Jack Shepherd had a polished seduction routine. He would take women out for expensive meals and thrilling rides on his speedboat. But one night his fixation on trying to impress went horribly wrong when he killed his date, Charlotte Brown. Shepherd met Charlotte - or Charli, as she was known - for the first time on a December night in 2015. Before that, they'd got to know each other online through the dating website OkCupid.

Amazon may have pioneered the smart-speaker movement, but Google isn't far behind. A year after Amazon debuted the first Echo, Google followed in its footsteps with the Home. The company copied Amazon yet again with the Home Mini, which is its version of the Echo Dot. Last year, Amazon revealed the Echo Show -- an smart speaker with a display. And, sure enough, earlier this year, Google announced that it, too, was getting into the smart-display category.

Lenovo will start shipping the first Google Assistant smart display this weekend, marking the birth of a new range of products that could eventually include some of Echo Show's staunchest rivals. Similar to what Echo Show does, Google's smart displays will give you a way to interact with the tech giant's voice assistant in a visual way. We first met the new devices at CES this year, where we were impressed with their ability to instantly display maps and send them to your phone when you ask for directions. Certainly beats listening and trying to visualize them. Here's another instance where a smart display can be much easier to use than a smart speaker: Assistant will also provide a step-by-step visual aid for recipes you look up that you can follow on screen.

Lenovo Smart Display is Google's play against Amazon's Echo Show. If the Google Assistant is primed to compete against Amazon's Alexa in a game of "show and tell," it has its work cut out for it. Beginning this weekend, Lenovo becomes the first of Google's consumer tech partners to bring out a Google Smart Display smart speaker, which has a screen to visually complement whatever you ask the Google Assistant, woken up with a familiar "OK Google" or "Hey Google" voice command. In so doing, Google (via Lenovo) is pitted against its most obvious direct competitor, the Echo Show from Amazon, which was the first of the Alexa-based smart speakers to add a display. I was able to use the Lenovo Smart Display to surface my Google Calendar and Google Photos, watch news from CNN and Reuters, set timers, play music on Spotify, make a video call through the Google Duo app, and check out YouTube videos on such topics as making sushi. As with the Google Home speakers without a screen, you can use Smart Displays to control such things as your Nest thermostats and Philips Hue lightbulbs.

Earlier this year, my home was infested with smart speakers--I've used a lot of them at this point. But I've never used an Alexa device as dedicated to the cause as the Polk Command Bar, a soundbar that wants to be an Amazon Echo so badly that it's practically in cosplay. It's designed to look like engineers smushed an Amazon Echo Dot right into the center of it. In many ways, that's precisely what Polk did. Polk worked closely with Amazon's Alexa team for two years to design the Command Bar, and had to get special approval to place an Echo-style glowing blue ring, along with mute, volume, and action buttons front-and-center.

Voice-enabled smart devices is set to be the new game changer in consumers' lives.Andria Cheng Amazon has made Alexa practically a household name as the voice-assistant-enabled Fire TV stick and Echo devices rank among its best sellers and gives the online giant a dominant lead in the growing smart speaker market. But you'd be wrong to think that lead came just from those big discounts Amazon gave on the likes of Prime Day. On the campus of New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark on Tuesday, 2,500 developers, marketers, executives and other attendees from Panasonic and Lego to Capital One and Johnson & Johnson gathered for the three-day inaugural Voice Summit. While Amazon rivals like Microsoft and Google were also among attendees, the Seattle giant's presence was not to be missed: it's the event's largest sponsor among dozens. At the conference, which ends Thursday, attendees could hang out with Amazon Alexa staff and learn to code and ask questions, besides listening to various Amazon executives talking about the direction of voice and learning about Alexa initiatives across industries from retail and education to finance and healthcare.

One of the oldest video calling apps is still one of the best, but both people need to be using Skype for calls to be free. Otherwise, you need to pay to call a landline or mobile number. Some people still use their phones to talk, not just text and surf. If you're one, you can also cut costs when dialing. So long as you're on Wi-Fi -- whether it's your existing wireless network at home or a free Wi-Fi hotspot -- you can take advantage of apps that let you make free "VoIP" calls (Voice over Internet Protocol) on your smartphone or tablet.

This is the third story in our continuing series covering the basics of AI. While it isn't necessary to read the first article, which covers neural networks, doing so may add to your understanding of the topics covered in this one. If you'd like to know how computers "see," visit the second article to learn about computer vision and image processing. When computers process text or audio from humans, they're just looking at data. You can whisper "I love you" or drop an F-bomb, the machines just see 1's and 0's.

Digital transformation is bringing the world closer and is highly responsible for driving all activities within an enterprise. It is bringing agility into businesses and reducing the overall cost of some kind of ownership also. If we closely look into this phase of transformation, cloud technologies are the highest adopted technology stream in the digital enterprises. The very reason for this being is, clouds empower teams to provision new application servers and infrastructure whenever required on the go. Furthermore, with the latest cloud platforms coming up, any digital business can now easily make things work for their IT infrastructure in minutes rather than months.

Language is a uniquely human capability and the manifestation of our intelligence. But through AI -- specifically natural language processing (NLP) -- we are providing machines with language capabilities, opening up a new realm of possibilities for how we'll work with them. Today you can walk into a darkened living room and ask Alexa to turn the smart lights up to a pleasant 75% brightness. Or, you can summon information about weather conditions on the other side of the world. The progress the industry has made was on display in Google's recent demo of Duplex, in which an AI agent called businesses and booked appointments.