The widely predicted adoption of virtual or augmented reality (VR/AR) in the consumer experience may have yet to be fully realized, but all retailers must look to the future in order to stay competitive. You need only look to the demise of market giants like Toys R Us or The Limited to remember what happens when you don't. These days, innovation comes in many forms. Experimentation with voice-commerce through smart home assistants Alexa, Google Home, and Siri has been one notable area, as have fully automated stores like Amazon Go. Who is really leading the charge in organic innovation?

A robot that communicates with humans via facial expressions and understands people by scanning their face has been stumped when it met a person with botox. Furhat Robotics unveiled its'world's most advanced social robotics and conversational artificial intelligence platform' last week. The android can communicate with humans in the way we do with each other - by speaking, listening, showing emotions and reading changes to facial features. The Stockholm-based start-up were left scratching their heads when one test subject completely threw the eerily-lifelike robot. A Furhat insider said: 'We were at a loss as to why one of our robots wasn't interacting properly with a human test subject.

Artificial Intelligence and digital marketing are beginning to go hand in hand. With the ability to collect data, analyze it, apply it and then learn from it- AI is transforming digital strategy. As it continues to advance, so will the capabilities to use it to improve digital marketing strategies and valuable customer insights for companies. Here are 3 ways AI is changing digital marketing for the better. The most important aspect of a successful digital marketing strategy is great customer experience.

AI voice assistants are more capable than ever of helping consumers shop smart. That means your marketing efforts will have to shift priorities in a major way to capture their attention. To hear about actual voice chat use cases, how to leverage voice and bots right now and more, don't miss this VB Live event! Ding dong, it soon may be time to start thinking of google as near-dead in the water. The day is coming where marketers will have to redirect the time, energy, and laser focus on search engine optimization, and the millions of dollars spent on buying keywords and relevant content, to voice interfaces.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently been introduced to interactive recommender systems (IRS) because of its nature of learning from dynamic interactions and planning for long-run performance. As IRS is always with thousands of items to recommend (i.e., thousands of actions), most existing RL-based methods, however, fail to handle such a large discrete action space problem and thus become inefficient. The existing work that tries to deal with the large discrete action space problem by utilizing the deep deterministic policy gradient framework suffers from the inconsistency between the continuous action representation (the output of the actor network) and the real discrete action. To avoid such inconsistency and achieve high efficiency and recommendation effectiveness, in this paper, we propose a Tree-structured Policy Gradient Recommendation (TPGR) framework, where a balanced hierarchical clustering tree is built over the items and picking an item is formulated as seeking a path from the root to a certain leaf of the tree. Extensive experiments on carefully-designed environments based on two real-world datasets demonstrate that our model provides superior recommendation performance and significant efficiency improvement over state-of-the-art methods.

Pandora made its interest in podcasting clear several times this year. Now, the music-streaming company is ready to announce the "Podcast Genome Project," a tool that's both a cataloging system and recommendation algorithm for spoken audio programs. Much like the company's existing Music Genome Project, which categorizes music on hundreds of characteristics to make recommendations to listeners, the Podcast Genome Project (which I'm now abbreviating to PGP). As of today, the PGP is in public beta. For starters, the PGP analyzes and makes recommendations for podcasts based on "over 1,500" attributes, although we don't yet know what sort of characteristics it uses to categorize different shows. Additionally, it also takes user feedback (like thumbs-up or thumbs-down ratings, skips and replays) into account and combines that with machine learning analysis and natural language processing to build a profile for each individual users.

It is the'beginning of the end' for traditional smartphones, according to an annual technology report. Analysts believe that something entirely different may supplant the smartphone such as smart rings, bracelets and glasses. Even as top makers like Apple and Samsung unveil new handsets with improved performance, overall sales have flattened with most major markets largely saturated, the report found. In just over a decade, smartphones have become the hottest-selling consumer device around the world. The next catalyst for smartphones could be the possibilities offered by the forthcoming 5G, or fifth generation wireless networks, new form factors or advances in virtual and augmented reality. Future Today Institute founder Amy Webb said in her annual report on technology trends that 2018 'marks the beginning of the end of traditional smartphones'.

If you're a Volkswagen driver, you now have another way to lock and unlock your car, start and stop electric charging and check your remaining estimated mileage. You can also use Siri to turn on alarms, start the defroster, set the temperature and remind yourself where you parked. You might opt to set up routines using the voice assistant's Shortcuts, a feature that arrived with iOS 12. So you could, say, ask Siri to warm up the car, defrost the windshield and top up the battery charge with a single command before you step out into a chilly morning. VW does charge a monthly subscription fee for Car-Net, however, so you won't get those Siri commands for free.

Amazon's Echo Buttons are now useful for considerably more than playing party games. The company has enabled support for performing Alexa routines by tapping a button. You can turn on the lights without talking to your speaker, or let guests cue music without having to remember the specific commands. In that sense, it's a more flexible alternative to the Hue Tap -- so long as you live in Amazon's ecosystem, of course. You can enable the feature by creating routines in the latest Alexa app and then choosing an Echo Button as the trigger.

A judge in New Hampshire has requested that Amazon hand over audio recordings from an Echo device present in a house where two women were found dead. Timothy Verrill is accused of murdering 48-year-old Christine Sullivan and 32-year-old Jenna Pellegrini at a Farmington home in January 2017. Their bodies were found underneath a porch on the property with multiple stab wounds. Mr. Verrill pleaded not guilty the following month. But prosecutors believe that there could be corroborating evidence recorded by an Amazon Echo device which was inside the house.