It's been a week since Amazon's seemingly annual Alexa-oriented hardware event, but the tech and retail industries will likely be processing the rapid-fire announcements for many months to come. In just under two hours, Amazon announced more than a dozen new products aimed at everything from home audio and entertainment to kitchen appliances and in-car infotainment. The products were rolled out so abruptly and with so little fanfare that it was impossible for most onlookers to keep up, let alone contextualize and understand why Amazon had made an Alexa-powered microwave oven or a 100W subwoofer. Amazon's peculiar and blitzkrieg-style marketing strategy aside, it's clear now that the company has every intention to make Alexa, its Echo line, and every single device open to integrating its digital assistant into the dominating force in the smart home. In essence, Amazon wants Alexa to be the OS for everyone's physical lives, just as Apple, Google, and Microsoft now control our digital ones. Not only is Amazon willing to do so through developing its own products that may completely flop, but it's also willing to enter into well-established markets it will likely never succeed in, just so it can extend Alexa's reach even just an inch further than competing software.

Retailers are increasingly applying artificial intelligence (AI) to better personalize customer service initiatives, and momentum is increasing. Fifty five percent of retailers plan to leverage AI technology within three years, and applications will vary, according to the "2018 Customer Experience/Unified Commerce Survey," from Boston Retail Partners (BRP). AI's ability to learn from data, identify patterns and make decisions with minimal human intervention makes it a credible option to improve customer service. Some retailers use it to offer purchasing suggestions based on customer responses to a series of questions. Others use it to pinpoint the most convenient time of day to reach out to consumers with product suggestions, which are also based on past clicks and website visit data.

Jefferson Graham visits an Amazon Go store in Seattle, where an app gains you entrance to the store, and there are no lines or cashiers to check you out./ Murphy Brown returned this week and she got herself a lesson on how to tweet. Yup, that's how out of it she's been. In case you missed it, the hit show that originally debuted in 1988 returned to CBS Thursday in a revival. Thirty years later, for Talking Tech readers, this seemed like a great opportunity for us to look back at three decades of how our lives have changed with technology.

Sinakhone Keodara reached his breaking point last July. Loading up Grindr, the gay dating app that presents users with potential mates in close geographical proximity to them, the founder of a Los Angeles-based Asian television streaming service came across the profile of an elderly white man. He struck up a conversation, and received a three-word response: "Asian, ew gross." He is now considering suing Grindr for racial discrimination. For black and ethnic minority singletons, dipping a toe into the water of dating apps can involve subjecting yourself to racist abuse and crass intolerance.

Artificial intelligence is the stuff of sci-fi fantasy capturing the attention of writers, researchers, scientists, and the general public for decades. Artifical intelligence and robotics have been central to legendary storytelling for many years from Isaac Asimov, to Skynet, to iRobot, Star Trek, and others. AI, however, is no longer the stuff of fiction or the hardly-believable movie plot that dazzles our minds. AI has stepped out of the silver screen and is, for now, standing patiently by, waiting for your attention! Artificial intelligence is quickly becoming one of the fastest growing, most dynamic industries in the world.

Artificial intelligence could have a profound impact on learning, but it also raises key questions. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are no longer fantastical prospects seen only in science fiction. Products like Amazon Echo and Siri have brought AI into many homes, and experts say it's only a matter of time before the technology has a profound impact in education, as well. Already, there are interactive tutors and adaptive learning programs that use AI to personalize instruction for students, and AI is also helping to simplify some administrative tasks. But Kelly Calhoun Williams, an education analyst for the technology research firm Gartner Inc., cautions there is a clear gap between the promise of AI and the reality of AI. "That's to be expected, given the complexity of the technology," she said.

The next time you pull out your smartphone and ask Siri or Google for advice, or chat with a bot online, take pride in knowing that some of the theoretical foundation for that technology was brought to life here in Canada. Indeed, as far back as the early 1980s, key organizations such as the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research embarked on groundbreaking work in neural networks and machine learning. Academic pioneers such as Geoffrey Hinton (now a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto and an advisor to Google, among others), the University of Montreal's Yoshua Bengio and the University of Alberta's Rich Sutton produced critical research that helped fuel Canada's rise to prominence as a global leader in artificial intelligence (AI). Stephen Piron, co-CEO of Dessa, praises the federal government's efforts at cutting immigration processing timelines for highly skilled foreign workers. Canada now houses three major AI clusters – in Toronto, Montreal and Edmonton – that form the backbone of the country's machine-learning ecosystem and support homegrown AI startups.

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance at ever-increasing speeds, is it time to say goodbye to the digital marketing agency as we know it? Are we working on borrowed time, destined to be out of a job and replaced by robots? No, to put it bluntly. There's no denying the huge impact AI has had and will continue to have on our day-to-day lives. It's been less than 6 years since Apple introduced us to Siri, and look how far we've come since then.

Amidst the great debate over if artificial intelligence (AI) will steal human tasks, there's been little discussion of how it may transform corporate cultures in new and unprecedented ways. In the era of automation, even the most prosperous companies will be those who redesign their operating environment and function around harnessing the cognitive capabilities of machines in precisely the identical manner that Victorian-era industry was redesigned around exploiting the physiological capabilities of steam along with mechanization. AI will demand a radical culture change as it alters the association between machines and people, changing machines out of passive receivers of orders into educated, sentient collaborators. In doing so, it will also alter the abilities that organizations attempt to locate and foster in human workers. Basically, AI will require individual work spaces to be constructed around powering processes, products and services with information in the exact same manner the Machine Age found society revolved around powering machines using electricity.

Artificial intelligence--the technology that powers Siri and Alexa, guides self-driving cars, and helps Netflix and Amazon tailor your search results--is already embedded in our lives. Here's how it will help you maximize your travels in the coming years. The next stage of AI online is hyperpersonalization: Websites and search engines will use data about you--or a group of people similar to you--to make recommendations for how and where to travel. "Nuance is going to refine the experience," says Gilad Berenstein, CEO of UTrip, a company that builds AI recommendation engines for the travel industry. Say you want to go to New York City.