Amazon Alexa is an in-home digital assistant. Named after the Library of Alexandria, Alexa is just cloud-based software that reacts to your voice. You can ask it questions or give it commands. It could be described as a robot without a body. Of course Alexa operates out of a physical machine.

Police say a 21-year-old Taborice Lee Foster lured his target using Grindr, a dating app for gay men. When the victim arrived to his home in Panama City, Foster and another man attacked him, pointing a gun from behind while searching the date's pockets and stealing his wallet.

"The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race, " Stephen Hawking has warned. "We are now solving problems with machine learning and artificial intelligence that were … in the realm of science fiction for the last several decades," retorted Amazon's CEO, Jeff Bezos. What is for sure is that AI (Artificial Intelligence) is living a resurgence and a renaissance. Its impact is already transforming the business, technology and research landscapes. The jury is still out there on the long term consequences, whether they will be beneficial, harmful, or even catastrophic.

Related: Want to Be More Like Amazon? Intelligent virtual assistants have gained a lot of prominence in the business world since they were reintroduced by major platforms like Slack, Facebook, and Twitter. Despite the fact we have only grazed the potential of chatbots, they've already changed the way companies communicate with their audiences. Moreover, efficient corporations have found alternative uses for bots. For example, chatbots are now utilized as internal-facing assistants that can increase productivity and employee satisfaction throughout a company.

Global consulting firm Accenture notes that stand-alone, AI-powered digital voice assistant devices are being used "for a range of consumer services such as playing music, turning the heat and lights on and off, and providing news, weather and sports scores." That's to be expected, of course - that's what they're for - but in an online survey of 21,000 consumers in 19 countries, Accenture discovered that digital virtual assistants are becoming "the central hub for home activities in Australia." Again, that's the whole point of digital assistants - they're meant to be the hub of your digital home, not just answering questions but helping you control your other connected devices, but naturally, it's always good to see this being confirmed by actual users. In addition, "three quarters (75%) of these owners said they use their smartphones less for entertainment, more than two thirds use them less for online purchasing and more than half for general information searches (71% and 55%, respectively)." David Sovie, global MD of Accenture's High Tech business said: "Digital voice assistant devices are challenging smartphones as the central hub for all activities in the home. "These low-cost devices deliver valuable and practical benefits and are relatively easy to use, and their rapidly growing popularity is one of the most striking trends in the high-tech industry." Accenture tells us its survey shows that "ownership levels of digital voice assistant devices in Australia are projected to increase more than five times this year, reaching 23% by the end of 2018 from 4% in 2017.

After a decade of brands being tried and tested by social media, another new medium is set to challenge brand integrity: AI-powered voice technology. This new voice-controlled world will not only test brand differentiation, but also how enduring a brand's relationship is with its consumers. Tone of voice has long been an essential component of a brand development, helping marketers embody and express the personality of their brand, largely via the written word. Before the rise of Facebook, Twitter and other social media this was a straightforward exercise, developing a brand's tone of voice safe in the knowledge that all text written for advertisements, marketing collateral, website content, or for press use, would be carefully reviewed, checked and approved against those guidelines. Smart brands have since extended their brand identity guidelines to help them manage how they communicate via social media, where brand communications can be free-flowing conversations that are not planned in advance, regulated by the letter and can be disrupted by consumers.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has come on leaps and bounds in recent years, the aim being that it helps machines work and react the way humans do. Like most technological advances, AI is growing because it simplifies routine tasks, making it easier for human beings to focus on the intellectual aspects of a given process. For example, computer devices were introduced for problem-solving, but have always needed an operator to look after the coding and maintenance. It's a huge challenge, but this absence of intelligence is is slowly being filled by artificial intelligence. In this post, we will look at ways in which AI is successfully adding brilliance to machines and web applications.

In a meeting room this week at the Wynn–away from Google's temporarily rain-soaked outdoor booth at the Las Vegas Convention Center–the company demoed a tabletop touchscreen device that could display Google Photos albums, bring up directions from Google Maps (and send them to your phone), look up recipes, play music with album art, and of course load videos from YouTube. Google Assistant voice commands controlled most of the action, with the 8-inch touchscreen providing extra control and context. Google's software is a work in progress–devices using it won't ship until later this year–but it gave me the impression that the company is ready to take on touchscreen devices powered by Amazon's Alexa assistant, such as the Echo Show and Echo Spot. It also revealed an unsolved problem for both companies: How complex should navigation be on a device that's more like an appliance than a computer? As Amazon and Google are learning, the race toward simplification comes at a cost.

Does a robot manage your money? For many of us, the answer is yes. Online and algorithmic investment and financial advice is easy to come by these days, usually under the moniker of "robo-advisor." Startups such as Wealthfront, Personal Capital, and Betterment launched robo-advisors as industry disruptors, and incumbents, such as Schwab's (Intelligent Advisor), Vanguard (Personal Advisor Services), Morgan Stanley and BlackRock have joined the fray with their own hybrid machine/advisor solutions. It's clear that robo-advisors and AI play an important and growing role in the financial services industry, but a question remains. Will robo-advisors disrupt corporate capital allocation the same way they have personal capital allocation?

This week about 180,000 visitors flocked to the world's biggest technology exhibition, the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. And while all the usual gadgets made an appearance, from smart fridges to self-driving cars, there was one dominant theme: speech. With nearly half of people in the US using voice-activated digital assistants in their smartphones or tablets, and the ownership of standalone digital assistants, like Google Home and Amazon Echo, expected to double in 2018, every tech company now wants a slice of the pie. Alexa, Amazon's voice assistant, is now available in everything from microwaves to cars, and from TVs to mirrors. Google had more than 350 voice-controlled devices at the show, including speakers, cars, and a giant toy town complete with a railway.