As artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning become ubiquitous, we will soon be hard-pressed to find any industry not capitalizing on the benefits they can provide. Telecommunications is one of the fastest-growing industries as well as one that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning in many aspects of their business from enhancing the customer experience to predictive maintenance to improving network reliability. The largest telecoms in the world rely on artificial intelligence and machine learning in a number of ways. Here are the most common applications. Nearly every telecom uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve its customer service primarily by using virtual assistants and chatbots.

Silicon Valley has long sought to disrupt virtually every aspect of modern life. Now comes technology's final frontier: old age. Tech that's specifically designed for seniors is a growing market, fueled by inexorable demographic trends – about 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 every day. Senior tech is increasingly showing up in assisted living facilities and nursing homes. A company called It's Never Too Late proffers a massive 70in high-definition touchscreen computer that provides older people with little prior tech experience easy access to everything from travel videos and music playlists to a library of college lectures.

Moven, which works with banks in eight regions, including Westpac New Zealand, provides behavioural models that help banks drive better engagement and retention – little "nudges" such as spending alerts and notifications, and savings prompts. Brett King says Australian banks will struggle to keep up with the likes of Chinese giant Ant Financial. King, who grew up in the Melbourne suburb of Berwick and was speaking at the FINSIA summit in Melbourne on Tuesday, says Moven's experience with TD Canada Trust – Canada's second-biggest bank – provides a good example of what the future might hold. Half of TD's customers use Moven's platform, called My Spend. This group has seen a 4 per cent to 8 per cent reduction in monthly spending thanks to the various "nudges" they receive compared with a controlled group.

Robot motions in the presence of humans should not only be feasible and safe, but also conform to human preferences. This, however, requires user feedback on the robot's behavior. In this work, we propose a novel approach to leverage the user's brain signals as a feedback modality in order to decode the judgment of robot trajectories and rank them according to the user's preferences. We show that brain signals measured using electroencephalography during observation of a robotic arm's trajectory as well as in response to preference statements are informative regarding the user's preference. Furthermore, we demonstrate that user feedback from brain signals can be used to reliably infer pairwise trajectory preferences as well as to retrieve the preferred observed trajectories of the user with a performance comparable to explicit behavioral feedback.

The demo house Amazon built inside one of the towers at its Seattle headquarters to show off its Echo smart speakers has a new room, and an important one: a garage. Inside the garage is a concept electric car--or, more specifically, the immobile insides of such a vehicle--that Amazon uses to show automakers the full spectrum of things its Alexa Auto software platform can do. That includes in-car versions of typical Alexa tasks such as audio streaming, messaging, voice calls, and reminders. And because it's a car, Alexa can also do things like roll the windows up and down and control the cabin temperature, all at the verbal request of the driver. Amazon has been working hard on Alexa Auto for the past two years.

Apple has launched new privacy settings with its voice assistant Siri. The new features strive to fade out privacy concerns of the users. As announced recently, Apple is introducing new settings with Siri to allow better privacy control to users. Reportedly, Apple has taken this decision in the wake of reports regarding how Siri listened to users' recordings. We know that customers have been concerned by recent reports of people listening to audio Siri recordings as part of our Siri quality evaluation process -- which we call grading… We've decided to make some changes to Siri as a result.

Apple is turning off automatic review of Siri audio and locking it down so that only Apple employees get to listen to it.

Looking to make the most of current AI technologies and solutions in your business? Register now for the O'Reilly AI Conference in San Jose, September 9–12, 2019, and learn how to leverage AI in your work today. What can artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) do to improve customer experience? AI and ML already have been intimately involved in online shopping since, well, the beginning of online shopping. You can't use Amazon or any other shopping service without getting recommendations, which are often personalized based on the vendor's understanding of your traits: your purchase history, your browsing history, and possibly much more.

Artificial intelligence – We've all heard about it. It's everywhere, in your cell phone, your social media apps, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant – you name it. Let's just agree that it's become a norm in the technology space and is destined to make an appearance in almost every area of our lives in the coming years. The thing is, AI is a computer program that has the ability to learn. With a regular software, once you're done typing in commands, the software stops operating.

No two cultural touchstones better illustrate our diametrically opposed feelings about voice systems. Star Trek's always listening, ever-helpful Computer represents the highest ideal of a digital assistant, while Orwell's Telescreen, with its "Big Brother is watching" messages, was emblematic of our darkest fears. With each passing year and digital assistant breakthrough, we vacillate wildly between these two perspectives. Bloomberg recently reported that Amazon was employing thousands of humans to comb through utterances and transcribe what we say to Amazon's Echo-based voice assistant. The revelation broke an unspoken agreement between Amazon and the millions of Echo and Alexa-enabled device owners who assumed that only algorithms, not humans in a back office somewhere, would be analyzing our words for meaning.