Artificial intelligence, machine intelligence, cognitive computing - whatever you want to call machines that are capable of understanding and acting upon their environment - is no longer solely the purview of highly credentialed lab directors and deep-thinking computer scientists. Facebook today is talking for the first time about FBLearner Flow, a piece of software that manages machine learning models for employees throughout the social networking company. Way back in the last century, one of the most common put-downs of computers was the accusation that they only did what they were programmed to do. These days, it is increasingly common for marketing and many other kinds of systems to employ some variety of "machine learning," which moves away from the days when programmers dictated computers' every move. And pretty soon, they'll come for us.

According to a new market research report, "Speech Analytics Market by Type (Solutions (Speech Engine, Indexing, Analysis and Query Tools, and Dash Boards and Reporting Tool) and Services), by Deployment Type (On- Remise, Cloud), by Organization Size, by Vertical, & by Region – Global Forecast to 2020?, published by MarketsandMarkets, the market size is estimated to grow from USD 589.2 Million in 2015 to USD 1.60 Billion by 2020, at an estimated Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 22.0% from 2015 to 2020. Browse 66 market data Tables and 25 Figures spread through 145 Pages and in-depth TOC on"Speech Analytics Market" Early buyers will receive 10% customization on this report. The speech analytics technology is witnessing the rising demand due to the need to decipher hidden insights from the customer interaction data. Rising number of contact centers, importance of customer feedback, need for Customer Relationship Management (CRM), product development, increasing competition among organizations, and stringent compliance management are some of the factors deriving the demand of speech analytics solutions and services. The speech analytics solutions are expected to dominate the market from 2015 to 2020, with larger market share than the service segment, due to growing trends of analytical insights from customer interaction data.

In this post we will explore why you are interested in machine learning. We will look at some questions that can help you get to the root of what draws you to the field. We will finish with a map showing the 4 main "whys" so that you identify where you fit and what resources to target. Why are you interested in machine learning? Have you deeply considered this question?

Applications of spatial data analysis are endless, cutting across many disciplines. With the advent of various sensors today – space, airborne, terrestrial alike, spatial analysis is becoming paramount in order to turn these data into valuable information. However, processing massive amount of data is a challenge as it requires complex procedures and multiple tools. The session shall highlight the latest development in big data analytics as well as some exemplary applications from different domains.

Pepper the robot participates in a Japanese ribbon-cutting ceremony earlier this year. Its manufacturer, SoftBank Robotics, is opening new offices in San Francisco and releasing a development kit for Android programmers. MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - Pepper the robot is coming to our shores later this year, and its creators want the help of Android developers to help make it smarter. Japan-based SoftBank Robotics announced Wednesday at Google I/O, the company's annual developer's conference, that it is opening a new Pepper-focused outpost in San Francisco and unveiling an Android SDK, or software development kit, in the hopes of enticing programmers to write code for the robot. "Pepper is ultimately an unfinished product, and we just wanted to incentivize developers to expand the ways in which people can engage with a humanoid robot," says Steve Carlin, vice president of SoftBank Robotics Americas, which has an existing office in Boston.

Google is expected to dive deeper into virtual reality and artificial intelligence Wednesday during an annual conference that serves as a launching pad for its latest products and innovations. Although Google keeps its plans under wraps until the big event, the conference agenda makes it clear that virtual reality and artificial intelligence, or "machine learning," will be among the focal points.

Pepper is finally coming to America. SoftBank said today that its chatty humanoid robot, unveiled with great fanfare by the company's founder and CEO Masayoshi Son two years ago, is expected to debut in the North American market later this year. SoftBank also announced that a new developer portal is now available to anyone interested in creating applications for the robot. And tomorrow at Google I/O, SoftBank engineers will take the stage, along with Pepper, to introduce a tool that they hope will entice more developers to build apps for the robot: an Android SDK. "We're so excited to see what the development community can bring on to our platform," Steve Carlin, vice president of marketing and business development for SoftBank Robotics America, told IEEE Spectrum, adding that "ultimately what is going to really power Pepper is the creativity of this community."

On Wednesday during the Google I/O opening keynote, the company announced two new messaging platforms: Allo and Duo. Before diving into some of the features that set the two new apps apart from existing Google messaging platforms, let's take a moment to count just how many messaging services Google now has. On second thought, that would take too long--it's far too many. Anyone watching the keynote probably noticed the number of times the various presenters referred to Google's Hangouts and Messenger apps: excatly zero times. Google knows Hangouts and Messenger are dead.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai speaks during Google I/O 2016 at Shoreline Amphitheatre on May 19, 2016 in Mountain View, California. "We're at a seminal moment for AI," Google CEO Sundar Pichai told 7,000 people attending I/O, the tech giant's annual developers conference at a sun-splashed Shoreline Amphitheater, an outdoor concert venue near Google's worldwide headquarters here. Pichai, who has repeatedly stressed the importance of AI and machine learning, anticipates a momentous shift in computing: super-smart machines on every device we use guiding every moment of our days. "We're entering a golden age of machine learning and artificial intelligence," Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in a public conversation Wednesday at the Washington Post's Transformers Conference in Washington D.C. Google was an early pioneer in artificial intelligence, which drew on its massive data files derived from consumer searches on Google.com. But it's seen its mantle slip after breakthroughs by its rivals, such as Amazon's Echo and Facebook's bot platform.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Amazon's Jeff Bezos is a Star Trek-loving space geek, but unlike Elon Musk, he's got no plans on for heading to Mars. People haven't really thought this through," he said. Bezos spent 45 minutes in a convivial public conversation at the Washington Post's Transformers Conference in Washington D.C., which was also webcast live. He was interviewed by Martin Baron, executive editor of the Post, which he bought in 2013. After a few jokes about whether or not he'd have a job when the conversation was done, Baron asked Bezos about Amazon's Echo device and its cloud-based voice recognition agent Alexa. The Echo got more competition Wednesday in Mountain View, Calif. Amazon's CEO said the original inspiration for the Echo was the talking computers of Star Trek. While the Echo team is still quite a ways away from reaching that goal, he didn't feel too badly because after all, Star Trek was set more than 250 years in the future. "We still have a couple of centuries, but I don't think we'll need that much time," Bezos said. Bezos said he grew up playing pretend Star Trek every day with his friends when he was in fourth grade in Houston. "We would fight over who got to be Captain Kirk or Mr. Spock, and somebody played the computer too.