The rise of technology has given way to reliance on virtual assistants, such as Alexa and Siri, for tasks like playing music, setting alarm clocks, and scheduling appointments. Currently, the Airbus company is engineering a similar mission assistant to help astronauts finish everyday tasks on the International Space Station. Airbus is working on the Crew Interactive MObile CompanioN (known as CIMON for short) in partnership with Space Administration at the German Aerospace Center and will be the first time artificial intelligence (AI) is used on the ISS in this way. CIMON is designed as a spherical, free-flying robot that can move independently around the station. It's about the size of a medicine ball, and weighs approximately 11 pounds.

Amazon's Alexa assistant is already capable of performing a wide range of capabilities, but the company wants to push it even further. A new report claims that Amazon wants to turn Alexa into a translator that's capable of not only translating phrases, but also incorporate culturally aware responses. Sources familiar with the matter claim that Amazon is "seriously exploring" the possibility of making Alexa more useful across different languages and cultures, according to Yahoo Finance. One possible way of doing this is by having Alexa translate language in a more sophisticated manner. For example, if a user from the U.S. is only capable of speaking English but he is at an event in Japan, Alexa will be able to help that user hold a conversation in Japanese.

"Alexa, what time is my next train to work?" "There is a 20-minute delay. The next train departs from Berlin Central Station at 9:42 and will arrive at Westkreuz at 9:54." "Alexa, please email Janet and Tim to say: Sorry, my train is delayed. I'll be 10 minutes late for our meeting, can we start at 10:10 a.m.?" Conversational interactions like this one will undoubtedly be part of our future. Tech giants like Amazon, Google, Apple, and Microsoft are heavily investing in the race to become the leader in voice technology. Voice interactions have been catapulted into the limelight in the past year, but why is this decade-old technology only now becoming a big deal?

Voice is uncharted territory for most marketers, as it's still a nascent space. Right now, there's significant opportunity for brands to get on board with voice shopping and forge the way as more consumers purchase smart speakers and get accustomed to interacting with digital assistants. Amazon is leading the pack in the space with the greatest market share, and it appears set to build on its first-mover advantage in selling smart speakers with its line of Echo devices that range in price from $50 to $230. The company is able to sell the products at a loss if it means getting people hooked on its e-commerce platform or registering them for a membership to its Prime service. Amazon's acquisition this week of smart doorbell maker Ring could further boost Alexa's shopping strategy by giving consumers a way to authorize access to their homes for deliveries.

In recent years many of us have begun to relying on Alexa, Siri, and other virtual assistants to play our music, set our alarms, and schedule our appointments. Now, the Airbus company is designing a similar mission assistant to help astronauts complete everyday tasks on the International Space Station. Airbus is developing the Crew Interactive MObile CompanioN (nicknamed CIMON) in collaboration with Space Administration at the German Aerospace Center. It's set to be the first time that artificial intelligence (AI) has been used on the ISS in this manner. CIMON takes the form of a spherical, free-flying robot that can move independently around the station It's about the size of a medicine ball, and weighs roughly 11 pounds.

Police tell the San Bernardino Sun that a man was carjacked Tuesday after he used the app to meet two women in a cul-de-sac. Investigators say he was talking to the women when three armed men robbed him and drove off in his car.

Get out of the way, Tinder. There's a new dating app on the scene hoping to disrupt the way we find that one special person to eventually melt down in an IKEA with over the relative merits of a Kvikne wardrobe versus a Trysil. Described by Wired as "a sort of 23andMe meets Tinder meets monogamists," Pheramor's secret to success is your DNA. That's right--for a low-rate of $19.99 plus a $10 monthly membership fee, the Houston-based online dating startup promises to match local singles who are compatible not only socially but genetically. The app's matching algorithm analyzes 11 special "attraction genes" supposedly linked to our pheromones--olfactory signals that some believe trigger attraction.

Patients at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston soon will use high-tech assistants to help them navigate their hospital stays. They could use Google Home to page a nurse, request spiritual care, or find out when their doctor is scheduled to arrive. Already, Beth Israel Deaconess has tested how both the Alexa and Google Home ambient listening devices might work with inpatients. The medical center is also considering how these technologies could be used to help physicians with tasks such as accessing patient data without having to click through electronic files. Such applications could be just the start of advances ushered in by consumer tech giants, says John D. Halamka, MD, MS, chief information officer for Beth Israel Deaconess and dean for technology at Harvard Medical School.

Artificial intelligence has quickly evolved from science fiction to digital assistants such as Alexa and Siri learning about our daily lives. A.I. applications are interpreting MRIs and will soon be operating self-driving cars. In personal finance, many of us interact with chat boxes on bank web sites. And in the investing world, robo-advisors are managing portfolios for retail investors. "But we haven't seen the penetration of AI within institutional finance," said Richard Johnson, vice president of market structure and technology at Greenwich Associates on a recent webinar about the evolution of A.I. and current levels of adoption on Wall Street.

Training an algorithm to predict future outcomes, using a PCA algorithm to uncover clients' personality traits, uploading a corpus of text to extract sentiment and grouping 650 000 lines of CRM and weblog data to cluster clients with machine learning all sounded like unreachable rocket science to me a while ago. Now I do it as easily as I use Excel or Illustrator. They are my new secret weapons. In 5 years "proficient in machine learning" will be a must-have on any manager's resume (just like project management or strategic thinking/analytical thinking is today). Harvard Business Review says "The most important general-purpose technology of our era is artificial intelligence, particularly machine learning (ML). But for now it's still a rare skill, a strong competitive advantage that only early adopters hold. And this might surprise you, but it's already within arm's reach. It's changed my brain a bit. As our lead data scientist Bernardo Nunes puts it…I've invested in a "growth ...