Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is trying to distinguish the business technology giant from its technology brethren by focusing on digital privacy. This year, Microsoft's big coder conference was sandwiched between Facebook's annual F8 developer conference last week and Google's upcoming Google I/0 event, starting later this week. Part of Nadella's opening talk centered on user privacy, which Nadella referred to as "a human right," echoing Apple CEO Tim Cook's recent public comments in the aftermath of Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal. Both Microsoft and Apple (aapl) stand to benefit and win public trust if they can portray their companies as bastions of user privacy compared to companies like Facebook (fb) and Google (goog). All of these giant tech companies are amassing large quantities of data that they in turn use to improve their respective artificial intelligence technologies--these AI technologies are then used to create more compelling products, like Amazon's Alexa digital assistant, for example.

Organizations need a way to get work done, not just talk about it. Smartsheet enables you to move from idea to impact -- fast. Your message has been sent. There was an error emailing this page. It's long been the stuff of sci fi, but increasingly, the practical side of artificial intelligence (AI) is very real. On the consumer side, personal assistants such as Siri, Alexa, and Cortana help automate the simplest of tasks.

We're in the final stretch here at Google I/O 2018, and I don't know about everyone else here, but I could really use some proper alone time. Too bad that's impossible to find here. Strangely enough, the closest I've been able to find is the inside of a massive Google Home Max with three other people. To be clear, the Max doesn't play any music itself -- if it did, it would probably sonically disintegrate any poor sucker who wandered inside. Instead, Google kitted out the inside with a painfully normal Google Home Max and an elaborate lighting setup that responds differently to songs you ask Google to play.

Google Assistant can now finally beam Play Movies to a Chromecast when you issue voice commands through the tech giant's Home speaker. It's weird how that hasn't been available until now when Home has been able to recognize spoken commands to stream Netflix shows from the start. Thankfully, the tech giant has fixed the oversight and quietly announced the integration at its annual I/O conference. And from the sound of things, the feature has already started rolling out to users. Trent Archer told Android Police that he's already able to play movies through Google Home -- as you can see in his video above, he tells Assistant through the speaker to play Bourne Ultimatum.

Yesterday Google made many announcements in the Keynote of Google I/O 2018 including Android P beta (Any Name suggestions???), new Google assistant voices, Smart Compose for Gmail, Augmented reality to the Google Maps, and AI curated Google News. But what was most interesting to me is the new technology that will work under the Google Assistant which is named "Google Duplex" So what this basically means is, once this feature is rolled out, we won't have to make trivial calls like the ones making an appointments or making some enquiry. You can just ask your Google Assistant to make an appointment at, say some Doctor, and it'll Personally call the doctor's clinic, Talk with the receptionist and then confirm to you that you it has completed the task!!! I know!!! Sounds like some Jarvis level s#!t!! In fact, Google played multiple audio clips as a Demo, but It was not a Live Demo.

The more technology advances, the clearer it becomes that our smartphones are no longer about conversing but more about transfers of information. This was evident at Google's I/O keynote, where the company unveiled that its AI can now make phone calls on your behalf, booking salon appointments or restaurant reservations. The demo was stunning, both because of how human this next-level chatbot sounded and how dystopian the world would be with our robot imposters flooding the phone lines. But as I walked out of the conference yesterday, I couldn't stop thinking about the person on the other end of the line. When did human service workers become Google's to experiment on?

Microsoft has surprised no-one by taking part in the AI frenzy currently sweeping the tech industry at its Build conference this week. Multiple projects were shown off; here are some of the most important. First out of the blocks is Redmond's work and a limited beta of squashing Cortana and Alexa together to allow the two virtual assistants to chat together. Talking of talking to AI, Microsoft highlighted an overhaul of its conversational AI bots, which should make it easier for developers to get such smart collections of code up and running on the firm's Azure cloud platform or their own servers, with more options for customisation and integration. For example, a new project dubbed Project Conversation Learner will let developers feed conversations into the bot framework, while Redmond's machine learning tech figures out new dialogue sequenced on top of them. On the topic of projects, Microsoft also showed off Brainwave, a deep learning neural network architecture that's designed, in theory, to make Azure the fastest cloud platform for running AI systems on.

At its big conference for developers on Monday, Microsoft executives were showing what it will be like to live in a world infused with artificial intelligence. Cortana, the company's digital assistant and its rival to Amazon Alexa and Apple's Siri, is at the heart of Microsoft's effort to embed voice and image recognition into more of its services. Microsoft representatives demonstrated how artificial intelligence could help drones spot anomalies they see from above and recognize the people who come into a conference room for a meeting, speedily transcribing what they say. Four years into his gig running Microsoft -- and after initially proclaiming that the world is primarily mobile-first and cloud-first -- CEO Satya Nadella is focused on expanding the powers of Cortana, which is embedded into Windows 10 and has nearly 150 million people using it every month. But there are limitations, and among them is Alexa's popularity in the home through the Amazon Echo.

Many people have grown accustomed to talking to their smart devices, asking them to read a text, play a song or set an alarm. But someone else might be secretly talking to them, too. Over the past two years, researchers in China and the United States have begun demonstrating that they can send hidden commands that are undetectable to the human ear to Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa and Google's Assistant. Inside university labs, the researchers have been able to secretly activate the artificial intelligence systems on smartphones and smart speakers, making them dial phone numbers or open websites. In the wrong hands, the technology could be used to unlock doors, wire money or buy stuff online -- simply with music playing over the radio.

Artificial Intelligence is beginning to have transformative effects on consumers, enterprises, and governments around the world. The impacts are contributing by automating repetitive task, creating efficiencies, ubiquitously improving user experience, and creating ways for humans to improve our cognition. Furthermore, by 2020, the AI market is projected to reach $70 billion, driven by increasing computational power and improving approaches/applications with machine, deep learning, natural language processing and robotics and many a number of other technologies. To gain a better understanding of the perception of AI in the US, PwC surveyed 2,500 consumers and business decision makers. The objective is to better understand their attitudes towards artificial intelligence, and the future implications on business and society.