FRAMINGHAM, Mass., July 2, 2018 – International Data Corporation (IDC) today published an IDC Innovators report profiling five technology providers that are considered key emerging vendors in the conversational AI platforms market. The five companies named as IDC Innovators are Personetics, Kore.ai, Conversational AI platforms are used to build applications that answer questions, provide advice and/or recommendations using natural language processing and other dialog related technologies. The market for intelligent conversational assistance is growing rapidly, fueled by the use and acceptance of consumer tools like Google Assistant, Apple's Siri, and Amazon's Alexa. To date, there are dozens of supplier companies seeking to address these emerging interface opportunities with new companies emerging in the marketplace every day.

Silicon Valley's quest for artificial intelligence has led it to build self-driving cars, drones, and robots that can do back flips. But often that journey has come down to something much more prosaic, such as ordering a pizza -- or booking a restaurant reservation. Duplex is the company's next-generation virtual helper. When the company first showcased it at its developer conference in May, it engaged in conversation so lifelike -- complete with humanlike "ums" and pauses -- that the person on the other end of the call couldn't tell that the speaker was just software. Some asked whether the interaction was fake.

Humans have a complicated relationship with artificial intelligence, and it's only getting more complex. Some worry that AI will replace us as the dominant species on the planet, while others envision the digital assistant as a panacea for the tedious tasks we humans hate doing. But, since we don't have those robot butlers just yet, here's a look back at the tech news you may have missed last week while you were toiling away, building a better world for our future robotic overlords. This week's episode includes a first-hand account of what it's like to talk to the Google Duplex AI bot that makes restaurant reservations--while doing a surprisingly convincing human impression (you can read more about that here). We also talk about the latest batch of waterproof gadgets to use by the pool, and fully admit how addicted we are to technology in light of the recent outages for Google Assistant and the group chat app, Slack.

Barbie becomes a robotics engineer, a new app for baby and Siri gets mad. You can now talk to Alexa through your iPhone, Barbie is becoming a robotics engineer and an app can tell you why your baby is crying -- the late-night comics talk about the newest rollouts related to technology, and why some of it isn't as impressive as you might think. Late-night comic Trevor Noah kicks things off by pointing out why, when it comes to parenting, apps can't replace good old fashioned common sense. Seth Meyers gives us the mansplaining Ken doll and Jimmy Fallon gets in some woman trouble. Find out why Siri tells him off in today's Best of Late Night, above.

The Israeli military says it's uncovered a plot by Hamas to spy on soldiers by befriending them on social media and then luring them to download dating applications that give the militants access to their smartphones.

It led him to pause his statement on the fight against Islamic State as Speaker John Bercow remarked on the "very rum business".

The field Artificial Intelligence is really starting to hit it's stride. Our developers were sitting around the office today thinking about some of the older AI app – Siri, Cortana, and so on. Obviously, both Virtual Personal Assistants or VPAs as they are often called, are still around and going strong. But all three of the big VPAs (the two previously mentioned and Google Now) today are far more advanced than what they were even 5 years ago. Even more noticeable, we now have AI devices like Echo that connect to the Internet of Things to bring your whole world online.

The blockchain space is full of projects without a clear use case and clear value, but, as we'll see, there are also projects which are quite the opposite. Nebula-AI (NBAI) is creating a decentralized AI computing platform which will make AI DAPPS (which they call DAI Apps) a reality. The first product and demo that they released is Quant-AI: A cutting-edge trading price prediction tool. In this article, we'll dive into the specifics of this project and take a look at Quant AI and the broader concept of DAI Apps. Thanks to the use of GPUs and parallel computing for algorithms like machine learning (ML) AI has finally become widely viable.

Housed in a tall plastic cylinder, Amazon's Alexa is far from physically resembling a woman. Yet when asked about its gender, the system curiously responds it is "female in character." A closer look at recent developments in artificial intelligence shows Alexa is the rule rather than the exception. From Apple's Siri to Hanson Robotics' humanoid robot Sophia, it seems that the future is female indeed -- but not in the way we intended. Artificial intelligence and robotics may intend to free us from many human limitations, but it seems that gender stereotypes are not one of them.

AI is all about adding intelligence to machines to supplement and streamline the things that humans are trying to accomplish. It allows us to understand and make decisions based on massive amounts of data. In fact, you're probably already using AI in ways you're not even aware of, such as speech recognition when you ask Cortana for the latest news or the chatbot that you interfaced with the other day for technical support. Below I've called out some of the key AI terms for marketers, to give you a foundation for finding ways to harness the vast potential of AI. AI is great at helping brands to engage directly with consumers at their time of need.