Designers and entrepreneurs have been fascinated with AI and conversational design for years. So I wasn't surprised when a potential client asked me about AI: "We're building an AI assistant for enterprises, and it needs to combine conversational design with machine learning." I said, "Of course we can design it, but it will take a lot of user research." Designing an AI application, particularly one with a voice interface, is a huge project. Even with the popularity of Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri, there's still a great deal of ambiguity about how to build this type of technology.

The Wear OS update that Google announced at IFA has arrived. With new navigational shortcuts, tighter Google Assistant integration, and a smartphone-style notification "stream," your old Android Wear smartwatch will certainly feel different once it's installed. While older watches will enjoy some interface improvements, Google's update isn't about fixing your current device. Android Wear and Wear OS smartwatches won't see much of a speed or battery life boost with the update, for instance. But next year's models, which will also utilize the new Qualcomm Wear 3100 chip, absolutely will.

NOA doesn't want you to read the news. It wants to read it to you. The Irish company's full name is News Over Audio and it does exactly what that suggests: collects up the best of the world's news and turns it into nuggets of audio, allowing you to catch up on them while listening rather than having to read at a screen. The news you can get is already among the best in the world: it includes the Financial Times and Bloomberg, as well as The Independent. And it is continuing to grow, with other publishers that are among the world's biggest and most important, having announced in recent days that the Economist and the New York Times are arriving, too. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph.

It's part of a growing area of research known as "adversarial attacks," which are designed to confuse deep neural networks–usually visually, as Co.Design has covered in the past–leaving them potentially vulnerable to attacks by bad-faith actors on the technology and infrastructure in our world that depends on AI to function. In this case, the system being "attacked" by researchers at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum are personal assistants, like Alexa, Siri, or Cortana. According to Professor Thorsten Holz from the Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security, their method, called "psychoacoustic hiding," shows how hackers could manipulate any type of audio wave–from songs and speech to even bird chirping–to include words that only the machine can hear, allowing them to give commands without nearby people noticing. The attack will sound just like a bird's call to our ears, but a voice assistant would "hear" something very different. Attacks could be played over an app, for instance, or on a TV commercial or radio program, to hack thousands of people–and potentially make purchases with or steal their private information.

Infor has announced the general availability of its Infor Coleman Digital Assistant, which is designed to help maximise human work potential by enabling natural language extensibility and accessibility of Infor CloudSuite. At its annual Inforum customer conference, the company also introduced its Infor Coleman AI Platform for embedded machine learning models, which it expects to deliver in the Spring of 2019. The Infor Coleman Digital Assistant is the first in a series of new products rolled out under the Coleman AI umbrella and provides a conversational interface to the Infor OS platform, the underlying foundation of Infor CloudSuite. It offers custom skill building, a voice user experience (UX) and navigation, and natural language processing (NLP) extensibility. As a digital assistant, Coleman uses a conversational UX and NLP – with deep domain and industry knowledge – to chat, hear, talk, and in the future, it is expected to analyse images. Rick Rider, Infor Coleman Product Director, said, "According to research from McKinsey & Company, the average interaction worker spends nearly 20 per cent of their time looking for information or tracking down colleagues for help with specific tasks.

Consumers are increasingly comfortable with AI technologies. Forty-four percent of them currently use some type of virtual assistant.i Even those who don't have access to a Siri, Alexa or Cortana enjoy AI experiences everyday--often without realizing it. Leading websites and social platforms routinely use AI, along with machine learning and analytics, to provide a steady stream of personalized experiences. Consumers are ready for traditional retailers to deliver the same level of AI-based personalization they enjoy in other aspects of their lives.

Instead it is about a thoroughly progressive, completely 360 degree view of the traveller and everything that goes into creating special, unique, memorable experiences." Did you get your tickets directly from the ticket office? In today's fast-paced world, finding time to travel to a ticket office and get your tickets is a luxury few can afford. Besides, why bother if you can get your tickets in just a couple of clicks via your laptop or even your smartphone? Indeed, digital travel sales grew rapidly over the last several years, totaling $564.87 billion in 2016. And the number is expected to reach $817.54 billion by 2020. Such explosive growth is fueled by recent technology advances, not the least of which is data science. We at AltexSoft are no strangers to successfully applying data science and machine learning technologies to the field of custom travel software development.

From left to right, Ajit Chawla (Birlasoft), Kristin Deegan (Wells Fargo), Kader Sakkaria (BMO Harris Bank) and Neha Aggarwal (Birlasoft) participate on an AI session at annual BCX Summit. The banking industry lately has pointed to Bank of America's virtual financial assistant Erica as a prime example of how financial institutions can introduce AI concepts to everyday consumers through digital banking experiences. The concept of virtual assistants has become more commonplace thanks to the proliferation of Amazon Echo devices in households across the U.S. and banks stand to benefit from this growing trend. BofA introduced Erica at a time when their customers were likely already familiar with an AI-driven virtual assistant, which probably bolstered interaction in the first few months of its availability. The bank earlier this month revealed more than 3 million mobile banking users interact with Erica, up a lofty 200 percent (or 2 million users) since the end of June.

Conversational AI is a form of Artificial Intelligence that allows people to communicate with applications, websites and devices in everyday, humanlike natural language via voice, text, touch or gesture input. For users it allows fast interaction using their own words and terminology. For enterprises it offers a way to build a closer connection with customers through personalized interaction and receive an unprecedented amount of vital business information in return. The last eighteen months have seen no abatement in the demand for conversational AI platforms and predictions from major analyst firms shows the trend is set to continue strongly in 2018. But throughout this, there is an underlying message; enterprises need to deploy conversational platforms that are capable of truly understanding the customer--however they phrase the question.

It's hard to miss all the attention and hype artificial intelligence (AI) is getting these days. Everywhere you turn there are articles on a myriad of AI-related topics, such as deep learning, machine learning, cognitive computing, computer vision and natural language processing (NLP). These terms are frequently used interchangeably despite meaning very different things -- a sign that many people still don't understand this field. Every conference or event is now an "AI Summit." More startups are now "AI-based."