Am I the only one who feels a tad underwhelmed by Google Duplex? My social media feeds are filled with gushing platitudes over the virtual assistant's handling of a simple haircut appointment. Some are even claiming the Turing Test has been passed. Putting aside the ethical ramifications of abdicating such tasks to the robots (a topic worthy of its own post), I'm left wondering: is this how low we've set the bar for human conversation? Google Duplex may score top marks for authentic tone and delightful mannerisms, but the topic of conversation was hardly riveting.

Samsung's Bixby voice assistant is lagging behind the likes of Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa in terms of speed and voice recognition. However, that might finally change as the company has confirmed that Bixby 2.0 will launch later this year. Head of AI at Samsung Research Gary G. Lee told the Korean Herald that Bixby 2.0 will launch alongside the Galaxy Note 9, which is rumored to be released in August. Lee also confirmed that Bixby 2.0 will come with upgraded and enhanced natural language process, improved noise resistance and quicker response times. The current version of Bixby is able to answer most queries easily, but the problem is that users must be very specific in how they ask questions.

It is no secret that Google optimizes all of their services on a regular basis, with 2018 being a year that has been introducing another set of updates. Some of these updates include the implementation of infinite scrolling on Google mobile search, removing the "View Image" option, along with the addition of title tags on Google Images, and the addition of Google Speed in the next few months. Another major Google service that will be receiving updates in the near future is Google Assistant, which is one of the best AI assistants currently available. While this app can already perform functions such as open applications, search for nearby locations, and respond to search queries, Google demonstrated what else it could possibly do in the future. At the I/O Developer's conference on May 8, 2018, Google CEO Sundar Pichai presented some of Google Assistant's upcoming features.

Personal assistants such as Amazon's Alexa or the Google Assistant are growing in popularity, and children love them. Unfortunately, children have also been proven to abuse robots – so scientists in Seoul, South Korea are trying to teach kids that this isn't OK. Do we need to be worried about the way that we learn to interact with robots? Is there any risk that it will impact how we interact with other humans? And does that change when Google and the rest are also trying to make their artificial intelligences sound as deceptively human as possible?

At Google's I/O 2018 conference, company CEO Sundar Pichai presented Google Assistant's newest feature: it can make phone calls on your behalf. On stage, he played the recording of a phone call placed by the assistant to a hair salon to schedule an appointment on a specific day, within a specific time slot. And the voice sounded completely natural and realistic, even adding "mm-hmms" and "uhms." It's called Google Duplex, and Pichai said the assistant can understand the nuances of conversation. It's something Google has been working on for many years, and while it seems like superadvanced artificial intelligence (Pichai said it can react intelligently even during an unexpected conversation), it's still under development.

Google recently unveiled its latest talking AI, called Duplex. Duplex sounds like a real person, complete with pauses, "umms" and "ahhs". The tech giant says it can talk to people on the phone to make appointments and check business opening hours. In recorded conversations that were played at the Google unveiling, it conversed seamlessly with the humans on the receiving end, who seemed totally unaware that they were not talking with another person. These calls left the technology-oriented audience at the Google show gasping and cheering.

Just a few short years ago, having "conversations" in human languages with machines was pretty much universally a frustratingly comedic process. While natural language processing (NLP) and recognition is far from perfect, thanks to machine learning algorithms it's getting increasingly closer to a point where it will be harder to tell whether we are talking to a human or a computer. Business has capitalized on this, with increasing numbers of chatbots deployed, usually in customer service functions but increasingly in internal processes and to assist in training. At ICLR 2018 in Vancouver, Salesforce's chief scientist, Richard Socher, presented seven breakthrough pieces of research covering practical advances in NLP including summarization, machine translation and question answering. He told me "NLP is going to be incredibly important for business – it is going to fundamentally change how we provide services, how we understand sales processes and how we do marketing.

Artificial Intelligence has unleashed the power for e-commerce businesses to explore countless opportunities to dramatically improve customer experiences, generate new leads and better understand their customers. Businesses are continuing to evolve and are steadily incorporating Artificial Intelligence into their strategies – a prediction from Business Insider has suggested as much as 85% of customer interactions will be managed without a human by as soon as 2020. There are many innovative ways businesses are exploring the potential of AI – I've spent a little time researching the best uses so far. With the advancement in Natural Language Processing, and a huge improvement in a machines ability to understand human language including words and text, the technology is there for retailers to explore Virtual Agents/Assistants. The two most well-known and obvious examples would be the Amazon Alexa Echo – they have already begun to integrate and partner with SkyScanner for flights, Dominos for pizza delivery, JustEat for takeaway delivery and Uber to ask Alexa to request a taxi ride.

We tested Alexa, Siri and Google Home to see which digital assistant knows most about the Royal Wedding. SAN FRANCISCO -- A funny as Lord Carpenter Rover of Sunnyside might sound, please don't reply to a Facebook prompt asking you to create your royal wedding guest name using details from your past. Facebook is always awash in sharable quizzes and prompts (remember'Tell us your first 10 rock concerts' last year?) But it also puts you in real danger of identity theft. Much as other, more adult, prompts have asked users to create and forward along their "porn star" name, this one helps you craft an aristocratic title from seemingly innocuous items from your family and your past.

Machine learning is enabling computers to tackle tasks that have, until now, only been carried out by people. The next wave of IT innovation will be powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning. We look at the ways companies can take advantage of it and how to get started. From driving cars to translating speech, machine learning is driving an explosion in the capabilities of artificial intelligence -- helping software make sense of the messy and unpredictable real world. But what exactly is machine learning and what is making the current boom in machine learning possible? At a very high level, machine learning is the process of teaching a computer system how to make accurate predictions when fed data.