Oracle today announced the launch of the Oracle Digital Assistant for companies, an AI assistant built to help employees handle things like enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), or human relations needs in a conversational setting. The Oracle Digital Assistant will be able to handle employee needs on popular chat apps like Slack, Facebook Messenger, and WeChat, as well from Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant, and Microsoft's Cortana. The announcement was made at Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco and follows a series of updates announced yesterday for Oracle ERP and cloud systems. Oracle Digital Assistant builds upon the Oracle bot development platform, which made its initial debut in fall 2016. Like other automated bots, Oracle's enterprise assistant derives intent from words using a combination of natural language understanding and natural language processing.

At Infor's Inforum conference in Washington, DC, Infor launched its Coleman Digital Assistant. It is the first of the Coleman AI family products that the company is planning. Enterprise Times sat down with Massimo Capoccia, SVP Infor OS, Technology, Infor to talk about Coleman and other technologies that Infor is planning to bring to market. Unlike many of its competitors, Infor has developed Coleman completely in-house. This is a brave move. AI is a technology that is developing rapidly and has a high cost to get into.

Large retailers have found that the quickest way to get access to new products and technologies is to invest – and in some cases to accelerate or incubate – in the startups that are creating them. Some of the startups are focused on technology, and others on product. This is H&M's second such investment this month, following the $20 million it paid for a 1% stake in fintech startup Klarna last week. Target has been prominent among other retailers cultivating startups, first with its Target Techstars accelerator, which recently ran its third annual program. It has expanded into wellness and beauty mini accelerators, and just announced a new accelerator for Gen Z entrepreneurs and creators.

We owe a lot to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a division of the U.S. Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies. The 60-year-old agency proposed and prototyped the precursor to the world wide web. It developed an interactive mapping solution akin to Google Maps. But it's also one of the birthplaces of machine learning, a kind of artificial intelligence (AI) that mimics the behavior of neurons in the brain. Dr. Brian Pierce, director of DARPA's Innovation Office, spoke about the agency's recent efforts at VB Summit 2018.

I don't know what I want but I want it now. This is the anthem of e-commerce in the on-demand economy; built on a solid foundation of total convenience. Technological advances during the information age across industries have spoilt us for choice and availability. We want what we want faster and cheaper than before. This benchmark in human behavior has transformed us into hyper consumers of everything. Ever since the advent of e-commerce giants such as Amazon and eBay, our behavior has slowly but surely shifted from brick-and-mortar retail shopping to the convenience of our smart device while binge-watching Peaky Blinders.

At the OpenWorld conference this week, Oracle is introducing the Oracle Digital Assistant, which Oracle calls the next generation of enterprise chatbots. While typical chatbots are built for a single purpose, the Digital Assistant can be trained to support domain skills from multiple applications, such as HR, ERP, CRM or CX. The digital assistant provides a simplified user experience, since an employee only has to interact with one assistant rather than one for each application, Suhas Uliyar, Oracle's VP of AI, Bots & Mobile Product Management, said to ZDNet. Also: Oracle v. Google ain't over yet -- Google vows it'll appeal to Supreme Court CNET "As an employee of an organization, it becomes onerous to find out, 'How do I interact with this skill?'" he said. "Digital assistant is the one singular point, which routes between questions asked."

Many might not realize it but artificial intelligence (AI) has ubiquitously made its way into our daily lives. For instance, digital assistants such as Amazon Alexa and Apple Siri handle everyday tasks including scheduling reminders or playing your favorite morning jam. Support channels are being taken over by chatbots and you're none the wiser. Impressive as these applications may be, AI is entering its so-called third wave, which is set to create more interesting applications for the technology itself, as reported by Top500.org. Third-wave AI is supposed to be truly intelligent and most similar to human thinking, meaning it will make sense of the independent world and its varying contexts.

In the present era, shopping is an irrefutable need of people. If you will conduct a study regarding shopping, you will find the maximum percentage of people loves shopping. However, there is drastic change in way people do shopping. In earlier times, vendors knew about the preferences and needs of customer to make recommendation based on past purchases. In this way, vendor wins the brand loyalty which increase their profitability and sales.

When we think about artificial intelligence and human speech we typically think of personal assistants like Siri and Alexa. That technology is still in its infancy. What if the real potential with AI is not to make computers or apps sound more human, but instead, to help humans be more humane and empathetic? An MIT spin-off company called Cogito has developed software that evaluates the subtle give-and-take of conversation--focusing not on what is said, but how it is said. The technology monitors subtleties of speech like tone, energy, vocal strain, and tempo.

Google isn't being stingy about its recently announced Home Hub features -- it's going to be available on all Assistant smart displays, regardless of manufacturer. But we assumed it would be awhile before we actually saw these features. However, the folks at 9to5Google noticed that Lenovo is rolling out multi-room audio, Live Albums from Google Photos, Nest Hello Doorbell, Home View and more to its Smart Display over the next few weeks. Multi-room audio adds your display to a speaker group and allows you to play music throughout your home, while Live Albums will automatically pick your best photos and display them. You can see who's at the door without having to ask thanks to Nest Hello Doorbell, and the handy Home View allows you to see all your smart home devices at once. In addition to these features, Smart Display owners in both 8-inch and 10-inch sizes will be able to control many different media and entertainment devices, including certain televisions, set-top boxes, speakers, smart remotes and more via touch or voice.