If you're considering getting or giving a smart speaker in the near future, the Echo Dot is a great place to start. It doesn't take up much real estate on the counter, it's relatively easy on the wallet, and it comes loaded with Alexa and her many, many capabilities. But now that there is a new generation of Echo Dots available, should you spring for the latest and greatest? Let's look at the new Dot, what makes it different, and whether it's worth the extra cash. The display on the third-generation Echo Dot with Clock can also display timers and weather.

Take a look at how people can build software to handle low-level tasks and massive calculations and what it means for both machine and human workloads. Researchers predict that designers at all wage levels and employees with deep industry knowledge will still be in high demand. The company says it will hold four free cloud and AI-focused events for developers in North America, India, Europe, and Asia. KPMG analyst predicts the milestones we can expect from virtual assistants powered by artificial intelligence over the next 10 years. Employee outlooks on AI are changing.

Over the next year and a half, Nest became the face and name of Google's smart home offering, a division that's grown quickly as Google Home/Google Nest has become one of the top two players in the U.S. smart home category, rivaled only by Amazon's Alexa/Echo offerings.

In today's digital dating world, communicating clearly can sometimes get lost in translation. That's why new relationship terms have taken on a life of their own. Here are 5 new dating terms you should know. It's just like the old saying goes – the way to a Tinder date's heart may be through their stomach. An ambitious young man attempted to woo a woman he met through a dating app by showing off his pasta-making skills on Twitter, in a saga that has since gone viral online, as dozens of commenters root for sparks to fly.

'Cognitive' is everywhere these days. IBM Watson is pushing the concepts of Cognitive Computing from cancer research to cooking recipes. VPAs (virtual personal assistants) are gaining acceptance and adoption. Just look at the explosion behind Amazon's Alexa. Every technology show I attend has a few vendors now showing their Alexa interface and sometimes it even works. We're all talking at boxes and we expect those boxes to understand.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to transform the way that marketing professionals work, and how organizations target, engage and connect with customers and prospects. Just like how marketing automation created new tasks and job functions, AI will revolutionize the way marketing is performed – and dictate a new set of job needs and skills. Marketing will be one of the earliest business functions to be massively changed by AI use. In the past decade, marketing automation systems produced enormous amounts of data, much of which has gone unused. AI, which includes machine learning, intelligence process automation, digital assistants, and conversational interfaces, enables more of this data to be used for dozens of marketing applications.

Bank transfers, debit cards, credit cards, e-wallets and mobile wallets: all are used to process the one hundred and twenty-two billion digital transactions made each year in the European Union. At its simplest, the ubiquity of AI enables digital payments by allowing consumers to more easily buy goods and services through services such as digital assistants or recommendation engines, which run on machine learning. But this explosion in the number of the digital payments creates a problem which will also need AI to solve. The increase in web-payments, brings with it the unavoidable risk that volumes of digital-payment fraud will also rise. If we don't act now, fraud is likely to grow as a proportion all transactions.

Fox News Flash top entertainment and celebrity headlines for Nov. 1 are here. Check out what's clicking today in entertainment. A reality TV star in Australia is accused of trying to extort her Tinder date -- and then assaulting him with another man when he refused to pay, according to a new report. Suzi Taylor, who starred on the hit home renovation show "The Block," allegedly lured the 33-year-old victim, whom she met through the dating app, to a home in Brisbane just after midnight Wednesday, News.com.au She then demanded money from him -- but when he refused to comply, Taylor's alleged accomplice, Ali Ebrahimi, entered the room and assaulted the man, police said in a statement.

As developers look toward what makes a well-rounded conversational AI assistant, it's imperative to denote the differences between utility and intelligence. Today's intelligent agents can be useful -- the can sell a product, direct a call or answer a question without human intervention. But the chatbots of the future will be more flexible and interactive and should be able to "offer products and services in a human way," said Sasha Caskey, CTO of digital platform Kasisto. To train a computer to replicate human activity and speech, developers should start with contextual interactions, Karen Myers, lab director at SRI International AI Center, said at the AI World Conference Expo in Boston. The first generations of chatbots were focused on one-off interactions -- book this event on a calendar, answer this specific question or direct a user to a webpage.

I wanted to give a bit more detail to the concept of five levels of AI assistants. We've been talking about it at Rasa for some time, and recently wrote about this on the O'Reilly blog. This is our way of quantifying the path that AI assistants have been following, and will travel over the coming years. This is your guide to understanding the path to true conversational AI. We are still in the early days in the development of AI assistants, as most chatbots can only handle simple question and answer pairs.