The'always on' digital age in which we live means consumers now expect companies to be able to communicate in a fast, accurate and relevant manner. The challenge for mortgage lenders is keeping pace with this technological change to ensure they remain competitive. It is with this in mind that companies are pushing technology boundaries. New digital advancements are being reported every week in the media, from Santander's '30 minute' online remortgage application, which is enabled by Hometrack's AVM, to Habito's artificial intelligence-based mortgage advice service. The purpose of both these offerings essentially, is to streamline the mortgage application process and reduce the time to offer.

Steam rolled out of the pot, and my kitchen was filled with an intoxicating blend of scents. I'd cooked a turkey ragu before, but as soon as I opened the pot, I knew this would be an entirely different experience. There were the familiar, comforting notes of ground turkey and mushrooms, but there was also earthiness from the beets, the fire of serrano chile, and an unexpected brightness from the coriander seed (coriander seed!). My dinner wouldn't have been out of place at one of San Francisco's trendy food trucks or upscale restaurants, but coming out of my 15 IKEA pot, it was unbelievable. As I mixed in the pasta and ricotta cheese and took the first incredible bite, I realized that A.I. could do a lot more for me than just beating me at Go.

Recently, the popular weather app Dark Sky launched a website version of its platform, and at first glance, it didn't look much different than the mobile version. There are some advanced deep-dive features, but the main draw is still the gorgeous maps and hyper-local forecasts. Even the company's cofounder, Adam Grossman, admits that its function is partially just to direct more people to the app store. "It's a lower barrier to entry for using our platform than downloading a 4 app," he says. What's most exciting about the site is not what you see in your browser.

Beyond Verbal, a company that specializes in voice to emotion analysis, is making its analytics API available via Beyond mHealth Research Platform. The API also has an AI component that will help researchers find distinct patterns that would link health issues with voice. Beyond Verbal has done such research by itself, but believes that making its technology available to others will make a much bigger impact. It is hoped that specific voice markers or pattern can be linked to specific health issues. While using voice to detect signs of depression may not seem so far-fetched, doing so with coronary disease seems much less obvious to the uninitiated.

In the future, speaking may be all that's required to diagnose health issues. Beyond Verbal, an Israeli company specializing in analyzing emotion from vocal intonation, is set to launch a platform today that could be the first step in doing just that. Momentum by TNW is our New York technology event for anyone interested in helping their company grow. The Beyond mHealth Research Platform could usher in a brave new world of healthcare research by correlating distinct vocal features that are mostly imperceptible to humans. In doing so, these vocal'biomarkers' could alert your physician to the presence of anything from depression and stress to heart disease. This sort of early detection could prove to be the difference between life and death.

The CRM of today allows for a complete digital transformation, says Daniel Turtledove, regional director, Dynamics CRM at EOH. When the first cave-dweller started selling hand-made clubs for the discerning hunter-gatherer there is a good chance he would follow up with the client to find out how the product performed in the field – hoping to create a lasting relationship and fine-tune his club production process to better service the market. This process, historically, was a tedious, time-consuming endeavour but, over the last few years customer relationship management (CRM) has evolved, using cutting-edge technology to streamline the process and allow for unheard of insight into your existing and potential clientele. To understand this evolution and the value-add cutting edge CRM can deliver, Daniel Turtledove, regional director, Dynamics CRM at EOH, and winner of the Dynamics CRM Partner of the Year award, gave us a tour of modern CRM. CRM gives you out-the-box ability to deliver to your customers on standard things that we take for granted, Turtledove says. "The traditional core that is CRM, is to offer customers a wide variety of services.

In this digital age, "business as usual" is not sufficient; customers have come to expect their digital experience to be tuned to their needs. New techniques for meeting customer needs and expectations are required to leverage the digital channel more effectively. Machine learning is emerging as a digital disruptor and an essential piece of technology to take advantage of the enormous amounts of customer data now available to Marketing and eCommerce managers--especially regarding their customers' digital experiences. Research shows that Marketing and eCommerce managers are struggling with how to identify, quantify, and prioritize customer experience issues in their digital channels. And while there is nothing simple about machine learning it's important to understand machine learning enough to see how it applies in the world of digital customer experience.

Sentiment analysis is widely used to gauge public opinion towards products, to analyze customer satisfaction, and to detect trends. With the proliferation of customer reviews, more fine-grained aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) has gained in popularity, as it allows aspects of a product or service to be examined in more detail. To this end, we have launched an ABSA service a while ago and demonstrated how the service can be used to gain insights into the strengths and weaknesses of a product. For performing sentiment analysis on customer reviews (as well as with many other text classification tasks), we face the problem that there are many different categories of reviews such as books, electronics, restaurants, etc. (You only need to have a look at the Departments tab on Amazon to get a feeling for the diversity of these categories.) In Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing, we refer to these different categories as domains; every domain has their unique characteristics.

This event highlights the changes that NVIDIA GPU-accelerated computing has brought to the analytics, machine learning, and deep learning segments. This new computing paradigm is enabling customers to extend the benefits beyond big data with the power of deep learning and accelerated analytics. The leaders from this growing ecosystem of solutions and technologies that are delivering on this promise will lead an active discussion in the keynote and panels.

"Will work still be the place where we integrate individuals into societies?" asks End of Shift -- The Robots Are Taking Over, a new documentary on the future of work by filmmaker Klaus Martens that premiered last week on German and French public television (I make a brief appearance in it as well). It is a rhetorical question, and although not verbalized by the narrator before the end of the film, it is omnipresent from the first scene on and implicitly precludes all interviews and footage that Martens and his crew captured in Germany, France, Japan, and the San Francisco Bay Area. The topic is acute: An oft-cited Oxford study predicted in 2013 that software and robots will eliminate half of the human work force within the next two decades. This year's OECD report comes to a less pessimistic conclusion, emphasizing the heterogeneity of workers' tasks within occupations. It projects that "on average across the 21 OECD countries, 9 percent of jobs are automatable" (e.g. in Germany 12 percent, in France 9 percent, and in the US 9 percent), and low qualified workers will be most affected.