Alexa already can translate words and short phrases from and into a variety of languages, but Yahoo's sources say that Amazon is pushing for a true multilingual assistant that can perform more complex translations. Such a system would need to be aware of cultural as well as linguistic details, as well, as most language is dependent on contextual and situational cues. Yahoo's sources also note that eventually, Alexa will be able to translate conversations with multiple people speaking different languages at once, perhaps as an outgrowth of it's recognition systems for multiple users now. Obviously, this is all future-focused; you won't be able to use Alexa to go to that wedding in Japan just yet.

Naturally, the Hello displays also double as speakers, letting you jam out to some music while you're cooking or walking around your home or office. They should blend in nicely with your furniture, since they have a minimalist, wooden finish that makes them easy on the eye. Archos will be launching them later this summer in 7 and -8.4-inch versions, and the company told us pricing should be between $130 and $150 for the smaller device and $170 and $200 for the larger one.

The Amazon Echo kicked off the smart speaker trend a few years ago, but it's no longer alone. There are dozens of smart speakers already on the market in 2018 and a ton more are coming. You need to decide which voice assistant you prefer (there are now four--Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, and Cortana) and what features are most important to you. Does it need to play Spotify? Does it need to connect to your other speakers and smarthome gadgets?

It depends who you ask. AI might be a hot topic but you'll still need to justify those projects. Back in the 1950s, the fathers of the field Minsky and McCarthy, described artificial intelligence as any task performed by a program or a machine that, if a human carried out the same activity, we would say the human had to apply intelligence to accomplish the task. That obviously is a fairly broad definition, which is why you will sometimes see arguments over whether something is truly AI or not. AI systems will typically demonstrate at least some of the following behaviors associated with human intelligence: planning, learning, reasoning, problem solving, knowledge representation, perception, motion, and manipulation and, to a lesser extent, social intelligence and creativity. AI is ubiquitous today, used to recommend what you should buy next online, to understand what you say to virtual assistants such as Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri, to recognise who and what is in a photo, to spot spam, or detect credit card fraud. At a very high level artificial intelligence can be split into two broad types: narrow AI and general AI.

Chances are, if you've ever used a digital assistant, you've run up against a problem that's proven difficult to solve: They may be good at certain helpful tasks, but they aren't great conversationalists. It's easy to understand why that might be something companies like Amazon.com Besides the obvious--people would presumably prefer an alternative to barking out carefully formatted commands--it could also make the assistants more useful. A few ideas: They could better understand what they're being asked to do, leading to fewer errors. They could help lead people toward information they need that they might not know exactly how to ask for. Or assistants could set people at ease at critical times, making people more likely to use them.

According the New York Times, Amazon paid $1.1 billion for Ring, which makes security cameras and video doorbells which stream live video and audio to smartphones. Ring was an early portfolio company of Amazon's Alexa Fund, which got off the ground in 2015. Amazon invested an unknown amount in the startup as part of a funding round in March 2016, according to Crunchbase. As I wrote in our recent feature, the Alexa Fund's main goal is to seek out startups that might extend Alexa into new parts of consumers's lives. It lets users ask Alexa to show them their front door video feed on an Echo Show's video screen.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is 2018's hot topic not just in HR, not just in global business, but for millions of people around the world. More consumers will experience AI when they buy as 30% of companies globally are projected to use AI in their sales process within the next two years. Revenue in the AI software market could reach nearly $60 billion globally by 2025. For TA leaders, AI is here. Within the next few years, AI will be deployed in 95% of talent acquisition technology solutions, according to research by Talent Tech Labs.

As we've entered the infancy of the AI age, the fallacy in this thinking has revealed itself in some spectacular ways. Google's first generation of visual AI identified images of people of African descent as gorillas. Voice command software in cars struggled to understand females, while working just fine for males, putting women's safety in jeopardy. During the 2016 presidential election, Facebook's algorithms spread fear-stoking lies to its most vulnerable users, allowing a foreign power to meaningfully swing the election of the most powerful office in the world. Even efforts to make AI palatable for consumers have revealed bias.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has entered our daily lives like never before and we are yet to unravel the many other ways in which it could flourish. All tech giants such as Microsoft, Uber, Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Oracle, Intel, IBM or Twitter are competing in the race to lead the market and acquire the most innovative and promising AI businesses. AI is already being used in everyday life with applications including speech recognition, smart cars, fraud detection, security surveillance, music recommendations and AI-powered personal virtual assistant such as Cortana (Microsoft), Siri (Apple) or Alexa (Amazon). Discussions on AI are generally dappled with the terms, 'Machine Learning' and'Deep Learning'. Moreover, they are often interchangeably used.

Amazon Echo's voice assistant Alexa is ever-present in the AI world. The Echo is the best-selling device on the market, and it boasts a variety of capabilities beyond what we could have imagined from consumer technology just a few years ago. The question is no longer whether Alexa is useful for consumers, but rather how to get the most out of her 25,000-plus skills and more than 4,000 connected devices. Consumers often purchase digital assistants with smart homes in mind, but with so much functionality available, it can be hard to pin down exactly how Alexa can contribute. Here are the top smart home devices to pair with the assistant.