When a robot rings your phone, you can usually tell right away. Its voice is melodic, it rarely stumbles, and it's unnaturally efficient. The voice betrays its origin before it even has the chance to tell you that you qualify for a free loan, your mortgage payment is overdue, or that your input would really be valuable for a customer survey. Knowing it's a robot also makes it easy to hang up. The minds behind Google Duplex are in the process of changing that paradigm, for better or worse.

On May 17th, I attended the 4th Rise of AI conference in Berlin. The conference grew from 17 participants in 2015 to 70 in 2016, 300 in 2017, and this year 700. Although many more interested people wanted to participate, the event organisators, Veronika and Fabian Westerheide, announced that the conference next year will be capped at around the same amount of people to not loose the personal touch – in my opinion, a very good decision. I had the chance to give a presentation on my own. I talked about my team's learnings with regards to the data science process, the obstacles we faced and still facing, and the concepts & solutions we have been developing to get around those issues and to make the data science process smoother.

Microsoft has acquired an artificial-intelligence startup, Semantic Machines, to bolster its efforts in "conversational AI" and potentially make its Cortana virtual assistant better at understanding natural language enquiries. Microsoft didn't disclose how much it paid for Semantic Machines but said it would open a new AI research center in Semantic Machines' hometown of Berkeley, California. Semantic Machines contains numerous AI veterans, and the acquisition gives Microsoft access to some formidable talent. Semantic's chief technology officer, Larry Gillick, is a former chief speech scientist for Apple's Siri. Microsoft also name checked the University of California at Berkeley professor Dan Klein and the Stanford University professor Percy Liang.

From personalized healthcare to digital personal assistants, Artificial Intelligence has been changing the world around us and how! Read all about it here: bit.ly/2IWKiEq #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Siri #DataScience pic.twitter.com/724S9n9Lay

Earlier this month at its I/O developer conference, Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG)(NASDAQ:GOOGL) subsidiary Google wowed everyone by demonstrating a new conversational artificial intelligence (AI) technology called Google Duplex, a system that will become part of Google Assistant and will allow the virtual assistant to make phone calls on a user's behalf. The demonstration was striking because it sounded uncannily human, which has raised all sorts of ethical questions. The article originally appeared in Motley Fool. Microsoft's (NASDAQ:MSFT) virtual assistant Cortana has some catching up to do (in more ways than one), and the software giant has just announced a new acquisition to that end. Microsoft is acquiring Semantic Machines, a small start-up based in Berkeley that specializes in conversational AI.

Microsoft today announced that it has acquired Berkeley, California-based AI company Semantic Machines. The acquisition, Microsoft says, will help it build upon its burgeoning AI efforts to make speaking with digital assistants like Cortana and bots more like carrying on a natural conversation. Currently, interacting with bots and digital assistants involves issuing simple commands or queries, such as asking for the latest sports score or setting a reminder. Going forward, Microsoft wants to evolve these interactions to be much closer to how you would speak another human. That's where Semantic Machines comes in.

Earlier this month at its I/O developer conference, Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) subsidiary Google wowed everyone by demonstrating a new conversational artificial intelligence (AI) technology called Google Duplex, a system that will become part of Google Assistant and will allow the virtual assistant to make phone calls on a user's behalf. The demonstration was striking because it sounded uncannily human, which has raised all sorts of ethical questions. Microsoft's (NASDAQ:MSFT) virtual assistant Cortana has some catching up to do (in more ways than one), and the software giant has just announced a new acquisition to that end. Microsoft is acquiring Semantic Machines, a small start-up based in Berkeley that specializes in conversational AI. The goal is to help virtual assistants evolve beyond just simple commands and allow them to better understand broader context and have ongoing conversations with users.

Voice control gadgets – such as Amazon's Alexa, Google's Home or Apple's Homepod – are becoming increasingly popular, but people should pause for thought about advances in machine learning that could lead to applications understanding different emotions in speech. The CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, recently said that 20% of the company's searches are initiated by voice via mobile phones. And, at the end of 2017, analysis of the US market suggested that a total of 44m Amazon Alexa and Google Home devices had been sold. The technology has increasingly impressive abilities to recognise words, but – as an expert on acoustics – it is clear to me that verbal communication is far more complex. How things are said can be just as important as the words themselves.

For years, Apple has used the stage of its Worldwide Developers Conference to announce upgrades to the Siri personal assistant that would make it more useful. This year's plan, according to a Siri trick Apple has put out there: Siri will be smarter, get a new look and a new voice. Ask Siri to tell you about the WWDC conference, which starts June 4th in San Jose, and you get one of three answers both in audio and written form. It might be all that late night studying I've been doing." If readers feel like they've read this before, welcome to the club.

IVR is Here to Stay Maximizing customer satisfaction at minimum cost is the top goal for any business offering customer service. Many businesses use Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology to automate frequently performed phone transactions via pre-recorded voice prompts and dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) tones of the phone keypad (i.e., "Press 1 for Sales, press 2 for Billing, press 3 to speak to a representative…."). The most common uses for IVR include the automation of service selection, caller identification, self-service, and caller preparation. Today's use of IVR is generally helpful to callers, but listening to lengthy menu options can significantly lower the customer experience. In this blog, we consider how we can use IVR to its fullest potential, and what will IVR be like in the future.