Microsoft is joining Google and Amazon in the race for your home. This week, at an event in China, the venerable tech giant trumpeted the arrival of Project Evo, a sweeping plan to build hardware devices that work a lot like Google Home or the Amazon Echo. But this race is much bigger than some gadgets that sit on your coffee table. The prize is more than just the best home digital assistant. The biggest spoils go to the company that rides its assistant to artificial brains that are far smarter -- and creates a market for using these brains to do just about anything. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are all racing to build systems that recognize and truly understand natural language -- how you and I talk.

Our 12 days of Christmas predictions has hit lucky seven, and just in time for the 13th of December too! Of course this means 13 shopping days until Christmas Day, but for those who have made their preparations and are not yet tired of Wham and Shakin' Stevens on the airwaves, our countdown continues with a look at one of the key trends of 2016 which is expected to continue into the new year. The concept of machine learning, automation and artificial intelligence (AI) have got a lot of attention over the past couple of years, and it is predicted that this will continue into 2017. Sian John, Chief Strategist of EMEA at Symantec, predicted that AI and machine learning will require sophisticated Big Data capabilities as in 2017, machine learning and AI will only continue to grow. "With this growth comes new, powerful insights for businesses to tap, and an increased collaboration between humans and machines," she said.

Microsoft Corp. said it will release a translation app for Windows and other operating systems from rivals Apple Inc. and Google, part of a broader race between the world's largest technology companies for supremacy in the field of artificial intelligence. The translator app, following a Skype translator service Microsoft unveiled in 2014, can convert nine spoken languages and 50 written ones, research executive Lili Cheng said at an event in San Francisco. The app relies on AI techniques like speech recognition and machine translation. So you can sleep an extra five minutes. What to eat, drink, wear and drive – in real life and your dreams.

Newswire) Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "Global Artificial Intelligence Market (2016 - 2022)" report to their offering. The global artificial intelligence market is estimated to reach USD 16,274.0 The report aims at estimating the size and future growth potential of the market across different segments such as technology, application, and region. With the rise in adoption of AI in the media & advertising, retail, finance, and healthcare sectors, the machine learning and natural language processing technologies are expected to play a key role in propelling the growth of the AI market in the next five years. Artificial intelligence (AI) could double annual economic growth rates within two decades by changing the nature of work and spawning a new relationship between man and machine.

Clara Lu is the marketing manager at ViSenze, an artificial intelligence company that makes search by images possible without keywords. With so many articles proliferating the media space on how humans are at the cusp of full AI (artificial intelligence), it's no wonder that we believe that the future -- which is full of robots and drones and self-driven vehicles, as well as diminishing human control over these machines -- is right on our doorstep. But are we really approaching the singularity as fast as we think we are? It's not hard to have that impression with the likes of Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, leading university departments and research centers around the world and more being highly concerned with the potential risks brought about by AI and taking action now to avoid a doomsday scenario in the near future. They predict that by the year 2030 machines will develop consciousness through the application of human intelligence. In fact, Dr. Hawking told the BBC, "The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race."

Sure, you know your mobile phone is essential, but exactly how much can you rely on it? A few days ago in Japan, Google threw down a gauntlet: how far can you get in a foreign country, where you can't be sure of finding an English speaker, where the words, even the alphabet, are unfamiliar, and where the address system is notoriously tricky? So there I was, in Tokyo, charged with solving a series of puzzles using a smartphone and nothing more. First, I had to get myself from bustling Tokyo (where English speakers are plentiful and, because they are Japanese, endlessly helpful) to the distant city of Kanazawa. I had a JR train pass, which is the best way to get around Japan for a foreigner and which offers fantastic value, though you must buy it before you arrive in the country.

BOSTON: Many businesses are failing to extract actionable insights from the huge volumes of data they track due to the systemic failure of their approach to machine learning, a leading academic has argued. "If companies want to get value from their data, they need to focus on accelerating human understanding of data, scaling the number of modelling questions they can ask of that data in a short amount of time, and assessing their implications," according to Kalyan Veeramachaneni, Principal Research Scientist in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at MIT. He made this assertion in the Harvard Business Review where he observed that machine-learning experts and their business counterparts were frequently speaking different languages and had different expectations. So, for example, when the former complain that "the data is a mess", this often turns out to refer less to its quality than its granularity. "Machine learning experts are used to working with data that's already been aggregated into useful variables," he noted, "such as the number of website visits by a user, rather than a table of every action the user has ever taken on the site."

It's difficult to predict how artificial intelligence technology will change over the next 10 to 20 years, but there are plenty of gains to be made. By 2018, robots will supervise more than 3 million human workers; by 2020, smart machines will be a top investment priority for more than 30 percent of CIOs. Everything from journalism to customer service is already being replaced by AI that's increasingly able to replicate the experience and ability of humans. What was once seen as the future of technology is already here, and the only question left is how it will be implemented in the mass market. Over time, the insights gleaned from the industries currently taking advantage of AI -- and improving the technology along the way -- will make it ever more robust and useful within a growing range of applications.

Microsoft's AI Is Not Just About Being Smart On December 13th at a very announcement-packed event in San Francisco, Microsoft shared its views of Artificial Intelligence and the progress it has made thus far. Back in September, Microsoft created a new AI and research group of about 5,000 people under the leadership of Harry Shum and they have certainly been busy. A new chatbot called Zo.ai that is integrated into messenger app Kik Cortana Devices SDK so Cortana can be on all kind of devices including what looked to be an Echo-like smart speaker manufactured and branded by Harman/Kardon Calendar.help The list of achievements is significant but it's the picture that develops when looking at them in total that really shows how invested Microsoft is in AI. Nobody would argue that Microsoft missed the whole "app economy" craze.

It looks like 2017 is shaping up to be an interesting year in the embedded-technology space--for a variety of reasons. We're coming off a year that saw a number of large mergers, and the change in the U.S. political climate is significant. Tom Starnes, analyst with Objective Analysis, notes, "One country's loss is another's gain as corporations try to hold on to as much of their revenues as they can in very complex and competitive markets for sophisticated technology. Meantime, the very-global chip industry has been consolidating at a rate and with a mass not seen before, with all but a few companies struggling for profitability." Jim Handy says, "Objective Analysis expects the memory business to be highly profitable in 2017, followed by a collapse beginning in mid-2018."