Tinder is giving its users new ways to flirt. The dating app announced on Tuesday that it's testing a feature that will let users send Bitmojis to their matches. For now, it's only available for users in Mexico and Canada, but Tinder may eventually launch Bitmojis in the app globally. Tinder is giving its users new ways to flirt. The dating app announced on Tuesday that it's testing a feature that will let users send Bitmojis to their matches US users are expected to gain access to Bitmojis in the app by the end of this summer, Tinder told Engadget.

This is new territory for families. For the first time, children who are too young to distinguish fantasy from reality are engaging with devices powered by artificial intelligence. Many see smart speakers as magical, imbue them with human traits and boss them around like a Marine drill instructor, according to several new studies in the past year. Hunter Walk, a San Francisco venture capitalist, worried that his family's Amazon Echo "is turning our daughter into a raging asshole," he wrote in a blog post in 2016, because of the 4-year-old's tendency to boss it around. He has since set rules around how to talk to the device and said he hasn't noticed any rude behavior by his daughter, who is now 6. "I still have concerns," Mr. Walk says.

AFTER graduating from the pages of Sci-Fi novels to the screens of computer scientists in mere decades, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has morphed from concept to reality quicker than you can say "buzzword". Despite protestations, we have moved swiftly past the point of AI's place as a buzzword in the corporate lexicon. Artificial Intelligence brings with it a confluence of fear and excitement; of expectations and radical change. But questions about its capacity to solve real-world problems linger. We brought together a panel of AI, robotics, and customer experience (CX) experts to deliberate the current state of AI––the challenges for brands and consumers–– and what the future holds.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has blown up in the past few years and is quickly starting to take over the world of business marketing. From digital assistants like Alexa and Google Home to Siri and search algorithms, AI allows consumers to access the information they want quickly and efficiently. It's predicted that the world of AI is only going to continue to grow until it's incorporated into most aspects of our business and personal lives. Biz Journals anticipates that "62% of enterprises will use AI technologies by 2018", which has increased from the 38% of businesses that were using it in 2017. Some are afraid that AI is going to take jobs away from marketers by performing tasks usually carried out by humans, but this isn't the case. Rather, AI is able to quickly carry out a lot of the time-consuming, tedious tasks previously required by small business owners so that their time can be freed up to focus on more in-depth tasks that require a human's level of personalization.

NEW YORK, NY - JUNE 07: Founder and CEO of Essential Products Andy Rubin speaks onstage at WIRED Business Conference presented by Visa at Spring Studios on June 7, 2017 in New York City. Its Amazon Prime day and one of the biggest discounts that are available is on the Essential Phone in Halo Gray coming in at $250 (see here) just 35% of what it was selling for just one year ago. Adding this deeply discounted product to the news that the company Essential Products Inc, is up for sale is a further indication that the ecosystem that Andy Rubin was going to build has failed badly. The focus has now switched to the smart home but without a smartphone, the ecosystem has almost zero chance. Essential Products' long-term strategy is to build a hardware-based ecosystem of devices which would offer better and smarter access to the Digital Life services that are used every day.

Our previous article on " Artificial Intelligence in Hotels " spoke about how AI can impact the operational processes and dynamics within the hospitality industry. This final article in the 3 part series will focus on using the inherent capability of AI along with predictive analytics and natural language processing to synchronize and optimize the entire information management system to deliver exceptional customer service. Intelligent hotel system is where all the data channels are linked together just like human arteries and veins, forming a superlative, productive and high-performance structure that resembles the future vision of automated hotel system. IoT-enabled connections of motion sensors, room control, and smart voice control are poised to change the way hotels function. Integration of IoT into intelligence-driven hotel operations will not only personalize hotel guest experience but also impact the business model of the hotel industry in the near future.

In spite of the skepticism that AI is just another technology buzzword, its momentum is real! According to Gartner, by 2020, customers will manage 85% of their relationship with the enterprise without interacting with a human. Digital assistants will be so pervasive that they will optimize employee productivity for most situations. As the way people interact with technology becomes a key differentiator, the enterprise faces a new universal imperative: to include and integrate AI to enhance customer experiences. Besides making traditional interfaces smarter, AI integration is making interfaces invisible as is the case with AI powered voice-assistants.

Today, we can pull out our smart phones and use various apps to enhance our everyday lives. Digital assistants like Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri are able to complete a number of helpful tasks in- and outside the home. Powered by complex coding and algorithms, these technologies are affecting how we interact with things around us, and even each other. But tech experts are warning that while AI has some positive impacts, these new advances could harm our environment. "Like any new innovation, we need to consider and manage potential new risks," Jahda Swanborough, a global environmental leadership fellow and lead at the World Economic Forum, told DW.

As usual, Amazon Prime Day deals were best when it came to buying Amazon's own products. LOS ANGELES -- The "deals" for Amazon Prime Day are everything we expected. Great, generous discounts on Amazon's own products, close-outs on Amazon and other brands' products that didn't do well, and so-so deals on a lot else. The surprise: It wasn't possible to see some of these purported deals early on. We didn't foresee Amazon not being able to handle the traffic to shop, and having much of the website down for over three hours Monday.

Amazon is every online retailer's forbidding nightmare. Last year, it dominated 44 percent of the US eCommerce market and about 4 percent of all domestic retail sales. One Click Retail, an eCommerce analysis provider, explains its dominance with the fact that millennials, Amazon's core demographic, are getting older and starting to spend more. Moreover, advanced marketing capabilities for sellers, developments in Alexa, and pioneering in applications of the hottest technologies make it impossibly hard for smaller competitors to actually… well, compete. Amazon is not only a simple and familiar platform selling everything you can think of -- it's also one of the most innovative players on the market.