IBM has just become the latest tech giant to tackle the voice assistant market. On Tuesday, IBM launched Watson Assistant, an AI service that companies can integrate into a variety of platforms, like cars, hotel rooms and home appliances, among other things. Don't expect IBM to launch its own smart speaker anytime soon, however. IBM's Watson Assistant is a digital assistant that can be molded into a variety of products, like Harman's digital cockpit (pictured), which learns about the driver with each interaction Watson Assistant is designed to be different from Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant or Apple's Siri in that it isn't tethered to a specific device. What's more, IBM describes Watson Assistant as an'enterprise assistant,' meaning that it's aimed at helping companies improve their consumer experience.

Even if you don't have a home packed with smart devices, a smart speaker can still be a great way to play music and get information. So if you're looking for your first one or just want to add to an existing setup, Best Buy is offering its exclusive Insignia Voice smart Bluetooth speaker with built-in Google Assistant for just $36.99 right now. The Bluetooth speaker looks like a standard alarm clock but it comes with Google Assistant built in for hands-free control. Once connected to your smartphone, the speaker can access a variety of popular online streaming services as well as your own Google Play music library to listen to a wide range of music in multiple rooms at once. And if you have other smart devices in your home, you'll be able to control them as well just by asking Google Assistant to turn off the lights or turn up the thermostat.

Innovation is good; financial innovation is bad. It gave us the global financial crisis, after all, along with multibillion-dollar bailouts for entities such as AIG Financial Products, which almost nobody had heard of before they suddenly turned out to pose a mortal threat to the entire economy. That said, there are two financial innovations that are generally considered to have been clearly positive for society. One is the ATM, for reasons which should be self-explanatory. The other is passive investing.

A strategic tool for enterprises, it introduces genuine reactivity into information systems facing business changes, and as a result, provides a significant edge in optimizing costs. Alexa is Amazon's voice service and the brain behind tens of millions of devices like the Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, and Echo Show. Alexa provides capabilities, or skills, that enable customers to create a more personalized experience. There are now tens of thousands of skills from companies like Starbucks, Uber, and Capital One as well as other innovative designers and developers. You might want to keep up with your fitness goals by getting Fitbit data with Alexa.

There's no question as to who the real technology star is now: it's you. Your voice is what hundreds of companies are vying to attract, with thousands of new products calling out for you to talk to them. Voice-activated technology has erupted over the last 12 months since Amazon's Alexa was informally crowned breakout technology champion of the CES 2017 consumer tech show. Seemingly by stealth, Amazon had snuck Alexa into a dizzying array of products and everywhere you turned, there she was. Alexa was the name on everyone's lips – literally – and Amazon had achieved this near-ubiquitous name- recognition without even having a stand at the gargantuan annual gadget-fest in Las Vegas.

A hotel room can make a guest feel welcome by proactively addressing their needs once they step into the room. Watson Assistant can set the room temperature and make dining recommendations based on preferences from past stays, turn on the lights and close the blinds depending on the time of day. IBM Watson is seeking to join the exclusive club occupied by Siri, Alexa, and the Google Assistant. At the IBM Think 2018 conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday, IBM is set to announce the Watson Assistant, an artificial intelligent advisor that the company describes as an "AI enterprise assistant." "Enterprise" is the key clue not to think of Watson Assistant has another Alexa or Siri but rather a new product tailored to IBM Watson partners.

In this paper, we describe a solution to tackle a common set of challenges in e-commerce, which arise from the fact that new products are continually being added to the catalogue. The challenges involve properly personalising the customer experience, forecasting demand and planning the product range. We argue that the foundational piece to solve all of these problems is having consistent and detailed information about each product, information that is rarely available or consistent given the multitude of suppliers and types of products. We describe in detail the architecture and methodology implemented at ASOS, one of the world's largest fashion e-commerce retailers, to tackle this problem. We then show how this quantitative understanding of the products can be leveraged to improve recommendations in a hybrid recommender system approach.

Ther is as many frustrations with the whole "Alexa" product as their are benefits. Not specifically related to this echo dot version of it. The dot is the best way to open yourself to this world of IoT and voice enabled home, cheap and cheerful the tech is awesome, but it is let down by the company vying to gain market share along with its competitors. Remember when Silicon valley was run by dreamers and open source ideals like in the fist season of "Halt and catch fire!" if your a techie over 40...watch it! The echo for example, wont play from your Apple Itunes library because of business rivalry.

Google routinely fields product queries from millions of shoppers. Now, it wants to take a cut of their purchases, too. Under a new program, retailers can list their products on Google Search, as well as on the Google Express shopping service and Google Assistant. In exchange for Google listings and linking to retailer loyalty programs, the retailers pay Google a piece of each purchase, which is different from payments that retailers make to place ads on Google platforms. A new Google initiative called'Shopping Actions,' should help retailers fend off Amazon's growing dominance.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. At the moment, artificial intelligence may have perfect memories and be better at arithmetic than us, but they are clueless. It takes a few seconds of interaction with any digital assistant to realize one is not in the presence of a very bright interlocutor. Among some of the unexpected items users have found in their shopping lists after talking to (or near) Amazon's Alexa are 150,000 bottles of shampoo, sled dogs, "hunk of poo," and a girlfriend. The mere exasperation of talking to a personal assistant can be enough to miss human companionship, feel nostalgia of all things analog and dumb, and foreswear any future attempts at communicating with mindless pieces of metal inexplicably labelled "smart."