Suggest to Samsung's Virtual Personal Assistant Bixby "Let's talk dirty," and the female voice will respond with a honeyed accent, "I don't want to end up on Santa's naughty list." Ask the same question to the program's male voice and it replies "I've read that soil erosion is a real dirt problem." In South Africa, where I live and conduct my research into gender biases in artificial intelligence, Samsung now offers Bixby in various voices depending on which language you choose. The voices of Julia, Lisa and Stephanie are coquettish and eager. John is clever and straightforward.

But in the coming years, the company's machine learning technology could change how consumers decide what to eat -- and, in a potentially ominous development for their waistlines, make them eat more. So far, the technological advances can be experienced mostly at the chain's thousands of drive-throughs, where for years menu boards have displayed a familiar array of McDonald's favorites: Big Macs, Quarter Pounders, Chicken McNuggets. Now, the chain has digital boards programmed to market that food more strategically, taking into account such factors as the time of day, the weather, the popularity of certain menu items and the length of the wait. On a hot afternoon, for example, the board might promote soda rather than coffee. At the conclusion of every transaction, screens now display a list of recommendations, nudging customers to order more.

The room was packed at the annual Machine Learning and the Market for Intelligence conference in Toronto last week. Now in its fifth year, the lengthy name of the event matches the depth of the discussions. But one speaker and her talk stood out to me in particular: Marzyeh Ghassemi, who also happens to be a veteran of Alphabet's Verily, presented "Machine Learning From Our Mistakes." Ghassemi, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, talked about the importance of predicting actionable insights in health care, the regulation of algorithms, and practice data versus knowledge data. But at the very end, saving the best for last, she emphasized the importance of treating health data as a resource.

Security researchers with SRLabs have disclosed a new vulnerability affecting both Google and Amazon smart speakers that could allow hackers to eavesdrop on or even phish unsuspecting users. By uploading a malicious piece of software disguised as an innocuous Alexa skill or Google action, the researchers showed how you can get the smart speakers to silently record users, or even ask them for the password to their Google account. The vulnerability is a good reminder to keep a close eye on the third-party software that you use with your voice assistants, and to delete any that you're unlikely to use again where possible. There's no evidence that this vulnerability has been exploited in the real world, however, and SRLabs disclosed their findings to both Amazon and Google before making them public. In a series of videos, the team at SRLabs has shown off how the hacks work. One, an action for Google Home, allows the user to ask for a random number to be generated.

Leading cloud and managed service company, Maintel, recently revealed a new study into the attitudes consumers and businesses share towards virtual assistants. As artificial intelligence and voice-activated bots become more commonplace, the recent research from Maintel highlights why some companies are still hesitating before rolling out this new tech. Among consumers, data protection is usually the most significant concern linked to AI, with 47% saying they're worried about being hacked. Additionally, there's a consistent sense of reluctance among consumers in the UK when it comes to engaging with smart devices. Around 59% of customers don't have an intelligent device with a virtual assistant.

It's kind of incredible that a Google-made laptop runs a hobbled version of Google Assistant. We're referring to the Pixelbook Go, which begins shipping on November 15 as a sibling to the original Pixelbook. It's a performant and sleek machine with an exceptional keyboard and all-day battery life, but there's little to recommend it on the software side. When Google Assistant came to Chrome OS alongside the circa-2017 Pixelbook, the assumption was that it would match or best the robustness of Assistant on smartphones, smart displays, and speakers. Nips and tucks continue to arrive two years later, but Google Assistant on Chrome OS is advancing at a snail's pace relative to its counterparts.

Given their inherent similarities, it's entirely logical that robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) would have crossover in a variety of different contexts. Both of these technologies are contingent upon bringing order to processes – usually workflows, in either the physical or digital realm – that might otherwise run the risk of falling into disorder for any number of reasons, most notably human error. RPA and AI are perfectly capable of operating on their own, and in fact often do. Organisations considering implementing one or the other to manage any of their operations would serve themselves well by examining how they're being used in tandem. It's also worth investigating how a versatile low-code business application development platform or dynamic case management software may be ideal for creating solutions to most successfully leverage symbiotic RPA and AI.

What would you do if you had the super-power to accurately answer, in a few milliseconds, a multiple-choice question with a billion choices? Would you design the next generation of Web search engines, which could predict which of the billions of documents might be relevant to a given query? Would you build the next generation of retail recommender systems that have things delivered to your doorstep just as you need them? Or would you try and predict the next word about to be uttered by U.S. President Donald Trump? The objective in extreme classification, a new research area in machine learning, is to develop algorithms with such capabilities.

It seems like only yesterday that artificial intelligence (AI) was the stuff of science fiction - a concept, rather than grounded in reality. Marketers in particular have waxed lyrical about the potential of AI for perhaps five years or so, but during that time much of the conversation around AI has been the manifestation of a sort of'shiny new tech syndrome'. To suggest – as many do – that AI is still a buzzword, is to vastly underestimate how it, when paired with the right data and the increase in demand for intelligent virtual assistants, is already radically altering aspects of marketing. At The Drum Arms at Advertising Week New York, The Drum co-founder and editor-in-chief, Gordon Young, took the stage with Microsoft Advertising, the American basketball league NBA and digital agency Digitas, to discuss how this combination of data and AI will define – and in some cases is already defining – the future of marketing. Jorge Urrutia del Pozo, head of fan audience strategy and engagement at the NBA, discussed how he and his team utilize the huge and various amounts of data that the NBA creates.

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