Gartner has ranked AI as its most transformative trend for 2019. If you're not already focusing on AI as part of your strategy, now is the time to start. Forget about self-driving cars and Siri for a moment. AI's immediate impact on your business comes from the ability to apply it to countless business processes, across startlingly different areas of workplace operations, from the office to the factory floor. For example, at Cisco we're already using it to optimise our procurement, and through our Mi-Idea innovation centre, we've shown how AI machine vision can verify whether employees are wearing the right safety gear in the industrial workplace.

Artificial Intelligence is nowadays one of the most popular topics to discus upon. It only continues to significantly increase in its role in business and daily life in general. It is important to discuss that what role women are likely to play in the world of Artificial Intelligence, writes Nandita Koshal, Research Associate, International Institute for Higher Education Research and Capacity Building, O P Jindal Global University. AI and IoT technologies are increasingly being fashioned on women and their perceived roles. They play the role of our guide as GPS that takes us to our destination; as Cortana and Siri they become our personal assistants who aid in expediting our day to day commitments; and as Alexa and Google play they become our companions and friends who respect and fulfil our requests.

You know you are in the digital age when you have to intervene between two robots arguing in your home, as happened to me recently when my Google Home Hub believed my Google Assistant on my Pixelbook was speaking to it rather than to me and they started misunderstanding each other. It struck me that I was in a very 21st century moment, asking two robots to listen. As with all new technology there will be new challenges, and opportunities, and where artificial intelligence is concerned, history would suggest the latter far outweighs the former. For anyone concerned about what artificial intelligence (AI) and automation might mean for their jobs they should remember that you cannot uninvent the internet. You can't choose not to do technology. As Tolkien once noted, 'The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out'.

IBM announced the development of a new solution designed to transform driving in cities. Announced the day after SEAT presented its concept car Minimó promising to revolutionize urban mobility, 'Mobility Advisor' uses IBM Watson AI to help urban citizens make informed decisions about their daily transportation options including cars, scooters, bikes and public transport. With its advanced cloud and AI technologies, IBM is helping us to innovate new approaches to mobility that will transform our business strategy while improving the lives of people living in urban areas. Currently under development and designed to run as a mobile app on 4G/5G networks, 'Mobility Advisor' uses IBM Watson Assistant to provide users with a conversational interface to plan and optimise routes and suggest the most suitable transportation options. With IBM Watson Machine Learning, 'Mobility Advisor' can learn a user's preferences and make personalized recommendations for how best to complete a journey. It incorporates the user's appointments and historical data about previous choices in order to suggest the best modes of transportation each time – even if that means leaving the car behind, walking, or using one of SEAT's e-Kick scooters for the part of the journey.

Students of the Brihanmumbai municipal school in Andheri's DN Nagar are now privy to that savoury secret after the Google boss' visit here last week. And when a student asked Pichai what it takes to be an engineer, the boy next doorturned-Silicon Valley pin-up said, "Do you have a radio and TV at home? When it gets old, just learn to break that apart." It was the perfect photo-op. But Pichai used this opportunity to see how Bolo -- a reader app powered by Google AI for text-to-speech and speech recognition -- works on the ground.

The convergence of artificial intelligence (AI) systems with the agile world is having a disruptive effect on how we build software and the types of products that we build. By combining machine learning and deep learning we can build applications that truly learn like humans. AI bias is a very serious concern, as AI systems are only as good as the data sets used to train them. Aidan Casey, senior software engineering manager at Johnson Controls, will speak about how artificial intelligence capabilities will be used to augment and shape the agile world of tomorrow at aginext 2019. The conference will be held on March 21 - 22 in London, United Kingdom.

The dating app Hinge has been testing a feature that uses machine learning to find better matches for singles. It's called Most Compatible and according to multiple reports, plans to use your in-app data to match people with each other. Most Compatible has been tested once a week for at least this past month, but it will now become a daily feature. Hinge founder Justin McLeod said that this new feature mainly relies on the classic item matching algorithm Gale-Shapley, which was developed in 1962 and is nickname the stable marriage algorithm. It basically tries making successful matches by choosing the most seemingly compatible person.

Talk to Apple's Siri or Amazon's Alexa and you'll notice a common trait: They both have female voices. While this can help make robotic assistants more relatable and natural to converse with, it has assigned a gender to a technology that's otherwise genderless. Now, researchers are hoping to offer a new alternative by launching what they're calling the world's first'genderless voice.' To create'Q', researchers recorded voices from participants who identify as non-binary, or neither exclusively female nor male. Researchers then tested the voice on 4,600 people across Europe.

Hey, Google, did you know I could bypass Siri with one click on an iPhone and go to you instead? Apple recently upgraded its Siri Shortcuts, which let you record quick one to two-word commands to Siri create a tweet, call the wife, read aloud your daily schedule or play your favorite podcast. One of those options Apple is the ability to record yourself saying, "Hey, Google," in the same manner as you would do with Siri. The phone automatically goes to the Google Assistant app, (which you'll need to have, if you haven't already) and the Google microphone is cued, awaiting your query. Some believe the Google Assistant to be a smarter alternative.

Boot up the options for your digital voice assistant of choice and you're likely to find two options for the gender you prefer interacting with: male or female. The problem is, that binary choice isn't an accurate representation of the complexities of gender. Some folks don't identify as either male or female, and they may want their voice assistant to mirror that identity. But a group of linguists, technologists, and sound designers--led by Copenhagen Pride and Vice's creative agency Virtue--are on a quest to change that with a new, genderless digital voice, made from real voices, called Q. Q isn't going to show up in your smartphone tomorrow, but the idea is to pressure the tech industry into acknowledging that gender isn't necessarily binary, a matter of man or woman, masculine or feminine. The project is confronting a new digital universe fraught with problems.