At the OpenWorld conference this week, Oracle is introducing the Oracle Digital Assistant, which Oracle calls the next generation of enterprise chatbots. While typical chatbots are built for a single purpose, the Digital Assistant can be trained to support domain skills from multiple applications, such as HR, ERP, CRM or CX. The digital assistant provides a simplified user experience, since an employee only has to interact with one assistant rather than one for each application, Suhas Uliyar, Oracle's VP of AI, Bots & Mobile Product Management, said to ZDNet. Also: Oracle v. Google ain't over yet -- Google vows it'll appeal to Supreme Court CNET "As an employee of an organization, it becomes onerous to find out, 'How do I interact with this skill?'" he said. "Digital assistant is the one singular point, which routes between questions asked."

Many might not realize it but artificial intelligence (AI) has ubiquitously made its way into our daily lives. For instance, digital assistants such as Amazon Alexa and Apple Siri handle everyday tasks including scheduling reminders or playing your favorite morning jam. Support channels are being taken over by chatbots and you're none the wiser. Impressive as these applications may be, AI is entering its so-called third wave, which is set to create more interesting applications for the technology itself, as reported by Top500.org. Third-wave AI is supposed to be truly intelligent and most similar to human thinking, meaning it will make sense of the independent world and its varying contexts.

In the present era, shopping is an irrefutable need of people. If you will conduct a study regarding shopping, you will find the maximum percentage of people loves shopping. However, there is drastic change in way people do shopping. In earlier times, vendors knew about the preferences and needs of customer to make recommendation based on past purchases. In this way, vendor wins the brand loyalty which increase their profitability and sales.

When we think about artificial intelligence and human speech we typically think of personal assistants like Siri and Alexa. That technology is still in its infancy. What if the real potential with AI is not to make computers or apps sound more human, but instead, to help humans be more humane and empathetic? An MIT spin-off company called Cogito has developed software that evaluates the subtle give-and-take of conversation--focusing not on what is said, but how it is said. The technology monitors subtleties of speech like tone, energy, vocal strain, and tempo.

Google isn't being stingy about its recently announced Home Hub features -- it's going to be available on all Assistant smart displays, regardless of manufacturer. But we assumed it would be awhile before we actually saw these features. However, the folks at 9to5Google noticed that Lenovo is rolling out multi-room audio, Live Albums from Google Photos, Nest Hello Doorbell, Home View and more to its Smart Display over the next few weeks. Multi-room audio adds your display to a speaker group and allows you to play music throughout your home, while Live Albums will automatically pick your best photos and display them. You can see who's at the door without having to ask thanks to Nest Hello Doorbell, and the handy Home View allows you to see all your smart home devices at once. In addition to these features, Smart Display owners in both 8-inch and 10-inch sizes will be able to control many different media and entertainment devices, including certain televisions, set-top boxes, speakers, smart remotes and more via touch or voice.

It was seven minutes to ten o'clock in the morning, and it was the only good thing that had happened." If you get the feeling that these sentences could have been better structured, it's simply because these seemingly disparate, literary threads have been stitched into a novel by an algorithm. That's also why the human author of this novel, Ross Godwin, calls himself'writer of writers'. He is an artist and creative technologist at Google, and also a former Obama administration ghostwriter. In March 2017, Godwin fitted a Cadillac car with a surveillance camera, global positioning system (GPS) unit, microphone and clock, and connected these devices to a portable artificial intelligence (AI) writing machine that fed on these input data in real-time.

When it comes to adding a voice assistant to a speaker or a pair of headphones, Amazon's Alexa has become the default choice for many OEMs, likely due to the openness and high adoption rate of the platform. Never one to miss a money-making opportunity, Qualcomm has decided to lend these manufacturers a hand by building a smart headset reference design, which features its very own QCC5100-series Bluetooth audio chip. With the Alexa app installed on your Android phone, once it's paired with these earbuds, you can toggle Alexa with a simple push of a button on one of the buds. Thanks to Qualcomm's radio know-how, this reference design apparently boasts a long battery life (as do many Bluetooth headphones these days, anyway) along with active noise cancellation, aptX HD audio and TrueWireless Stereo. Since this development kit supports Alexa Mobile Accessory Kit protocol out of the box, manufacturers can focus more on the design and other features, thus saving time and cost in the long run.

Yesterday, Google announced an AI product called Duplex, which is capable of having human-sounding conversations. I am genuinely bothered and disturbed at how morally wrong it is for the Google Assistant voice to act like a human and deceive other humans on the other line of a phone call, using upspeak and other quirks of language. "Hi um, do you have anything available on uh May 3?" If Google created a way for a machine to sound so much like a human that now we can't tell what is real and what is fake, we need to have a talk about ethics and when it's right for a human to know when they are speaking to a robot. In this age of disinformation, where people don't know what's fake news… how do you know what to believe if you can't even trust your ears with now Google Assistant calling businesses and posing as a human? That means any dialogue can be spoofed by a machine and you can't tell.

It has become commonplace--and somehow not at all weird--to ask your speaker for a weather report, or to command your television to switch on HBO. This is the new now, a place we've been ever since Alexa marched into our living rooms and Siri snuck into our pockets. And it's likely the future, as voice-controlled smart-home speakers and devices continue to proliferate like bunnies in the spring. The thing is, I'm not quite sure it's the future we asked for. Haven't we already decided the smartphone is the best tool for ambient internet tasks?

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