The Sonos Beam is a new $399 soundbar, but to Sonos, it's a heck of a lot more than just a speaker that sits under your television. It's a fabric-wrapped representation of how Sonos sees the future--one in which all the voice assistants from Apple and Google and Amazon can live next to one another. In this future, hip urban millennials parents will use Beam not just for Netflixing and HBOing, but queuing up the soundtracks to their hip, urban lives and for controlling their hip, urban smart home. And they'll do it all with spoken commands instead of an app or a remote. Development on the Beam has been going on for more than two years (during which time the speaker was referred to internally as "El Rey," Spanish for "The King"). And it's being released at a critical time for Sonos: It's been reported that the 16-year-old audio company will soon file to go public.

The rise of mobile banking in the last few years has coincided with the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) becoming more capable and pervasive in a variety of fields and applications. Although unrelated, the parallel growth in both the sectors has, of course, led to a confluence of the two, as more and more banking and finance institutions explore AI applications to improve their offerings and services. While enterprise-solutions are many – from more efficient data analytics to improved back-end workflows through automation – quite a few organisations have also explored consumer-facing applications of AI. One of the most widely adopted applications has been the consumer chat-assistant. Simply put, a chat assistant (colloquially called a chatbot) is an AI or computer programme that conducts conversations meant to replicate human conversation via auditory or textual means.

Today, Amazon announced that the Echo Look is now available to all customers. Previously, the smart style assistant was available by invitation only. The Echo Look has a depth-sensing camera with built-in LED lighting that allows you to snap a picture of what you're wearing with just your voice, thanks to Alexa. The assistant can then give you personalized recommendations and keep track of what's in your closet. The Style Check feature will tell you which of two outfits looks better on you (based on fit, color, style and trends), and another feature will recommend items that will go well with what you already own.

Most of the best Memorial Day tech sales have slowly trickled to an end, but with summer in full swing and new products coming out all the time, there are a surprising number of killer deals this week, including a rare sale on some excellent Google gadgets. With the help of our friends at TechBargains, below are some of our favorite deals going on this week. Google discounts some of its products now and then, but this week four of them have had their prices slashed. The Google Pixelbook is the most powerful Chromebook you can buy, by a longshot, and ChromeOS has improved considerably since we reviewed it late last year. Google Pixelbook Chromebook for $749 (Was $999) - Intel Core i5 CPU, 12.3-inch 2400x1600 touchscreen, 8GB RAM, and 128GB SSD With the Google Home Mini on sale, rival Amazon has put its competing Echo Dots on discount, along with the Echo Show, which is an Echo with a screen, perfect for your kitchen.

All three a virtual tie, but each had questions they couldn't answer. Tune in to find out where Apple, Google and Amazon fell down. LOS ANGELES -- Apple this week had every opportunity to show off new voice skills for Siri, the personal digital assistant, and to prove that it could be competitive with Amazon and Google. Instead, it pretty much took a pass. At its annual developers conference Monday, the company spent 15 minutes on new augmented reality updates, nearly a half-hour on updates to a fall macOS software update and over an hour on the new version of iOS12, the mobile operating system upgrade for the iPhone and iPad that will be out in the fall.

Amazon's Echo Show is one of our favorite smart speakers, to the point that we described it as "the most capable mainstream smart home assistant on the market" in our 4-star review. And right now you can snag all its smarts and functionality for a killer deal on Amazon--the Echo Show is just $150, down from a list price of $230 and good for the lowest price we've ever seen. There are a lot of things to love about the Echo Show. One of the most obvious is its seven-inch color touchscreen, which allows you to see pictures and video and enables video calling with other Shows and Spots. Another cool feature is Drop In, which allows you to use multiple Echoes as an intercom system.

The Internet of Things is a major trend benefiting from the maturation of AI. Everyday examples of the IoT include wearables like the Apple Watch or Fitbit. The Amazon Echo and Google Home are racing to be the top choice for the Thing connecting all the devices powering your smart home, from Philips smart bulbs to Neato Botvacs.

While all my American and UK colleagues have had access to Amazon's Alexa for years, I've been left out of the party here in France. Those devices are now up for pre-order on Amazon at half price, with delivery set at June 13th for Prime members. It took Amazon long enough to teach Alexa French, but the assistant has reportedly gained mastery of both the language and country. "In France, Alexa is French," said Amazon VP Jorrit Van der Meulen. "We've built an entirely new experience from the ground up that honors the French language and culture, allowing customers to just ask to get music, weather, news, information, and more."

By now, everyone has heard of artificial intelligence: It populates our Facebook feeds and powers the virtual assistants we keep around our homes, including Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri. Perhaps you found this article through a Google search or a news aggregator app, which is also powered by AI. The average consumer interacts with AI multiple times every day -- despite a HubSpot survey that indicates that 63% of consumers don't even realize they have used AI -- but not everyone understands the full impact the technology will ultimately have on our economy. The founders of up-and-coming AI startups are poised to build multibillion-dollar enterprises. In fact, the immense value of AI technology is likely to spawn the world's first trillion-dollar companies -- a feat that tech giants like Amazon, Apple and Alibaba are racing to achieve.

In practice, Artificial Intelligence is a group of technologies that help facilitate the discovery and analysis of information for the purpose of making predictions and recommendations, support decision making, facilitate interactions, and automate certain responses. Since AI applications are continually transforming business models, the scope of traditional technology applications will scale up towards a multi-channel world with recommendation systems, virtual assistants, chatbots, and AI-managed marketing platforms. Essentially a model that helps identify patterns and associations from large amounts of data, Artificial Intelligence enhances quality control and improves operational effectiveness through digitized information assets. This allows businesses to focus time and resources on identifying new opportunities and customers, as well as different channels to market. Apart from large technology firms, the Banking and Securities sector is one of the leading industry verticals in Artificial Intelligence adoption.