In the era of big data, unless one's portfolio is in tune with the evolving digital trend, making prudent investment choices can prove to be a daunting task. Millennials have started to recognize the increasing need of the emerging automation trend and subsequently robotics, IoT, 3D printing are becoming part of our daily life with the latest buzzword being Artificial Intelligence (AI). While Siri and Ok Google have made life easier, the latest version of Global Positioning System helps track almost anything and everything along with its intelligent route map. Also, not being a pro on social network sites like Facebook, Twitter or snapchat can be seen as primitive. According to investment giant Jim Cramer, AI along with big data will soon let companies to bat a thousand. Interestingly, the benefits of the same will not remain restricted to any particular industry but will be felt across all business segments and investment arenas.

This story was delivered to BI Intelligence Apps and Platforms Briefing subscribers hours before appearing on Business Insider. To be the first to know, please click here. Google unveiled a slew of new features for its ecosystem of Google Assistant voice apps, called "Actions," the company announced last week. Google Assistant actions are similar to Amazon Alexa skills. The new features -- Custom Device Actions, push notifications, and support for media playback -- could incentivize more developers to create actions for Google Assistantand drive consumer engagement, ultimately making Google Assistant a stronger competitor in the voice assistant landscape.

Data is now considered one of the most important commodities. An explosion of consumer data has enabled companies and brands to more easily forge one-to-one relationships by offering tailored experiences and recommendations to end-consumers. Now, these savvy consumers have come to expect this type of personalized interaction from consumer-facing companies. The internet, which is one of the most transformative innovations of the modern era, has been the catalyst for this. With respect to shopping, in particular, the internet has put more power in the hands of consumers.

Neato first unveiled the Botvac D7 Connected vacuum over six months ago and it has finally arrived in the US and Europe. The company's flagship robotic vacuum packs a lot of tech, including Amazon Alexa and Google Home voice control, a floor planner that lets you set no-go zones (pet and children's areas, for instance), and the LaserSmart system that can guide it in the dark. It supports IFTTT, Android Wear and Apple Watch, and using the iOS and Android Neato app, you can check coverage maps to see where it has cleaned.

First came banks, then came Fintech, now we've got a complicated relationship on our hands. Here's what influencers said last year when we talked about the love-hate relationship between banks and Fintech: Getting back to technology, the nature of the FinTech narrative over the past few years has been evolving. As well, the pace of technology change continues to accelerate. Rapidly evolving advances in artificial intelligence across chatbots, robo-advisors, claims, underwriting, IoT and soon blockchain, add another layer of potential to further shake-up the traditional business model. The rise of startups is a logical step and part of the progress tech has made.

For the last four weeks, I've been living in an Orwellian nightmare. One in which I have to watch every word I say because "they" are always listening. And by "they", I mean Alexa, Siri and Google. It seemed like a good idea - get seven smart speakers and test them in a real house to see how they affected our listening habits and daily routine. At times, they've been pretty helpful. If we're running low on biscuits, one of us can bark, "Hey Siri, add Hob Nobs to the shopping list" and a reminder appears on our phones.

Microsoft is altering the way you activate its Cortana digital assistant with your voice. The first Cortana-powered Invoke speaker now lets users simply summon the digital assistant using "Cortana" instead of the usual "Hey Cortana" command. The change isn't live on Cortana for iOS, Android, or Windows 10, but it will likely appear there soon. Microsoft says it implemented the change last week for the Invoke speaker, and the old'Hey Cortana' still works too. Moving to just Cortana makes Microsoft's assistant as easy to summon as Amazon's Alexa.

A matrix completion problem, which aims to recover a complete matrix from its partial observations, is one of the important problems in the machine learning field and has been studied actively. However, there is a discrepancy between the mainstream problem setting, which assumes continuous-valued observations, and some practical applications such as recommendation systems and SNS link predictions where observations take discrete or even binary values. To cope with this problem, Davenport et al. (2014) proposed a binary matrix completion (BMC) problem, where observations are quantized into binary values. Hsieh et al. (2015) proposed a PU (Positive and Unlabeled) matrix completion problem, which is an extension of the BMC problem. This problem targets the setting where we cannot observe negative values, such as SNS link predictions. In the construction of their method for this setting, they introduced a methodology of the classification problem, regarding each matrix entry as a sample. Their risk, which defines losses over unobserved entries as well, indicates the possibility of the use of unobserved entries. In this paper, motivated by a semi-supervised classification method recently proposed by Sakai et al. (2017), we develop a method for the BMC problem which can use all of positive, negative, and unobserved entries, by combining the risks of Davenport et al. (2014) and Hsieh et al. (2015). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first BMC method which exploits all kinds of matrix entries. We experimentally show that an appropriate mixture of risks improves the performance.

The smart speaker is a tech innovation that's caught fire with consumers, according to the "Smart Speaker Consumer Adoption Report 2018" released by Voicebot.ai in collaboration with PullString and the RAIN Agency. The findings are based on an in-depth national survey of 1,057 U.S. adults, who were queried on ownership, product preference and use cases. About 19.7 percent of U.S. adults are said to have access to a smart speaker, which would mean an absolute number of 47.3 million out of the total U.S. adult population of 252 million, according to Voicebot.ai. "Access" includes adults who have a device in their homes but are not the primary user. A separate survey by NPR and Edison Research completed in November found 16 percent of adult Americans, or about 39 million, own a smart speaker.

Future Today Institute founder Amy Webb has released her annual tech trends report, and much of it focuses on the continuing impact of artificial intelligence. Other trends highlighted by the report include space travel, human gene editing, and a global shortage of data scientists. Webb, a quantitative futurist and professor of strategic foresight at the NYU Stern School of Business, released the report today in a presentation at SXSW in Austin, Texas. Now in its 11th year, the report identifies 225 trends across 20 industries, with roughly 70 of those trends related directly to AI. In 2018, Webb expects the AI cloud and marketplaces for algorithms will continue to grow and the first personal robots will come to market.