In the 21st century, industries that resist integrating new technologies often lose their competitive edge. Businesses across the globe have realized how important it is to include contemporary digital technology to drive constant growth and revenue. The last decade has seen incredible innovations and breakthroughs in the landscape of digital solutions. One of such compelling technologies is Artificial Intelligence (AI). Often misconceived as simply a replacement for human power, the concept of AI as a technological aid is more pervasive.

Simply say: "Alexa, ask Indiana for travel advisories." The device will then ask which county the information is needed for. Alexa will report back if there is an advisory, a watch or a warning issued.

If so, you probably won't want your phone to suggest a slasher movie or a thrash metal album. An app that works out how you are feeling could allow recommendation systems to only make suggestions that chime with that mood. Called MoodExplorer, the app has been designed by Wenzhong Li at Nanjing University, China, and his colleagues. They say that assessing someone's mood from moment to moment has been a key factor missing from personalised recommendation engines, often leading to inappropriate suggestions that people simply dismiss.

A recommender system based on ranks is proposed, where an expert's ranking of a set of objects and a user's ranking of a subset of those objects are combined to make a prediction of the user's ranking of all objects. The rankings are assumed to be induced by latent continuous variables corresponding to the grades assigned by the expert and the user to the objects. The dependence between the expert and user grades is modelled by a copula in some parametric family. Given a prior distribution on the copula parameter, the user's complete ranking is predicted by the mode of the posterior predictive distribution of the user's complete ranking conditional on the expert's complete and the user's incomplete rankings. Various Markov chain Monte-Carlo algorithms are proposed to approximate the predictive distribution or only its mode. The predictive distribution can be obtained exactly for the Farlie-Gumbel-Morgenstern copula family, providing a benchmark for the approximation accuracy of the algorithms. The method is applied to the MovieLens 100k dataset with a Gaussian copula modelling dependence between the expert's and user's grades.

Microsoft has just announced the dates for Build, its annual developer event, and it'll be held from May 7th to May 9th in Seattle, Washington. It's been quite an eventful year for Microsoft, as it ramps up its efforts in Windows Mixed Reality, churns out even more Surface laptops and leverages Cortana to go up against rivals like Alexa and Google Assistant. With all that, we have no doubt that Build 2018 will be a pretty exciting one, and of course, we'll be there on the ground covering it all. Developers, join us as we explore the future of technology.

According to Keith Anderson, SVP Strategy and Insight, Profitero, "Over the last 15 years… there've been at least a dozen technologies described as potential game changers, but… voice has clearly emerged as a truly game-changing technology… you now increasingly hear retailers, and especially brands, talk about mobile first, voice second." The report says that study after study points to the phenomenal growth of voice-activated devices like the Amazon Echo or Google Home, driven by the rapid change in how shoppers are searching for information online. Amazon reported that the Echo Dot was the best-selling product from any manufacturer in any category across Amazon globally on Cyber Monday 2017. In The Future of eCommerce, Kantar Retail says "Voice commerce is yet another technological vehicle that… allows consumers to make real-time purchasing decisions, creating a shopping environment that is both ad-hoc and spontaneous." So what should brands be doing now to get ready for the voice shelf?

Google Assistant has been around for a while now but is still predominantly centred on Android smartphones and the Google Home. In an attempt to catch up with Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri, Google's now preparing to bring the Assistant to a new class of device. Evidence found within the Chromium source, found by XDA-Developers, strongly implies the Google Assistant will be available to new ChromeOS devices. Code containing references to the "GoogleOSAssistant" and "AssistantManager" was recently merged into the main ChromeOS source. It includes references to some settings for the feature and hints at how the assistant will operate when running on a ChromeOS laptop.

There's a race on to get into your ears. And Audible is trying to win it. The Amazon-owned audiobook company is just the latest to launch a new range of audio content, in the form of podcasts. It comes as Google attempts to take its spot by offering audiobooks, and other companies like Spotify launch their own podcasts. Audible is referring to the new podcasts as "Audio Shows". But they work in the same way as podcast – they are cut down into a range of shorter episodes that are intended to be listened to in a series, and fans can subscribe and then receive new episodes when they come out.

Voicera is a company whose goal is to activate meetings and connect them to the rest of your work day. Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to Voicera? A: As they stand now, meetings don't fulfill their promise because they are disconnected and require a lot of energy and focus to make them effective. Sometimes you don't have the right people in the meeting and sometimes you're simply too distracted taking notes to really focus on the conversation. You simply add eva@voicera.com to any meeting invite and Eva will dial in, announce itself and start taking notes.

Google announced yesterday that Nest will no longer be a standalone division of parent company Alphabet. Instead, the team that makes luxury smart home gadgets will live under the Google umbrella in an effort to tighten the integration between the gadgets in our homes and the Google Assistant that lives in our phones. On the surface, it seems like a beautiful marriage of hardware and AI. As Google so succinctly puts it, the goal is to "create a home that's safer, friendlier to the environment, smarter and even helps you save money." Google has designs on rivaling Apple in the high-end hardware space, but right now many of the Made by Google products are expensive but not necessarily premium.