Sundar Pichai's demonstration of the company's new virtual-assistant technology, unveiled at the company's annual developer conference last week, was more unnerving than Pichai presumably intended it to be. Google Duplex, as the technology is called, represents a major leap forward in Silicon Valley's efforts to produce robots that sound like people. It can make phone calls to schedule appointments, say, or to reserve a table at a restaurant, using familiar human verbal tics and filler words--"uhm," "mmhmm," and "gotcha"--that make it eerily hard to tell that the voice on the other line is an artificial intelligence. To show the tech in action, Pichai played a recording of the Google Assistant device--Google's answer to Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa--calling and interacting with someone who was purportedly an employee at a hair salon to make an appointment. "What you're going to hear is the Google assistant actually calling a real salon to schedule an appointment for you," Pichai told the audience.

Terms like artificial intelligence have now become a part of our everyday vocabulary. They are thrown around in conversations about autonomous cars and robot-like personal assistants, like Amazon's Alexa. So you may be wondering how – and why – artificial intelligence is being incorporated into business technology. There are obvious applications like business data analytics or customer service products. But it is time to think through how you can implement this type of intelligence into each process around your business – and sometimes the applications aren't going to be as easy to identify.

A funny video has emerged of a woman discovering the items her pet parrot has saved in her Echo device shopping list. Footage, captured on August 26 in West Frankfurt, Illinois, shows the smart Eco device detailing the items Bibi, the African Grey parrot, saved as items to buy. Bibi's owner didn't have a clue that the Echo device was also listening to the parrot talking. It was when Alexa unexpectedly said, 'I'll add that to your shopping list', that the owner decided to see what else was on the shopping list. Bibi is an 11-year-old African Grey, and she's used those 11 years to pick up some useful terms.

TouchPal, a very popular AI-powered virtual keyboard for Android devices (with more than 700m users) recently unveiled something called Talia, a voice-activated intelligent assistant. While I prefer to live in the physical keyboard world (hello BlackBerry KEY2), using a virtual keyboard is pretty much inevitable if you have a modern smartphone. TouchPal pairs Android keyboards to the functionality of all the apps we addictively use on the daily: Facebook, Instagram, Snap, LinkedIn, YouTube, Chrome, and so on. TouchPal learns from user input to personalize and proactively tailor recommendations, suggestions and custom content. It is also an ad-supported network and requires a ton of permissions in order to operate on your phone. Considering how much it needs to know in order to make your life (I guess) more streamlined, this makes sense.

Today, the Sony WH-1000XM2 and WI-1000X headphones received software update 2.0.0, which integrates them with Google Assistant. A number of headphones already allow this with a press and hold of the call button, but full integration has additional benefits. Adding new functionality to an existing product (without having to pay for an upgrade) is something we're never going to complain about, so it's great to see Sony and Google making this move. Android Police first spotted the update, but we've confirmed with our own set of headphones. These headsets might not have dedicated Google Assistant buttons like the Bose QC35 II Bluetooth headphones, but they also won't cost you $350 to upgrade if you already own a set. However, you can change the noise cancellation button to summon Google Assistant instead.

"Music isn't just what we listen to, it's who we are." This is Google's hypothesis, as laid out in marketing materials for YouTube Music – a revamped streaming service it hopes will rival Spotify and Apple Music. And who knows who people really are better than Google? Through its blanket dominance in everything from email and search, to maps and calendars, Google knows its users' location, habits, tastes and future plans. By accessing the vast amounts of data swept up by these digital services, Google wants to offer a new type of personalised music streaming service. Combining this personal knowledge with the AI-powered Google Assistant, YouTube Music should in theory be able to offer listening suggestions suitable to whatever the situation – be it falling asleep or a morning commute.

Today's virtual personal assistants are conversational, voice-enabled artificial intelligence (AI) backed innovations that can communicate, learn, and intelligently predict an individual's needs to offer truly personalized experiences. Earlier this year, HARMAN and MSC Cruises introduced a groundbreaking virtual personal assistant as part of the cruise line's digital innovation program. By offering guests quick and easy answers about cruise events and entertainment from the comfort of their own cabin, the digital assistant can help simplify and enhance passengers' cruise experience. However, this new, progressive service is a mere drop in the ocean when it comes to the infinite number of ways that AI stands to revolutionize the hospitality industry. The hospitality and travel industry is no stranger to technological transformations, and it is on the cusp of a new revolution with the introduction of digital assistants and voice-enabled technology.

The proliferation of chatbot madness did not start today. Introduced by Alan Turing, chatbox begun in the 1950s. The artificial intelligence industry is growing exponential with 2014 statistics showing that the artificial intelligence has hit $126 billion. One of the reasons for the rapid growth of chatbox popularity is that many companies around the world have started adding virtual assistant bots for the purposes of customer service. Initially, chatbots were created to identify keywords, patterns, and keywords and the earned the reputation of being one of the most sophisticated programs.

Generative Text-to-Speech Synthesis, Heiga Zen, Research Scientist Abstract: Recent progress in deep generative models and its application to text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis has made a breakthrough in the naturalness of artificially generated speech.

My goal in this post is simply to share how we at YouVersion are leveraging machine learning tools to generate product recommendations. This article does not aim to teach fundamentals of machine learning or data science (as if one post even could do that), but it does aim to help others considering building a recommendation engine by seeing how we approached the problem. The tools and libraries mentioned as a part of this should be considered, but they should not be seen as promoted or the only way to build this kind of a system. They are simply what we utilized to accomplish our goal. At YouVersion, our goal is to lead people to engage with Bible scripture.