At Google's I/O 2018 conference, company CEO Sundar Pichai presented Google Assistant's newest feature: it can make phone calls on your behalf. On stage, he played the recording of a phone call placed by the assistant to a hair salon to schedule an appointment on a specific day, within a specific time slot. And the voice sounded completely natural and realistic, even adding "mm-hmms" and "uhms." It's called Google Duplex, and Pichai said the assistant can understand the nuances of conversation. It's something Google has been working on for many years, and while it seems like superadvanced artificial intelligence (Pichai said it can react intelligently even during an unexpected conversation), it's still under development.

Google recently unveiled its latest talking AI, called Duplex. Duplex sounds like a real person, complete with pauses, "umms" and "ahhs". The tech giant says it can talk to people on the phone to make appointments and check business opening hours. In recorded conversations that were played at the Google unveiling, it conversed seamlessly with the humans on the receiving end, who seemed totally unaware that they were not talking with another person. These calls left the technology-oriented audience at the Google show gasping and cheering.

Just a few short years ago, having "conversations" in human languages with machines was pretty much universally a frustratingly comedic process. While natural language processing (NLP) and recognition is far from perfect, thanks to machine learning algorithms it's getting increasingly closer to a point where it will be harder to tell whether we are talking to a human or a computer. Business has capitalized on this, with increasing numbers of chatbots deployed, usually in customer service functions but increasingly in internal processes and to assist in training. At ICLR 2018 in Vancouver, Salesforce's chief scientist, Richard Socher, presented seven breakthrough pieces of research covering practical advances in NLP including summarization, machine translation and question answering. He told me "NLP is going to be incredibly important for business – it is going to fundamentally change how we provide services, how we understand sales processes and how we do marketing.

Artificial Intelligence has unleashed the power for e-commerce businesses to explore countless opportunities to dramatically improve customer experiences, generate new leads and better understand their customers. Businesses are continuing to evolve and are steadily incorporating Artificial Intelligence into their strategies – a prediction from Business Insider has suggested as much as 85% of customer interactions will be managed without a human by as soon as 2020. There are many innovative ways businesses are exploring the potential of AI – I've spent a little time researching the best uses so far. With the advancement in Natural Language Processing, and a huge improvement in a machines ability to understand human language including words and text, the technology is there for retailers to explore Virtual Agents/Assistants. The two most well-known and obvious examples would be the Amazon Alexa Echo – they have already begun to integrate and partner with SkyScanner for flights, Dominos for pizza delivery, JustEat for takeaway delivery and Uber to ask Alexa to request a taxi ride.

We tested Alexa, Siri and Google Home to see which digital assistant knows most about the Royal Wedding. SAN FRANCISCO -- A funny as Lord Carpenter Rover of Sunnyside might sound, please don't reply to a Facebook prompt asking you to create your royal wedding guest name using details from your past. Facebook is always awash in sharable quizzes and prompts (remember'Tell us your first 10 rock concerts' last year?) But it also puts you in real danger of identity theft. Much as other, more adult, prompts have asked users to create and forward along their "porn star" name, this one helps you craft an aristocratic title from seemingly innocuous items from your family and your past.

Machine learning is enabling computers to tackle tasks that have, until now, only been carried out by people. The next wave of IT innovation will be powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning. We look at the ways companies can take advantage of it and how to get started. From driving cars to translating speech, machine learning is driving an explosion in the capabilities of artificial intelligence -- helping software make sense of the messy and unpredictable real world. But what exactly is machine learning and what is making the current boom in machine learning possible? At a very high level, machine learning is the process of teaching a computer system how to make accurate predictions when fed data.

Sundar Pichai's demonstration of the company's new virtual-assistant technology, unveiled at the company's annual developer conference last week, was more unnerving than Pichai presumably intended it to be. Google Duplex, as the technology is called, represents a major leap forward in Silicon Valley's efforts to produce robots that sound like people. It can make phone calls to schedule appointments, say, or to reserve a table at a restaurant, using familiar human verbal tics and filler words--"uhm," "mmhmm," and "gotcha"--that make it eerily hard to tell that the voice on the other line is an artificial intelligence. To show the tech in action, Pichai played a recording of the Google Assistant device--Google's answer to Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa--calling and interacting with someone who was purportedly an employee at a hair salon to make an appointment. "What you're going to hear is the Google assistant actually calling a real salon to schedule an appointment for you," Pichai told the audience.

Terms like artificial intelligence have now become a part of our everyday vocabulary. They are thrown around in conversations about autonomous cars and robot-like personal assistants, like Amazon's Alexa. So you may be wondering how – and why – artificial intelligence is being incorporated into business technology. There are obvious applications like business data analytics or customer service products. But it is time to think through how you can implement this type of intelligence into each process around your business – and sometimes the applications aren't going to be as easy to identify.

A funny video has emerged of a woman discovering the items her pet parrot has saved in her Echo device shopping list. Footage, captured on August 26 in West Frankfurt, Illinois, shows the smart Eco device detailing the items Bibi, the African Grey parrot, saved as items to buy. Bibi's owner didn't have a clue that the Echo device was also listening to the parrot talking. It was when Alexa unexpectedly said, 'I'll add that to your shopping list', that the owner decided to see what else was on the shopping list. Bibi is an 11-year-old African Grey, and she's used those 11 years to pick up some useful terms.

TouchPal, a very popular AI-powered virtual keyboard for Android devices (with more than 700m users) recently unveiled something called Talia, a voice-activated intelligent assistant. While I prefer to live in the physical keyboard world (hello BlackBerry KEY2), using a virtual keyboard is pretty much inevitable if you have a modern smartphone. TouchPal pairs Android keyboards to the functionality of all the apps we addictively use on the daily: Facebook, Instagram, Snap, LinkedIn, YouTube, Chrome, and so on. TouchPal learns from user input to personalize and proactively tailor recommendations, suggestions and custom content. It is also an ad-supported network and requires a ton of permissions in order to operate on your phone. Considering how much it needs to know in order to make your life (I guess) more streamlined, this makes sense.