Vienna's residents and tourists do not have to rely on the kindness of strangers or scroll through long lists of website links to find parking, restrooms or other critical information. They can simply use WienBot, the Austrian city's chatbot. Available via Facebook Messenger, WienBot provides answers to an array of user questions and continuously learns from the interactions -- even pre-empting questions as it captures the most frequently used terms. WienBot is a perfect example of how governments can use artificial intelligence (AI) to go digital, one of the biggest challenges for cities, states and nations worldwide. Developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and AI-powered chatbots will allow government CIOs to customize and improve the delivery of services for the citizens they serve.

Believe it or not the quest for artificial intelligence (AI) began over 70 years ago, with the idea that computers will one day be able to think like us. New approaches to AI coupled with advances in technology in the last 25-30 years mean that we may be close to realizing this. "Artificial intelligence will reach human levels by around 2029. Follow that out further to, say, 2045, we will have multiplied the intelligence, the human biological machine intelligence of our civilization a billion-fold." How realistic is Kurzweil's prediction?

CUA is continuing to invest in customer experience (CX) and digital innovation with the extension of its virtual assistant trial in its health business. Encouraged by the success of'Sam', the virtual sales assistant for health insurance, CUA Health has signed on with Flamingo Ai to extend the artificial intelligence (AI)-powered assistant's use. This follows Australia's largest credit union also expanding the implementation of the member experience program in April. CUA piloted Confirmit's'Fast Track for Contact Centres' in CUA Direct call centres before expanding the program to include in-branch feedback. CUA Health has been trialling Flamingo Ai's technology live with potential health insurance customers for the past two months.

For one, it has all the smarts of the Google Assistant built into its interface, so you can ask it questions, play games, set reminders, broadcast messages, and access smart home controls with your voice. And with a 7-inch display, it's also much smaller than some of the other smart displays that have come out in recent months, so it fits into tight corners or on narrow countertops much better than its 8- or 10-inch counterparts. But it's the Home Hub's abilities as a digital photo frame that makes it so appealing to me. Digital photo frames were all the rage a decade ago, though they were often fussy to set up and maintain. You'd have to either tether it to your computer with a USB cable to transfer over files or load up an SD Card whenever you wanted to add or change the images on display.

Recommender systems help users find relevant items of interest, for example on e-commerce or media streaming sites. Most academic research is concerned with approaches that personalize the recommendations according to long-term user profiles. In many real-world applications, however, such long-term profiles often do not exist and recommendations therefore have to be made solely based on the observed behavior of a user during an ongoing session. Given the high practical relevance of the problem, an increased interest in this problem can be observed in recent years, leading to a number of proposals for session-based recommendation algorithms that typically aim to predict the user's immediate next actions. In this work, we present the results of an in-depth performance comparison of a number of such algorithms, using a variety of datasets and evaluation measures. Our comparison includes the most recent approaches based on recurrent neural networks like GRU4REC, factorized Markov model approaches such as FISM or FOSSIL, as well as simpler methods based, e.g., on nearest neighbor schemes. Our experiments reveal that algorithms of this latter class, despite their sometimes almost trivial nature, often perform equally well or significantly better than today's more complex approaches based on deep neural networks. Our results therefore suggest that there is substantial room for improvement regarding the development of more sophisticated session-based recommendation algorithms.

Google has announced a partnership with Disney that can help bring kids stories to life. Starting today, Google Home can play ambient music and sound effects as you read select Little Golden Books aloud. All you have to do is say "Hey Google, let's read along to Disney," and start reading a compatible story. The announcement touts several features of the story-enhancing experience, including the ability for Google Home to detect when you stop reading or skip ahead. In those cases, the music or ambient sounds will adjust to fit where you are in the story.

If you've always wanted to control your Shield TV using your Amazon Echo, now you can. Yes, Nvidia's set-top box has launched a dedicated Alexa skill that lets you switch it on and off, change channels, control the volume, fire up apps (like Amazon Prime Video and HBO Now), and more. The Android-powered device already integrated Google Assistant last September, making it the only streamer you can control with the rival voice assistants. In addition, Amazon and NVIDIA are buddying up to offer Dolby Atmos passthrough support for Prime Video on Shield TV. There's also a limited time deal that gets you a free Amazon Echo Dot (3rd Gen) when you purchase a Shield TV from Amazon or Best Buy through November 10th.

The excitement about artificial intelligence (AI) is contagious. Our imagination has been ignited to its potential in a wide range of fields. In marketing, however, many have concluded that the hype is just that: hype. There may be potential, they say, but it is far too hard to implement AI and see results, and many have just given up. This is a shame, because AI has the potential to change marketers' lives in a very real way.

When we think of artificial intelligence, we picture futuristic robots. Yet AI is being used by most of us every day -- whenever we order an Uber, or ask Siri a question. Local resident Gill Eapen has worked in artificial intelligence for 30 years using AI to provide predictive and economic analysis to advise companies. Recently, he has taken this work and developed a cloud-based application that can be adapted to many arenas. 'We are the world's first and only fully-integrated cloud-based predictive and decision analytics platform," said Eapen.

As our British readers struggle with daylight savings ("struggle" an extra hour in bed), we saw China's first private satellite launch not go as planned, the original Wii remote prototype goes to auction and you can control your Roku device through Google's voice assistant. Hey Google, save me the trouble of finding the remote. Roku's Google Assistant control is here. If you're using a TV or player running at least Roku OS 8.1, you can link the Google Home app to your Roku account and control core functions using only voice and an "on Roku" suffix. You can launch channels, search for shows and control playback on most devices, while TV owners can turn on the set, adjust volume or switch inputs.