USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham takes a look (and listen) to the new Sonos Beam which incorporates Amazon's Alexa.voice They make the best consumer wifi speakers, and their flavor of Alexa, the Sonos One connected speaker, is my favorite choice for anyone looking to bring Alexa and music into the home. So I was itching to test the Sonos Beam, the new soundbar for TV viewing with built-in Alexa. Now that I've had it for a few days, my verdict--well, it's not the same as for the Sonos One, that's for sure. The good news with the Beam is that the sound, as always, is great and it mixes nicely with other Sonos speakers.

There's a reason why people deride banking hours; banks never seem to be open when you need them most, such as later in the day or on holidays and weekends. Fortunately, AI in banking is one of the most impactful applications of artificial intelligence through the use of conversational assistants, or chatbots, to engage customers 24/7. Customers are handling many things using chatbots, even private conversations regarding bank transactions, bank services and other tasks that don't necessarily require human intervention. For example, Bank of America introduced Erica, an AI assistant to help with customer transactions, and the bot has shown significant positive ROI. Many banks have quickly followed suit, although some saw mixed results.

Apple's App Store launch feels like a distant memory now -- the glossy buttons, overused gradient, and harsh drop shadows have faded in the rearview for most of us. Similarly, in a few years we'll have forgotten the arguments we're now having with our voice assistants -- the casual request "Hey Siri" eventually turning into a frustrated "HEY SIRI -- SET THE STUPID TIMER." It may seem to us now that voice user interfaces (VUIs) aren't learning quickly enough, but they're actually evolving at a pretty good pace. Primary platforms are making substantial strides to define the process and practice of crafting a VUI, for example, so that third-party UX designers can bring us new and hopefully better experiences. But UX designers also need time to adapt.

Half of smartphones sold globally this year will have an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant, a report by an industry consulting firm showed Sunday. According to Strategy Analytics (SA) Inc., 47.7 percent of smartphones sold on the global market will be equipped with some kind of on-device AI assistant, up from 36.6 percent last year. The report further finds that on-device AI is growing fast among smartphone vendors and by 2023, 89.9 percent of smartphones will have a built-in AI assistant. In 2017, Google Assistant rose to be the top AI assistant with a 46.7 percent market share, followed by Apple's Siri with 40.1 percent, it said. The report said the market share of Google's AI assistant is expected to climb to 51.3 percent this year and 60.6 percent by 2023.

ABSTRACT This proposal introduces a Dialogue Challenge for building end-to-end task-completion dialogue systems, with the goal of encouraging the dialogue research community to collaborate and benchmark on standard datasets and unified experimental environment. In this special session, we will release humanannotated conversational data in three domains (movie-ticket booking, restaurant reservation, and taxi booking), as well as an experiment platform with built-in simulators in each domain, for training and evaluation purposes. The final submitted systems will be evaluated both in simulated setting and by human judges. Index Terms-- dialogue challenge, end-to-end taskcompletion dialogue 1. INTRODUCTION There are many virtual assistants commercially available today, such as Apple's Siri, Google's Home, Microsoft's Cortana, and Amazon's Echo. With a well-designed dialogue system as an intelligent assistant, people can accomplish tasks easily via natural language interactions.

We are surrounded by artificial intelligence. From the Google Home and Amazon Echo, to Facebook's facial recognition and whatever it is Huawei's doing. It's easy to become desensitized to the term and misunderstand the current state of AI we live in. Verge video director Becca Farsace talks to some experts in the field of AI to better pinpoint what all this AI really means.

Four ways to explore the use of voice technology for your business. As Microsoft uses AI to chase down Amazon in retail, Google is drawing on its freakishly human-sounding Duplex technology to beat Microsoft in the call center. Google is hatching a plan to win over contact centers using its AI, announcing a slew of new features for its Dialogflow Enterprise Edition, which borrows from its own deep learning and AI research, as well as groundbreaking AI from Alphabet-owned DeepMind. The service, which launched in beta in April, aims to help customers build natural-sounding chatbots for the contact center, as well as phone-based conversational agents. It comes just days after Microsoft revealed its roadmap for Dynamics 365, including the new Dynamics 365 AI for Sales app, which will be in public preview in October, and is meant to help sales teams make decisions using call sentiment analysis and to deliver warnings about deals at risk.

When Google introduced routines to Assistant, it promised that you'd eventually have the option to schedule those routines instead of having to invoke them yourself each and every time. That feature is finally here -- Google has confirmed a Droid Life report revealing that scheduled routines are now reaching users. If you have an Assistant-equipped smart speaker, you can use the Home app to make multi-step actions repeat on specific days. You could adjust your lights and play music when you get up for work on weekdays, for instance. The company told Engadget that the feature is currently available only to smart speaker users in the US, all of whom should have access within a week.

Anyone who's had a frustrating interaction with Siri or Alexa knows that digital assistants just don't get humans. What they need is what psychologists call theory of mind, an awareness of others' beliefs and desires. Now, computer scientists have created an artificial intelligence (AI) that can probe the "minds" of other computers and predict their actions, the first step to fluid collaboration among machines--and between machines and people. "Theory of mind is clearly a crucial ability," for navigating a world full of other minds says Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the work. By about the age of 4, human children understand that the beliefs of another person may diverge from reality, and that those beliefs can be used to predict the person's future behavior. Some of today's computers can label facial expressions such as "happy" or "angry"--a skill associated with theory of mind--but they have little understanding of human emotions or what motivates us.

As hot as stories about artificial intelligence (AI), augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR), blockchain, and the Internet of Things (IoT) have been in recent months, we often can't help but think of these technologies as a long way off from mainstream adoption. Movies like Ready Player One and Avengers: Infinity Wars only perpetuate this perception by mixing real technologies with fantasy, making the tech we wield in the real world seem primitive in the process. AI, AR/VR, blockchain, and IoT are already playing an important role in our everyday lives, with countless examples hiding in plain sight. In this first article, we're going to look at Artificial Intelligence (AI). In pop culture, AI is often represented as a highly-evolved and self-aware artificial "brain" in a robot capable of overthrowing the human race, as in Ex Machina or The Terminator movies.