Continued Conversation arrives for Google Home devices in the US. The Google Assistant has many strengths but one of its great weaknesses is that you have to precede every interaction with the "Hey Google" or "OK Google" wake-up call. Google promised a solution in the form of Continued Conversation at last May's I/O conference and now it's finally rolling out to Google's line of Home devices in the US. You can talk to the Assistant as long as you like without preceding every query by a wake-up phrase if Continued Conversation is toggled on. An interaction with the Assistant must still be started with a wake-up call but after that, the Assistant will remain active waiting for another command.

SINGAPORE: Robotics and Artificial intelligence (AI) are here to stay. AI applications are not just helping businesses become more efficient, they are more frequently visible in our everyday lives. Consider virtual assistants such as Nanyang Technological University's humanoid robot receptionist Nadine, and robotic instructors, known as RoboCoaches, that lead fitness classes for the elderly, demonstrate exercises, and offer encouragement here in Singapore. Not to mention the increasingly prevalent role of Alexa, Siri and Cortana in our lives. READ: The rise of artificial intelligence and how lives will forever be changed, the Big Read.

Alexa, ask Excalibur Insurance for a car insurance quote. That possibility is just around the corner, as Wawanesa Mutual Insurance Company announced Thursday that it had opened an Innovation Outpost lab in Kitchener, Ont. that will connect customers with brokers through voice technology. One of the first projects out of the lab is a new interactive technology using an Amazon Alexa voice skill to connect Wawanesa customers to their brokers for an auto or home insurance quote. Jeff Roy, CEO of brokerage Excalibur Insurance Group, helped to spearhead the work with ProNavigator (which provides an insurance AI-powered virtual assistant). The brokerage will be the first going to market with the new technology, which will then be launched on other brokerages' websites in the future. David Arbuthnot, director of the Innovation Outpost lab, told Canadian Underwriter in an interview the voice assistant walks customers through six underwriting questions, which provides enough information to obtain a quote.

Previously, we looked at how Artificial Intelligence (AI) has changed the supplier side of the retail eco-system, especially on two fronts – Price and Product Offering. In this post, we shall analyze how it has affected the buyer's journey at almost every step of the way. As most of you will know, a buyer's journey starts from the awareness stage, where he comes to learn of a product or a brand, and then goes on to the following stages: research, consideration, purchase and retention; the latter is where a company tries to hold on to its customers. After all, history shows that people who have bought from your company before are most likely to be repeat customers if they are happy with the overall journey. AI retains the power to analyze vast tracts of data, and that includes human behavior.

Humans have always been thrilled with the concept of human-like robots and Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). Hollywood movies and science fiction have perhaps inspired several scientists to start working towards this direction. Although the AI bubble has burst many times, significant developments and breakthroughs are now renewing public interest in this field. In 2017, Gartner placed general AI at the stage of early adoption in its hype cycle. It also placed deep learning and machine learning technologies at the peak of this hype cycle. It is important to realize that AI is an umbrella term for several interlinked technologies.

Join us for a series of talks on how AI is making XR an even more powerful medium. We'll begin with an overview of how to think about artificial intelligence and it's applications in XR, followed by talks that introduce different AI products into the XR ecosystem. Hugh will outline the three ways XR developers, designers and entrepreneurs should be thinking about AI, and give some examples, including an open source Unity plugin Aquinas are developing for data capture & encoding 2. AI Assistants: David Gene Oh, Samsung Bixby. David will talk about AI assistants and what Samsung is doing 3. Conversational Interfaces: Jeff Meador, Portico True Talk. Jeff will talk about how Portico is using their amazing conversational interface for employee training in XR.

At last, you don't have to call out Google Assistant by name every time when you want to issue a command. As promised at I/O, Google has made Assistant's Continued Conversation available for US English speakers using a Home speaker. Enable it in your preferences and you don't have to use "hey Google" or "OK Google" for follow-ups, even if you have multiple requests. Ask if it'll be sunny tomorrow and you can both remind yourself to go the beach and put sunscreen on your shopping list, all without having to start the chat from scratch. The approach works by leaving Assistant active for no more than eight seconds if it doesn't hear speech. It'll stay active as long as it believes that you're talking, and will keep the LEDs lit on your Home speaker as long as it's listening for your voice.

One of the most important things we learn as children is how to communicate with each other. We start with "goo goos and gaa gaas," then on to baby sign language, a few simple words like "momma," and our conversations get more complex from there. For the Google Assistant to have a natural conversation, it should be able to understand when it's being spoken to and should be capable of responding to several requests during an interaction. We're taking another step forward in making your interactions with the Google Assistant more natural with Continued Conversation, available starting today on Google Home, Google Home Mini and Google Home Max. We've heard from a lot of people that adding "Hey Google" before each follow-up question for the Assistant doesn't feel as natural as they'd like.

When you consider the popularity of Amazon's virtual assistant Alexa and the company's Fire TV streamers, it was really just a matter of time before the folks at the Everything Store decided to mash them up. In fact, Amazon already has, sort of: The company started down that path last year by giving Echo devices the ability to pass commands along to a Fire TV or Fire TV Stick. With the new Fire TV Cube, though, Amazon is trying to break down the wall between Alexa and the content you want to see altogether. Now, we've only had our Fire TV Cube for about two days, and that's just not enough time to really put the streaming box through its paces -- instead, read on for our first impressions about Amazon's new hardware and the virtual assistant that will ultimately make or break it. The Fire TV Cube itself is a glossy black box that, aside from the blue ring that lights up when Alexa is listening to you, looks about as nondescript as a bit of home theater kit can be.

If you're thinking of buying the Amazon Fire TV Cube because you're delighted by the idea of having an Amazon Echo and a Fire TV device mashed into one device, let me stop you right there. Alexa on a TV interface demands a level of conversation like no other streaming TV product I've used before. After a few nights of using the Cube, I began to hate the sound of my own voice. Maybe you'll still be delighted by the Cube at first if you buy one. Maybe if you have kids, they'll love shouting at the TV to get their cartoon fix. But there's a good chance you'll end up doing what I did: going back to the fuddy-duddy Fire TV remote, because that's the easiest way to scroll through multiple media options.