Pearl Sullivan is dean of engineering at the University of Waterloo. Whether we like it or not, computers are getting smarter. As more and more of us ask Alexa to add bagels to our shopping list or ask Siri to tell us what to wear today, artificial intelligence is permeating our world in increasingly surprising ways. Although we aren't anywhere close to the kind of dystopian futures imagined by Isaac Asimov or in Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror, pressure is mounting on companies to capitalize on the potential of AI to help them change the way they do things. Whether it is tech giants such as Google and Apple, or retailers, taxi firms and factories, every business is eyeing the potential promised by AI to make them leaner, smarter and richer.

The list of smart home devices is growing day by day. Alexa is one of them and is taking the whole world by storm. It has recently launched Amazon Echo which is full of helpful features. It is a powerful gadget at a pocket-friendly price. Here are few things you must try if you own one.

The next big Windows 10 update is finally upon us, and it finally has a name: the April 2018 Update. It will be available for download beginning Monday, April 30. The April 2018 Update is also known as Version 1803 (it was codenamed Redstone 4, and it was informally called the Spring Creators Update). It rolls up several of the features that Microsoft has been quietly previewing in its Windows 10 Insider beta editions for the last few months. This particular update's focus is efficiency.

Smart speakers are all the rage in China and demand for smartphones shows no sign of slowing down in the region, according to GfK Asia. Latest sales figures released by the consumer market research firm show that 27 million smart speakers were shifted in November and 35 million in December in China last year. Powered by virtual assistants, voice-activated smart speakers in China include the Xiaomi Mi AI and Alibaba's Tmall Genie X1 (Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post). GfK reports that there are 34 products from 21 different brands in the country. Other global products include the Amazon Echo, Google Home and the Apple HomePod.

A new Amazon Alexa Skill launched in beta today that uses machine learning to analyze and improve your gameplay in "Call of Duty: WWII," Activision announced today. The Call of Duty Alexa Skill is available today in beta. "The Call of Duty Alexa Skill gives every player a personal Call of Duty coach for the first time, using AI and machine learning to analyze how you play and providing tips on how to improve your gameplay based on your individual strengths, weaknesses and play style," Tim Ellis, chief marketing officer of Activision, said in a prepared statement. "We know that people play more'Call of Duty' as their skills improve and the more often they play with their friends. The'Call of Duty Alexa Skill' is designed to help players improve their'Call of Duty' skills, connect more easily with their friends and get to the fun faster in'Call of Duty: WWII.'"

I have tough news, everybody--sometimes Rotten Tomatoes is wrong. It's a shocker, but the review aggregator is an imperfect system rather than a universal beacon of filmic quality. See, for instance, the officially "rotten" Duck Butter, which had its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival last week and is the latest film from Beatriz at Dinner director Miguel Arteta. The Hollywood Reporter calls the film "surprisingly banal," and Slant Magazine claims it's "difficult to fall in love with." "Duck Butter gets props for its creative story, for its queer women-centered storyline," Bust conceded.

The Alexa virtual assistant could be abused by attackers to spy on consumers with smart devices. Researchers at security firm Checkmarx created a proof-of-concept Amazon Echo Skill for Alexa that instructs the device to indefinitely record surround voice to secretly eavesdrop on users' conversations and then sends the transcripts to a website controlled by the attackers. Amazon allows developers to build custom Skills that can control voice-activated smart devices such as Amazon Echo Show, Echo Dot, and Amazon Tap. The rogue Echo Skill for Alexa is disguised as a simple math calculator, once installed it will be activated in the background after a user says "Alexa, open calculator." "The Echo is continuously listening for the user's voice. So when the user says "Alexa, open calculator", the calculator skill is initialized and the API\Lambda-function that's associated with the skill receives a launch request as an input."

Alexa will soon be able to recall information you've directed her to remember, as well as have more natural conversations that don't require every command to begin with "Alexa." She'll also be able to launch skills in response to questions you ask, without explicit instructions to do so. The features are the first of what Amazon says are many launches this year that will make its virtual assistant more personalized, smarter, and more engaging. The news was announced this morning in a keynote presentation from the head of the Alexa Brain group, Ruhi Sarikaya, speaking at the World Wide Web Conference in Lyon, France. He explained that the Alexa Brain initiative is focused on improving Alexa's ability to track context and memory within and across dialog sessions, as well as make it easier for users to discover and interact with Alexa's now over 40,000 third-party skills. With the memory update, arriving soon to U.S. users, Alexa will be able to remember any information you ask her to, and retrieve it later.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) also referred to as Machine Intelligence is a hot topic, which is loved by many, feared by few, but cannot be avoided by any. Now let's take a look at certain statistics that will help you to understand the popularity of this emerging exponential technology. By 2020 One Billion Video Cameras to be Connected to AI Nvidia just announced that its AI Imaging System can reconstruct or repair corrupted photos with minute level of accuracy. Its system "Metropolis", an AI-platform for smart cities is getting popular at lightning speed. Huawei and Alibaba are early adopters of Metropolis.

Computationally analyzing Big Data is not a passing trend. As volumes of data continue to grow, so will the improvements in analyzing big data. When it comes to applications of Predictive Analytics, we have only seen the tip of the iceberg. It has already helped organizations (i.e. All of these different types of Artificial Intelligence are tied together in a way that has profoundly changed the way we perform everyday tasks, and more is yet to come.