This post originally appeared on the PullString blog. Unless you've been living under a rock for the last twelve months, you've heard about voice assistants. They go by the name of Alexa, Google Assistant or Siri and can give you information about your commute or the weather, turn lights on and off, book flights, and order groceries. A line of questioning we hear a lot from CMOs in North America and Europe is: should they even care about this latest technology trend, does voice deserve its own strategy, does it warrant attention at their level of the organization? We believe there are four strategic reasons why every CMO should start thinking about what voice assistant customer engagement means for their digital transformation strategy.

Alexa is coming to your hotel room. Amazon this morning is announcing a new program called Alexa for Hospitality, designed to bring its voice assistant technology to everything from chain hotels to vacation rentals. The system can be customized to include key guest information, like checkout time or pool hours; allows guests to request services like housekeeping or room service; and can be configured to control "smart" hotel room functions, like adjusting the thermostat or raising the blinds. Marriott is Amazon's launch partner on the new platform, which is notable not only for the potential scale of this rollout, but also because the hotelier had been testing both Siri and Alexa devices ahead of today's news. According to Amazon, Marriott International will introduce the new Alexa experience at select properties in Marriott Hotels, Westin Hotels & Resorts, St. Regis Hotels & Resorts, Aloft Hotels, and Autograph Collection Hotels starting this summer.

In today's world, every customer is faced with multiple choices. For example, If I'm looking for a book to read without any specific idea of what I want, there's a wide range of possibilities how my search might pan out. I might waste a lot of time browsing around on the internet and trawling through various sites hoping to strike gold. I might look for recommendations from other people. But if there was a site or app which could recommend me books based on what I have read previously, that would be a massive help. Instead of wasting time on various sites, I could just log in and voila! 10 recommended books tailored to my taste. This is what recommendation engines do and their power is being harnessed by most businesses these days. From Amazon to Netflix, Google to Goodreads, recommendation engines are one of the most widely used applications of machine learning techniques. In this article, we will cover various types of recommendation engine algorithms and fundamentals of creating them in Python. We will also see the mathematics behind the workings of these algorithms. Finally, we will create our own recommendation engine using matrix factorization.

As is so often the case in our modern buzzword culture, the phrase artificial intelligence has grown well beyond the confines of what it is, and is instead often thought of in terms of what it could be. There's nothing wrong with maintaining a healthy sense of a technology's potentially dark extremes, but many experts contend that the gloomy predictions of a Terminator-like apocalypse levied by people like Elon Musk are not only a few decades premature, but ultimately make too many assumptions about the ways AI could be employed -- or, for that matter, is already being employed. Whether you realize it or not, artificial intelligence likely already plays an active role in your day to day life. Dating apps like Bumble use it to ban images of firearms and shirtless guys on their platforms -- they certainly don't employ people to enforce their prohibition on guns (of the steel or the flesh variety), they rely on machine learning to identify and flag images containing banned material. This same method, utilized by Yelp to differentiate between pictures of hot dogs and corn muffins, is at the center of the controversial defense contract Google has been under fire for taking on.

Google has made a crucial tweak to its AI assistant to make interactions more conversational. The company has ditched the need to use the wake phrase'OK, Google' or'Hey Google' to signal the start of a follow-up voice command for the talkative personal assistant. After an initial request, Google Assistant can now use artificial intelligence to try to discern whether you are addressing the smart speaker with a fresh query, or simply talking to someone else nearby. However, to do this, the assistant has to send the audio recording to its servers for analysis, which could threaten your privacy, according to security experts. The optional feature, dubbed Continued Conversations, can now be enabled for Google Home, Home Mini, and Home Max owners in the United States.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks during the annual F8 summit in San Jose, California on May 1, 2018. Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, recently sent a small shockwave through the online dating industry when he announced Facebook's plans to roll out dating features at Facebook's F8 conference back in May; shares in dating-giant Match Group immediately plummeted by 16%. Fast forward to today, 22nd June, and investors' initial (and perhaps somewhat knee-jerk) concerns that Facebook would swiftly usurp existing dating apps as the go-to app seem to have been allayed, with Match's share price since recovering. In fact, the announcement itself has generally been welcomed by all the major online dating players. So undeterred were Match Group that they decided to buy a controlling stake in Hinge earlier this week, doubling down on their strategy of acquiring competitor dating brands in spite of the announcement.

Continued Conversation arrives for Google Home devices in the US. The Google Assistant has many strengths but one of its great weaknesses is that you have to precede every interaction with the "Hey Google" or "OK Google" wake-up call. Google promised a solution in the form of Continued Conversation at last May's I/O conference and now it's finally rolling out to Google's line of Home devices in the US. You can talk to the Assistant as long as you like without preceding every query by a wake-up phrase if Continued Conversation is toggled on. An interaction with the Assistant must still be started with a wake-up call but after that, the Assistant will remain active waiting for another command.

SINGAPORE: Robotics and Artificial intelligence (AI) are here to stay. AI applications are not just helping businesses become more efficient, they are more frequently visible in our everyday lives. Consider virtual assistants such as Nanyang Technological University's humanoid robot receptionist Nadine, and robotic instructors, known as RoboCoaches, that lead fitness classes for the elderly, demonstrate exercises, and offer encouragement here in Singapore. Not to mention the increasingly prevalent role of Alexa, Siri and Cortana in our lives. READ: The rise of artificial intelligence and how lives will forever be changed, the Big Read.

Alexa, ask Excalibur Insurance for a car insurance quote. That possibility is just around the corner, as Wawanesa Mutual Insurance Company announced Thursday that it had opened an Innovation Outpost lab in Kitchener, Ont. that will connect customers with brokers through voice technology. One of the first projects out of the lab is a new interactive technology using an Amazon Alexa voice skill to connect Wawanesa customers to their brokers for an auto or home insurance quote. Jeff Roy, CEO of brokerage Excalibur Insurance Group, helped to spearhead the work with ProNavigator (which provides an insurance AI-powered virtual assistant). The brokerage will be the first going to market with the new technology, which will then be launched on other brokerages' websites in the future. David Arbuthnot, director of the Innovation Outpost lab, told Canadian Underwriter in an interview the voice assistant walks customers through six underwriting questions, which provides enough information to obtain a quote.

Previously, we looked at how Artificial Intelligence (AI) has changed the supplier side of the retail eco-system, especially on two fronts – Price and Product Offering. In this post, we shall analyze how it has affected the buyer's journey at almost every step of the way. As most of you will know, a buyer's journey starts from the awareness stage, where he comes to learn of a product or a brand, and then goes on to the following stages: research, consideration, purchase and retention; the latter is where a company tries to hold on to its customers. After all, history shows that people who have bought from your company before are most likely to be repeat customers if they are happy with the overall journey. AI retains the power to analyze vast tracts of data, and that includes human behavior.