The day after Christmas is always a good day to see which products and apps people were most excited about this holiday season. According to Wednesday's top free apps charts on Android's Google Play and iOS' iPhone, plenty of people received Google Home, Alexa-enabled speakers and Fitbits this holiday season. Amazon's Alexa app took the top spot on both app stores' lists of the top free apps midday Wednesday while Fitbit was in the No. 5 slot. Google Home took the No. 3 spot on the Android Play Store and came in seventh on iPhone. Since all three apps are needed to set up their respective devices, it's likely that many people received Amazon Echo or Google Home speakers, Chromecast streaming sticks and Fitbit trackers.

Businesses are trying hard to stay ahead of the curve and increase conversions in the coming year. As coming year is full of competition, businesses are trying to adapt AI enabled solutions to focus on better-targeted audience. Artificial Intelligence (AI) products are slowly infiltrating homes and place of work. This is something fiction movies coming into reality. Applications and solutions based on Machine learning and artificial Intelligence are influencing different verticals such as real estate,manufacturing, automobile, and healthcare.

CIO Applications, a leading technology magazine, has awarded Emagia as one of the "Top 10 Virtual Assistant Technology Solution Providers 2018." Emagia is the leading provider of intelligent digital solutions for order-to-cash operations. Selected by a distinguished panel, comprising of CEOs, CIOs, VCs, industry analysts and the editorial board of CIO Applications, Emagia was narrowed down among many other solution providers to the final Top 10 providers that exhibit competence in delivering virtual assistant technology solutions. Emagia's Gia is a digital cognitive assistant for global finance executives, order-to-cash shared services and accounts receivables operations teams. Equipped with specific skills in credit, collections and finance, Gia has smart conversational capabilities to communicate with and provide support to customers, sales, operations and treasury teams.

It seems Amazon's Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals on Amazon Echos were both a blessing and a curse. The smart speakers were obviously a popular gift, so popular in fact that the surge in voice requests on Christmas Day overburdened Amazon's servers, causing Alexa to crash, reports The Guardian. Outage tracking website Down Detector noted spikes in the UK, Germany and other parts of Europe. It seems the issue has now been resolved and was limited to those regions with no problems being reported in the US, at least not yet. The blackout follows a widespread Alexa outage in Europe in September.

When Amazon first debuted the Echo Show last year, plenty of people, us included, mocked its unusual design. More than that, we wondered if adding a display to a smart speaker makes sense, or if it was just another one of Amazon's gimmicks. It turns out, however, that being able to see the result of your queries is actually quite helpful; it's easier to glance at your entire shopping list than it is to have Alexa read it line by line. Amazon later followed up with the Echo Spot bedside clock, which offers the same features in a smaller design. But even though the Show and the Spot came out in 2017, it was in 2018 that smart displays came into their own.

Building open domain conversational systems that allow users to have engaging conversations on topics of their choice is a challenging task. Alexa Prize was launched in 2016 to tackle the problem of achieving natural, sustained, coherent and engaging open-domain dialogs. In the second iteration of the competition in 2018, university teams advanced the state of the art by using context in dialog models, leveraging knowledge graphs for language understanding, handling complex utterances, building statistical and hierarchical dialog managers, and leveraging model-driven signals from user responses. The 2018 competition also included the provision of a suite of tools and models to the competitors including the CoBot (conversational bot) toolkit, topic and dialog act detection models, conversation evaluators, and a sensitive content detection model so that the competing teams could focus on building knowledge-rich, coherent and engaging multi-turn dialog systems. This paper outlines the advances developed by the university teams as well as the Alexa Prize team to achieve the common goal of advancing the science of Conversational AI. We address several key open-ended problems such as conversational speech recognition, open domain natural language understanding, commonsense reasoning, statistical dialog management and dialog evaluation. These collaborative efforts have driven improved experiences by Alexa users to an average rating of 3.61, median duration of 2 mins 18 seconds, and average turns to 14.6, increases of 14%, 92%, 54% respectively since the launch of the 2018 competition. For conversational speech recognition, we have improved our relative Word Error Rate by 55% and our relative Entity Error Rate by 34% since the launch of the Alexa Prize. Socialbots improved in quality significantly more rapidly in 2018, in part due to the release of the CoBot toolkit, with new entrants attaining an average rating of 3.35 just 1 week into the semifinals, compared to 9 weeks in the 2017 competition.

Thousands of people plugging in new smart speakers on Christmas Day were greeted by a less than smart response after Amazon's voice-controlled virtual assistant Alexa crashed. Servers controlling the digital butler were overloaded with questions and requests, prompting Alexa to tell some users: "Sorry, I'm having trouble understanding you right now." The crash, at about 10am GMT, caused Amazon customers to complain about not being able to play festive songs, turn on their living room lights or get cooking instructions for Christmas dinner. Richard Hyland tweeted: "Good day for Amazon's Alexa to crash. It's not like people might want to register new devices or play music or anything."

Amazon's Echo voice assistants have gone from expensive parlor trick of a gadget to the perfect stocking stuffer, so you probably weren't surprised to see one of these smart home speakers wrapped up with your name on it. Well, maybe be a little surprised. The Echo is a perfect first step or addition to a smart home, and taking advantage of some of its lesser-known features could take you from smart home skeptic to convert faster than you think. Thankfully if you have a friend or family member with a name that sounds anything like "Alexa," you can change the "wake word" that activates your new voice assistant. Download the Alexa app to your smartphone, then navigate to the Devices tab.

LOS ANGELES – It's been two years since a new smash hit app has taken over the nation – remember Pokemon Go? But meanwhile, some of our favorite apps have gotten better, stronger and more essential to our lives. Perhaps you have a new phone, or it's been awhile since you updated your app roster. I've put a list together looking at the landscape of free and essential apps that everyone would want on their phones, from email assistants, to best mapping, ride-hailing and photo sharing. Here's the Talking Tech guide to the 12 app categories you want to have represented on your phone, and our multiple choices for downloading.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning show the potential to reduce the most time-consuming, manual tasks that keep sales teams away from spending more time with customers. Automating account-based marketing support with predictive analytics and supporting account-centered research, forecasting, reporting, and recommending which customers to upsell first are all techniques freeing sales teams from manually intensive tasks. CRM and Configure, Price & Quote (CPQ) providers continue to develop and fine-tune their digital assistants, which are specifically designed to help the sales team get the most value from AI and machine learning. Salesforces' Einstein supports voice-activation commands from Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, and Google. Salesforce and other enterprise software companies continue aggressively invest in Research & Development (R&D).