The customer-centric organizations of today are already keenly aware of the digital revolution, which has transformed conventional business models while empowering customers. Over the last decade, customer experience (CX) has drastically changed with the introduction of several opportunities for customers to interact, engage and transact with brands at their convenience across multiple channels. Digital 2.0 is the next phase, where the plain and simple customer experience of old will make space for intuitive, contextual and practical engagement across different customer touchpoints. By 2020, digital technologies like AI, biometrics, machine and deep learning and robotic automation will revolutionize the way consumers interact with organizations and brands. According to Gartner, 2020 is going to witness 20 billion'things' connected to the Internet.

Will it soon feel normal to say, "Alexa, microwave one bag of popcorn"? Like a rebooted Sharper Image catalogue, Amazon is adding its talking artificial intelligence to a microwave, a wall clock, a wall plug, cars and more. The new gadgets all hook into the Internet, take voice commands -- and make the online retail giant even more central to home life. The question is: Will families see these connected devices as conveniences, new complications -- or spies? Amazon's goal is to assert leadership over Google and Apple in the still-nascent market for smart-home tech, with everyday appliances connecting to the Internet to automate operations -- and gather all sorts of data on our lives.

Jefferson Graham previews new products introduced by Amazon, including a talking microwave and clock on Talking Tech. In announcing 70 new products, the tech and delivery giant made clear it will bring Alexa to new gadgets ranging from cars to clocks and even microwaves. Here are some of the more unexpected devices Amazon announced. AmazonBasics' smart Microwave has a button to connect with a nearby Echo. At $59.99, the new microwave under the company's AmazonBasics brand is a potentially cheaper option compared with traditional, nonsmart enabled appliances.

Amazon Basics' $59.99 microwave connects to Echo speakers to bring in Alexa personal assistant (Photo: Jefferson Graham) That's a key takeaway from Alexa-driven products Amazon launched on Thursday, from an anticipated AmazonBasics Microwave to a small cassette-sized gadget, Echo Auto, that will let Alexa hang out with you in the car. Amazon's designs on smart home domination and beyond is nothing new, and is no different from Apple, Google, or Samsung. Each company wants to lure you into its own ecosystem--and keep you there. Jeff Bezos' crew appears to have momentum on its side. Amazon now claims more than 20,000 Alexa-compatible devices from more than 3,500 brands, up from some 4,000 devices and 1,200 brands in January. The company's latest product avalanche comes with refreshes to the Echo family of smart speakers, such as the $34 Echo Input.

Last year, we concluded that Microsoft's only competitive advantage in the deal that saw Cortana coming to Alexa, and vice versa, was Skype. Now, Microsoft has said that it will offer Skype to Alexa devices, too. Later this year, according to Microsoft, Alexa-powered devices will be able to tap into Skype to place Skype audio and video calls to other devices, accept calls, and even place calls via Skype to landline and cellular phones. Microsoft called this the next step in the collaboration between the two companies, which included the original partnership, as well as the first implementations of the Cortana skill on Alexa devices, and the ability to use Alexa on Windows in August. Alexa can now be used on the Xbox, as well.

Amazon says its AI voice assistant Alexa can now guess what you might be thinking of – or what you've forgotten. At an event in Seattle on Thursday, the technology company unveiled a new feature called Alexa Hunches that aims to replicate human curiosity and insight using artificial intelligence. "We've reached a point with deep neural networks and machine learning that we can actually program intuition," said Daniel Rausch, the vice-president in charge of Alexa's smart home features. Once it is activated later this year, Alexa Hunches will observe its owners' interactions with connected smart home devices like locks, lights and electricity outlets. When Alexa believes it has detected a regular pattern, such as turning off a television set before bed, the voice assistant will remind owners if they forget to do it, and offer to fix the problem.

Can machine learning models for recommendation be easily fooled? While the question has been answered for hand-engineered fake user profiles, it has not been explored for machine learned adversarial attacks. This paper attempts to close this gap. We propose a framework for generating fake user profiles which, when incorporated in the training of a recommendation system, can achieve an adversarial intent, while remaining indistinguishable from real user profiles. We formulate this procedure as a repeated general-sum game between two players: an oblivious recommendation system $R$ and an adversarial fake user generator $A$ with two goals: (G1) the rating distribution of the fake users needs to be close to the real users, and (G2) some objective $f_A$ encoding the attack intent, such as targeting the top-K recommendation quality of $R$ for a subset of users, needs to be optimized. We propose a learning framework to achieve both goals, and offer extensive experiments considering multiple types of attacks highlighting the vulnerability of recommendation systems.

The landscape of business and shopping is changing! This evolution has been brought about by the onset of e-commerce and advanced artificial intelligence capabilities in hyper-targeting each customer, individually. Starting off as an abstract concept in sci-fi movies, Artificial Intelligence has been consistently making in-roads to our lives. Our fixation with Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortona or Amazon's Alexa is only a small example of AI's proliferation in our everyday lives. In the e-commerce ecosystem, Artificial Intelligence, especially machine learning and natural language processing has slowly paved he way for brilliantly segmented and targeted marketing.

Amazon has revealed a whole host of new Echo devices, as well as products that you can control by talking to the Alexa assistant that lives inside them. In all, it announced more than 70 updates – which touched on almost every part of its Alexa line-up. The very short version is this: Amazon updated just about every Echo to give it a better-looking grey mesh on the outside and to make it louder and better sounding on the inside. If you want the slightly less short version of each of the updates, then read on. Here's what happened to each of those products in slightly more detail.

On Thursday, Amazon introduced nearly a dozen new Alexa-powered products to the world. Some, like this year's Echo Dot, were standard upgrades to familiar products. But in the bulk of the newcomers you could see the full payoff of Amazon's longstanding strategy to put Alexa in more than just speakers. Which is exactly where it needs to be if it wants to stay ahead of Google. Products like the Echo Wall Clock and AmazonBasics Microwave--both of which connect to Echo speakers over Bluetooth--elicited jokes, mostly Kellyann Conway-related.