his loose locks and casual style. Bixby is the latest entrant in the crowded field of digital assistants that already includes Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant and Microsoft's Cortana. Every tech heavyweight is investing in these assistants because they're heralded as the future of how we'll interact with our gadgets. The hope is to build a relationship with you now and ultimately get you to buy more of their products later. Samsung believes artificial intelligence is the next major wave of computing, and Bixby is the manifestation of that belief. Gartner reckons that by 2019, digital assistants will be the primary way consumers interact with their smart homes. Instead of being able to answer questions like "What's the weather today," Bixby will help you control your phone. You'll be able to do things like say, "Find a photo of the Sagrada Familia.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning already make a huge impact on the way we watch movies and television, shop, and travel, but how will these new technology advancements affect you as a sourcing or recruiting professional? It all comes down to being able to quickly analyze huge amounts of data and make decisions and predictions based on that, says Summer Husband, senior director, data science, at Randstad Sourceright, in a presentation at SourceCon, in Anaheim, Calif, last week. In a healthcare setting, Husband says, algorithms can be used to perform survival analysis, a machine learning technique that analyzes time to an event, such as a patient's expected time before recurrence of a disease or a death. This process was developed for medical situations and it's a good analogy to sourcing and recruiting except instead of survival analysis, job posting data is examined. Ultimately, the goal is to answer the question, "what's the time to fill?" "So, we take data on jobs we've filled for clients in the past, how long those took, how many candidates, open roles, information about the company as well as job market data from sources like the BLS and CareerBuilder, for instance, to find out how all of those things impact the'survival rate' of our open jobs. We're obviously flipping the script, because we want our open jobs to die quickly, but the process is the same," Husband says.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is seemingly everywhere today. Whether it's using a virtual assistant like Siri or Alexa, improving sales insights through analytics, or hiring the best talent with AI-based recruiting software, many businesses have already started incorporating this technology into their everyday processes. While you may not necessarily need to make artificial intelligence the core of your operations right now, most experts agree that AI's role and importance in business will only continue to grow. Nine members from Forbes Technology Council each shared a way that companies can begin preparing for AI right now. I think for smaller companies, it is too early to create a plan, but I do think it is important to stay updated on AI and how it is being implemented in an applicable industry.

In financial services, the near future will see a shift in power toward the customer. That was the general consensus among SAP and the bankers and insurers participating in the first SAP Next-Gen Boot Camp on Machine Learning in Financial Services, held at the SAP Innovation Center Potsdam last week. Forty-six SAP customers from banking and insurance gathered to discuss the current and future challenges these sectors face, as well as to gain hands-on experience as to how machine learning can help master them. Machine learning and artificial intelligence provide unheard-of opportunities to banks and insurers to gain actionable insights from the large amounts of data they are dealing with on a daily basis. Banking is currently experiencing the need to accommodate the wishes of a generation who expects to have "a bank on their phone" (Stephen Lofthouse, University College London), a development that FinTech startups have caught on to much faster.

Over the course of March of the Machines, there has been a lot of talk about machine learning and deep learning, and the jobs arising from them, but what is it like to work in that field? When we talk about emerging technologies and the future of tech, deep learning is an area that crops up again and again. It will be the driving force behind the development of AI and robotics, and already plays an essential part in the creation of tech we use on a daily basis. But what is it like to work in this evolving sector? We asked Kevin McGuinness, research fellow at the Insight Centre for Data Analytics, Dublin City University (DCU), about what he's doing with deep learning and how the area is changing.

Marketing is undergoing dramatic change, driven by shifts in technology and the availability of digital data. Among the most significant changes is the heightened ability for marketers to discern what customers and potential buyers care about and then act on that information. Marketers today are watching as buyers leave digital tracks - the web pages they view, buttons they press on mobile devices, comments they leave on Facebook or Twitter. By observing how consumers act, marketers can learn what buyers care about and what is important to them. By aggregating this digital data, and applying the right algorithms, marketers can recommend products, deliver interesting offers, and create personalization to segments of one rather than to batches of thousands.

CMOs looking to transform their teams to be more efficient will soon be able to count on AI from their agencies. A new strategic alliance between global marketing agency Publicis Groupe and Microsoft Corp aims to create AI capabilities that help CMOs to transform their organizations. The recently-announced partnership will see new AI-inspired solutions developed to improve marketing operations and create new customer experiences. According to the Pucblicis' press statement, this marriage of data and technologies will help the agency to help CMOs and brands to "reimagine their digital operations at scale" using online and offline data. "Our partnership with Microsoft is an example of how we combine our unique assets and services with their cutting-edge cloud and AI technology to help transform our Clients business in powerful new ways," said Rishad Tobaccowala, Chief Strategy and Growth Officer and member of Directoire, Publicis Groupe.

The problem isn't that AI is new; it's that VCs can't let go of the old. Venture capital has always been an old-school industry in love with new-school ideas. Its current darling is artificial intelligence. While firms have ramped up AI investments, they've proven reluctant to personally use AI -- not realizing that there are multiple ways to profit from its development. Despite the nationwide drop in venture funding from $20.8 billion in mid-2015 to less than $11.7 billion by 2016's end, AI investment has ticked steadily upward.

Artificial intelligence is all around. Tech giants and startups are cultivating their AI technology to create better ways of living such as riding on driverless cars and making payment by scanning your face. While this lies on the grounds that AI's practical skills can ultimately replace human labor, one startup believes that AI can be an emotional companion to human. Shanghai-based startup Emotibot made an AI-powered bot that can complete practical tasks as well as have a conversation with you. Corporates who want more customer interaction are in talk with the company to source their technology to humanize their online customer service.

This article was written by Matthew Rubashkin. With a background in optical physics and biomedical research, Matthew has a broad range of experiences in software development, database engineering, and data analytics. At SVDS, our R&D team has been investigating different deep learning technologies, from recognizing images of trains to speech recognition. We needed to build a pipeline for ingesting data, creating a model, and evaluating the model performance. However, when we researched what technologies were available, we could not find a concise summary document to reference for starting a new deep learning project.