Since last year I've had a smart speaker in my living room--an Echo Dot. My family uses it mostly to ask Amazon's digital assistant, Alexa, to play music. But after I saw a report that an Alexa-enabled speaker owned by a family in Portland, Oregon, had recorded a conversation and sent it to a contact, I started wondering: what is it picking up on at my house when we're not talking to it directly? So I checked my Alexa history (you can do that through the "settings" portion of the Amazon Alexa smartphone app) to see what kinds of things it recorded without my knowledge. That's when the hairs on the back of my neck started to stand up.

Amazon's Alexa recently made headlines for one of the strangest consumer AI mistakes we've ever heard of: A family in Portland, Oregon claims that the company's virtual assistant recorded a conversation and sent it to a seemingly random person in the husband's contact list. Alexa didn't just make one slip-up -- it made several that, when combined, led to a pretty remarkable breach of privacy. The company's explanation, provided to news outlets yesterday, makes clear just how unlikely this whole situation was: "Echo woke up due to a word in background conversation sounding like'Alexa,'" the statement reads. "Then, the subsequent conversation was heard as a "send message" request. At which point, Alexa said out loud "To whom?" At which point, the background conversation was interpreted as a name in the customers contact list. Alexa then asked out loud, "[contact name], right?" Alexa then interpreted background conversation as'right'."

An Amazon Echo multimedia smart speaker, taken on November 28, 2016. Voice speakers such as the Amazon Echo have already shown themselves to be less than trustworthy. Only a few months ago, consumers complained about sinister laughter coming from the Amazon Alexa assistant. Meanwhile, the always listening devices have come under fire amid accusations that they could enable snooping by law enforcement. This week, public fear has ramped up a level after a US couple's conversation was recorded and sent to an acquaintance without their knowledge.

A couple in Portland, Ore., discovered that their Amazon Echo had recorded their conversation and sent it to one of their contacts. A couple in Portland, Ore., discovered that their Amazon Echo had recorded their conversation and sent it to one of their contacts. As secret recordings go, the Portland couple's conversation was pretty mundane: They were talking about hardwood floors. But their Amazon Echo was listening and recording their discussion. The device then sent the recording to someone in their contacts -- without the couple's knowledge.

One of the top conversations that we have with businesses all over the world is how digital transformation is impacting every part of their operations. This wave of transformation is being driven by the ongoing advances in computing building blocks of the last few decades: compute, storage, and networks. At the same time as companies are continuing down the path of digital transformation, there is a new generation of software building blocks that will drive even greater transformation for businesses in the future of which AI is one of the core drivers. AI will help to transform all industries, including transportation, manufacturing, retail, agriculture, and more and create opportunities we have yet to consider. In this post I will talk about how Microsoft is helping businesses transform with AI.

For the 7,000 people in the audience for Google's (GOOG, GOOGL) I/O keynote last week, the Google Duplex demo was a mind-fryer. CEO Sundar Pichai had said to his phone, "OK Google, book me a haircut appointment on Tuesday between 10 a.m. and noon." And then, silently and invisibly (to him), Google Assistant had made a phone call to a human receptionist at the salon and had held a conversation, flawlessly impersonating an actual person, complete with "umms" and "ahhs." The receptionist never knew she'd been talking to AI. "That the many in Google did not erupt in utter panic and disgust at the first suggestion of this is incredible to me," tweeted Zeynep Tufekci, a University of North Carolina professor. "This is horrible and so obviously wrong. And on "CBS This Morning," Salesforce (CRM) CEO Marc Benioff spoke about it in the context of his call for a new, national privacy law. "That was the most amazing AI technology I've seen.

In this video from Intel AI DevCon 2018, Andrew Ng from Deeplearning.ai and Landing.ai When you ask Siri for directions, peruse Netflix's recommendations or get a fraud alert from your bank, these interactions are led by computer systems using large amounts of data to predict your needs. The market is only going to grow. By 2020, the research firm IDC predicts that AI will help drive worldwide revenues to over $47 billion, up from $8 billion in 2016. Still, Andrew NG says fears that AI will replace humans are misplaced: "Despite all the hype and excitement about AI, it's still extremely limited today relative to what human intelligence is."

It is a device normally used to check the weather forecast or order more toilet paper. But Alexa can now summon a prayer to say grace before your evening meal or give thanks to God before going to bed at night. Amazon's virtual assistant has been picked up by the Church of England to make being a practising Christian easier. In response to a simple command, its app gets Alexa to read out the Lord's Prayer or the Ten Commandments, for those concerned about wrongdoing. Along with other Google searches, users can ask how to become a Christian, how to pray and who God is.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning saw a significant spike of attention in the past few years – whether it's through partnerships, acquisitions, or in-house developments. The largest financial institutions in the US have been involved in one way or another in bringing artificial intelligence into operations and customer-facing functions. A recent study of 34 major banks across several geographies (US, EU, Singapore, Africa, Australia, India) by MEDICI Team found that 27 out of these 34 banks have implemented AI in their front-office functions in form of a chatbot, virtual assistant, and digital advisor. Some of the most prominent banks in this space across regions are Bank of America, OCBC, ABN Amro, YES BANK, etc. While front-office applications have certainly seen a higher intensity, scope, and adoption, the AI strategy in the US banking industry, in reality, is far more diverse.

One of the biggest and most important trends in business today is the steady growth of artificial intelligence (AI). While people often think of AI in terms of the ways it can eliminate menial tasks such as paperwork and scheduling, the fact is that it will soon be touching every part of the business world, if it is not already. AI is doing more than just providing companies with virtual personal assistants -- it is changing marketing as we know it. Digital marketers today are helped by an incredible wave of information that is available from accessible, advanced data analytics tools, providing more insight into consumers as well as how to market directly to them. As the chief digital officer at Advantix Digital, I have had the chance to be exposed to AI -- from the introduction of machine learning to AdWords and optimizing for voice search.