Few industries are as competitive as ecommerce. Not only are online retailers competing with other online stores and brick-and-mortar locations, but also the overall noise that is the Internet. We live in a world where consumer attention span is getting shorter and shorter: 40 percent of people abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load, and the average shopping cart is abandoned more than 68 percent of the time. I'm hard pressed to find an ecommerce site that is not constantly scrambling to engage more and drive more sales. Technology is finally helping with those efforts in a big way.

Cecila Malmstrom publicly speaks of torture. On October 4, when the European politician stood up in parliament to give her support for laws banning the export of items used for implementing the death penalty, there should have been little controversy. But when footage of her speech was posted online, nobody saw it. YouTube removed the video, which had been uploaded by fellow MEP Marietje Schaake. "I did not know whether this decision was made by a human or whether this was the result of an automated decision," the Dutch politician told WIRED.

Amazon announced three new products to bring its artificial intelligence expertise to customers of Amazon Web Services. The new services Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, and Amazon Rekognition make AI broadly accessible by offering Amazon's deep learning algorithms and technologies as fully managed services that any developer can access through an API call or a few clicks in the AWS Management Console. This covers a range of functions, such as natural language understanding, speech recognition, text-to-speech, and image analysis technologies, available at any scale, for any app or device.

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While artificial intelligence is a loaded term that for some may conjure up images of a malicious Skynet system from the Terminator movie franchise, the reality is not as ominous. And when Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, argued during the U.S. Congress' first AI hearing -- dubbed "The Dawn of Artificial Intelligence" -- that it is already at work in the United States, improving the efficiency and productivity of systems across the map, he was right. "Artificial intelligence is already seeping into our daily lives," said Cruz, who is chairman of the Senate subcommittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness. The hearing, which included representatives from Microsoft, Carnegie Mellon University and NASA, among others, focused on the potential implications machine learning will have on the country's labor market, national security and transportation. One of the largest areas for growth through artificial intelligence is smart city planning and smart infrastructure.

Commonwealth Bank of Australia is developing artificial intelligence technology to help with cyber security, fraud detection and regulatory compliance, in a sign banks are attempting to put the power of big data to use in reducing risk. CBA's chief information officer David Whiteing told The Australian Financial Review that so-called machine learning technology will be used to help the bank make sense of large sets of "noisy" data and alert management to areas requiring their attention. The work will come alongside a broader program of innovative projects investigating the possibilities of technologies such as the internet of things, quantum computing and the blockchain. "When you have a large data set and people can't see the signal for the noise, machine learning capability will sift out and provide you with the top five things that are worthy of further investigation," Mr Whiteing said.

Amazon today announced three new artificial intelligence-related toolkits for developers building apps on Amazon Web Services. At the company's AWS re:invent conference in Las Vegas, Amazon showed how developers can use three new services -- Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, Amazon Rekognition -- to build artificial intelligence features into apps for platforms like Slack, Facebook Messenger, ZenDesk, and others. The idea is to let developers utilize the machine learning algorithms and technology that Amazon has already created for its own processes and services like Alexa. Instead of developing their own AI software, AWS customers can simply use an API call or the AWS Management Console to incorporate AI features into their own apps. AWS CEO Andy Jassy noted that Amazon has been building AI and machine learning technology for 20 years and said that there are now thousands of people "dedicated to AI in our business."

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Andrew Greenstein, an app developer from San Francisco, started journaling a few months ago. He tries to write for five minutes every day, but it's challenging to set aside the time. Still, he's read that journaling reduces stress and can help with goal-setting, so he's trying to make it a habit. At the Disrupt London Hackathon, Greenstein and his team built The Emotion Journal, a voice journaling app that performs real-time emotional analysis to detect the user's feelings and chart their emotional state over time. By day, Greenstein is the CEO of SF AppWorks, a digital agency.

Uber's ride-hailing service is set to get smarter. The company announced on Monday that it bought New York-based AI start-up Geometric Intelligence and will soon launch its own AI research lab, creatively named Uber AI Labs. Geometric Intelligence's 15 specialists in machine learning will help drive Uber's research in self-driving cars (confirmed by Geometric Intelligence CEO Gary Marcus to the The Wall Street Journal). Autonomous vehicles are a hot research area for the automotive industry right now, and Uber is keen to make its mark on the cutting-edge technology, along with carmakers like BMW and technology titans like Google. While Uber's own fleet of self-driving cars tool around San Francisco (I've seen them), pick up passengers in Pittsburgh and go on the occasional beer run, it needs to do much more to not be left behind in the dust. In addition to machine learning, Uber can also use AI to help calculate the most efficient route, better match carpool riders and more accurately tell customers when their car will arrive, chief product officer Jeff Holden wrote in Uber's blog post announcement.