Customer service careers could be wiped out in the next five years by AI-based chatbots and customer service voice assistants. That is the prediction of Gary Blower, a solution architect and senior technical consultant at software and development company Clearvision. Blower, who previously worked as a technical specialist for RBS, said this could become the norm as soon as 2024, with AI powerful enough to pass'the Turing test', in which robots are indistinguishable from humans. "I didn't think this was the case a couple of years ago, but now I look at the widespread adoption of Amazon's Alexa, Siri, and Google Voice that are essentially machine learning, based on algorithms." Blower suggested that there are a number of commercial and banking companies which are already implementing smart tech in the place of human customer service, which makes the public "hard-pressed to get hold of a human being."

One pressing issue of product recommendation systems today is the scalability of algorithms with large, real-world datasets. It's possible that a recommendation algorithm will work well and produce accurate results with small datasets, yet may start producing inaccurate or inefficient results with large ones. In addition, some algorithms are computationally expensive to run – the larger the dataset, the longer it will take, and the more it will cost the business to analyse and make recommendations from it. Advanced, large-scale assessment methods are required to deal with both issues.

Without question, 2018 was a big year for artificial intelligence (AI) as it pushed even further into the mainstream, successfully automating more functionality than ever before. Companies are increasingly exploring applications for AI, and the general public has grown accustomed to interacting with the technology on a daily basis. The stage is set for AI to continue transforming the world as we know it. In 2019, not only will the technology continue growing in global prevalence, but it will also spawn deeper conversations around important topics, fuel innovative business models, and impact society in new ways, including the following seven. In 2018, we witnessed major strides in MLaaS with technology powerhouses like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon leading the way.

Last month, we had our first glimpse of Google Assistant's interpreter mode for smart displays and speakers. Now, everyone with Google Home devices or smart displays (as well as some smart speakers) can try out the mode after Google started rolling it out to those devices, as noted by Android Police. You'll need to activate the mode (by saying something like "turn on interpreter mode or "Help me speak Spanish") in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese or Spanish. Once you've started it though, the interpreter will translate between 26 languages, with support for more on the way. When we tried the mode at CES, we found it to be slow and stilted, which could cause complications for more complex translations.

Dinner dates may soon be a thing of the past as Samsung hopes to match singletons based on what's inside their fridge. A new app, called Refridgerdating, has been launched by the Korean giant to help people let their taste buds dictate their love life. It works alongside Samsung's Family Hub Refrigerator which allows you to monitor and see inside your refrigerator via your phone. The app then takes a photo of the inside of the fridge and shares it to the social media platform for peckish Samsung fridge owners where they can then swipe right or left based on the contents of someone else's food preferences. It is designed to allow people to avoid the unfortunate moment they open the fridge and find it sparsely populated only frequented only by leftovers and takeaway.

Speakers powered by smart assistants are becoming dime-a-dozen commodities. In most cases, a smart speaker is good for voice commands, but I haven't found their musical reproduction particularly satisfying. The Riva Concert is part of Riva Audio's new Voice line of smart speakers that also includes the larger Riva Stadium. This sweet-sounding portable speaker is built to satisfy music lovers, with refined high-tech features you don't often see in smart speakers. Unpacking the Riva, I noted its heavy, solid build. Under the hood, you'll find a 50-watt Class D amplifier powering the three active drivers and three passive radiators.

We recently came across a wearable that is capable of reading people's minds. Experimenting with new form factors and interfaces, the Dr Xavier type of device allows the wearer to control devices and ask queries without speaking. Called AlterEgo, the wearable tech device, designed by researchers at MIT's Media Lab, can transcribe words that wearers verbalise internally. Simply put, the invention uses electrodes attached to the skin to capture words inside the wearer's head. "Our idea was: could we have a computing platform that's more internal, that melds human and machine in some ways, and that feels like an internal extension of our cognition?" said Arnav Kapur, who led the Intelligence Augmentation research of the Silent Computer Interface system at MIT's Media Lab.

Customer interaction and channels preferences have experienced significant changes over time and are constantly evolving and expanding across all industries, including banking. To consolidate customer satisfaction and cultivate customer advocacy, banks must endeavour to continue to meet these changing needs through use of innovative and progressive technology. Self-service banking interactions with technology were first introduced to customer's through implementation of ATMs, marking the advent of self-service banking. For staff, their introduction to the digital age began with some employees using text terminals that provided the first user experience with computing, though these character interfaces lacked intuitive design and required training. Channel options for customers experienced further expansion with availability of phone banking in the 1980s, while staff started using graphical windows screens.

As I noted in the first post in this series, there's a clear appetite among consumers for personalized financial services. This applies equally in the insurance industry. In my last post we saw a snapshot of five insurers delighting their customers with personalized services. But what are some other directions we expect insurers to take on the road to personalization? Working with carriers around the globe, we're seeing personalized services beginning to make inroads across all lines of business.

This is an integrative review that address the question, "What makes for a good explanation?" with reference to AI systems. Pertinent literatures are vast. Thus, this review is necessarily selective. That said, most of the key concepts and issues are expressed in this Report. The Report encapsulates the history of computer science efforts to create systems that explain and instruct (intelligent tutoring systems and expert systems). The Report expresses the explainability issues and challenges in modern AI, and presents capsule views of the leading psychological theories of explanation. Certain articles stand out by virtue of their particular relevance to XAI, and their methods, results, and key points are highlighted. It is recommended that AI/XAI researchers be encouraged to include in their research reports fuller details on their empirical or experimental methods, in the fashion of experimental psychology research reports: details on Participants, Instructions, Procedures, Tasks, Dependent Variables (operational definitions of the measures and metrics), Independent Variables (conditions), and Control Conditions.