How good is the level of general knowledge possessed by Alexa and other digital assistants? For the second time, U.S. digital agency Stone Temple analyzed the issue by making a selection of assistants answer 5,000 general questions. The best performance was recorded by Google Assistant on smartphones which had an answering share of 77.2 percent, of which just over 95 percent were correct. By comparison, Apple's Siri answered 40 percent, of which 80 percent were correct. In comparison with the previous year, the learning curve for all assistants is on an upward trend.

Most how-to articles on a given subject walk you through a series of steps, perhaps with a video attached. Windows 10's new free help feature, Cortana Show Me, is different: It actually performs basic Windows tasks for you on your PC while you follow along. Even better, Cortana Show Me strikes a nice balance between showing you what to do, actually performing those steps, and providing an "escape hatch" if you need to slow down. All you need to do is wiggle your mouse, and Cortana Show Me will stop. Microsoft's free app is part of the Windows 10 April 2018 Update, and includes walkthroughs for many basic tasks--we have a full list below.

A Vancouver Island professor is trying to find a whole new way to help people experiencing memory loss. University of Victoria associate professor Debra Sheets is seeking volunteers for her study which explores how artificial intelligence software -- like Amazon's Alexa -- can help people with memory loss and dementia, as well as their family caregivers. "I'm really excited by the possibilities for people with dementia," said Sheets. "For someone with dementia, voice is a really easy way to access things." Sheets, who specializes in nursing, said the benefit of new voice technology is that it can simplify someone's everyday routine if they struggle with remembering specifics.

Aeronautics company Airbus has successfully launched an AI assistant called CIMON into space. The artificial intelligence system is the first to arrive on the International Space Station (ISS) and is powered by IBM's Watson supercomputer and overseen by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in cooperation with Airbus. CIMON stands for "Crew Interactive Mobile CompanioN" and is a mobile and autonomous system designed to help astronauts with everyday tasks on the ISS, while also providing companionship. CIMON was created using 3D printing and made of plastic and metal. "We are the first company in Europe to carry a free flyer, a kind of flying brain, to the ISS and to develop artificial intelligence for the crew on board the space station," said Manfred Jaumann of Airbus.

Along with building the Bixby voice assistant, Samsung also plans to invest in AI startups. The company on Wednesday said its Silicon Valley-based Samsung NEXT business has launched a new fund to invest in early-stage startups "solving AI problems, as well as those using AI to solve computer science problems." The Q Fund doesn't have a cap, but it falls under Samsung NEXT's overall $150 million investment fund. The new AI fund will invest only in seed and series A investments, the earliest stages of a startup's operations. Such investments typically are up to $1 million, though the Samsung NEXT fund managers can invest more, as well.

Digital transformation's prevalence in everything we read is a signifier that the way we live and work is going to continue to evolve over the next decade. In this blog, I want to highlight a few use cases showing how disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning will be used in the office of the CFO to increase productivity, simplify processes, and support decision-making. Analytics: Since I have a background in financial planning and analysis (FP&A), I have been thinking about how digital assistants could impact analytics. Today, almost everybody in FP&A receives countless calls asking for information like, "What was our revenue in Q3 last year for this product? What has our growth been over the last three years for this line of business?"

Welcome to the club if you are still behind the artificial intelligence curve. This is the last chapter of my AI series, and I hope it has shed a humble light upon the linchpin of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). Included below are links to previous installments. You do not want to miss the mini-documentary in part 3. Keep the following quotes in mind as I prognosticate today on AI jobs for the near-term. "I have all the tools and gadgets. I tell my son, who is a producer. You never work for the machine; the machine works for you."

Artificial intelligence is changing the world of retirement planning. By using improved datasets and algorithms to efficiently deliver solutions tailored to people's needs, AI can help them save, invest and retire better. One of the hottest trends to emerge in this area in recent years is the use of robo-advisors. These are software programs that use the data supplied by clients to create and automatically manage their investment portfolios. They're gaining in popularity, but are they better than human advisors?

Gurugram-based HRtech startup Leena AI has become a part of summer class 2018 of US-based investor Y Combinator and has confirmed an investment from the company. Talking to Inc42, Adit Jain, co-founder told that while building bots, the team learned through its experience with ChatterOn that it's better to concentrate on a single subject because the underlying machine learning model gets better the more it's used. Following this understanding, the team launched Leena AI in August 2017 as a provider of virtual assistants for the workplace to focus on human resources chatbot. As an enterprise virtual agent, currently focusing on HR, Leena AI draws all functionality from ChatterOn, which increases the speed of execution by multi-fold. "To deliver value, you can't do many things and must focus on a few. We felt that the biggest pain in the internal shared services space was in HR because of highly fragmented back-end application landscape and decided to go deeper in the HR vertical," Anit explained.

The robotics industry is estimated to hit $135.4 billion in 2019 as per IDC. There was a time when a robotics revolution was considered mere science-fiction. The rise of robotics has been phenomenal in most disciplines. From building robotic arms for medical procedures to running autonomous self-driving vehicles, robotics is empowering all technological sectors. In October 2017, Sophia, a social human-like robot was offered citizenship of Saudi Arabia – the first robot to achieve this status.