Conversational commerce is a big disruptor, but it's got some kinks to work out to be a more human-oriented experience. Voice is natural, and it can have a huge impact on retail because it can mirror the real world, says Michael Haswell, director of global business development, retail & shopping, Google. But there are hurdles to getting people to move beyond telling voice-activated personal assistants to play a song or look up an address to real shopping activity. Currently, they can really only handle "low cognitive loads." If you ask a home assistant to buy peanut butter, it can probably handle that, especially if it already knows your brand preference.

Alphabet is folding Nest, led by CEO Marwan Fawaz (right), into Google's hardware team, led by former Motorola executive Rick Osterloh (left). Google is bringing gadget maker Nest back under its control as the search giant battles rivals Amazon and Apple in the rapidly expanding smart home market. A big part of the change: Making it easier to add Google's artificial intelligence technology and Assistant -- a digital helper that competes against Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri -- into new Nest products. The world's largest search engine has staked its future on building Google smarts into devices beyond smartphones. On Wednesday, Google said Nest was part of its plans and would no longer operate as a separate division that lived in the outer orbit of parent company Alphabet's "Other Bets" group of projects.

The vast promise to revolutionize areas like healthcare and transportation has been tempered by uncertainty regarding when these developments will be ready for widespread implementation. With all the futuristic talk and attention-grabbing headlines, many may have missed the fact that in many small ways, AI is already here, shaping some of the mundane things we do on a daily basis. We may be taking for granted some of the most obvious examples of the progress in AI that have occurred in a device many of us use countless times every day -- our smartphone. There are also features that you may not be aware of that are driven by AI. Read on to find out about 10 of those innovations.

It's been recently discovered that the Google Home smart speaker is now able to show visual information on TVs that have a connected Chromecast. This is the very first of the contextual visual responses that Google previously promised last year for its Home smart speaker. When users want to hear information about the weather, all they have to do is say "OK Google what's the weather?" and listen to Google Assistant's response. With Google's new contextual visual responses activated, users can now tell Google Home to show them weather information by asking "OK Google show me the weather on my TV" or simply "show me the weather," according to Android Police. Google Assistant will show the weather information on the user's TV as long as a Chromecast device is connected to the TV.

What is a Voice Interface? Ranging from Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa and Microsoft's Cortana the use of voice-based communication through devices like a Mobile App is in demand. You might be doubtful with written instructions on the computer but the use of voice interface communication has exceeded the user rate is spreading virally like social media news. Several Google-based software assistants innovated in progress are developed as voice communicating tools falling into the category of VUIs. Voices fed in through a program are heard when a logical yes is read by the sensors which serve as a voice interface with certain devices running it.

Banking providers must continue to step up to plate and meet consumer expectations. Digital banking solutions are table stakes, not something only tech-savvy Millennials crave. Subscribe to The Financial Brand via email for FREE!A crowded marketplace and the speed at which new technologies are revolutionizing banking makes crafting the right digital presence overwhelming for many financial institutions. Consumers now expect their banking provider to provide a secure, frictionless digital experience -- one that's easy to use, convenient and fits seamlessly into their everyday lives. With competition increasing across the industry, the stakes are high.

In my last article I mentioned that Google and Facebook are the leaders in the artificial intelligence gold rush era we are now living in. I always was a Google guy, my first phone was an Android phone, I got the Chromecast went it first came out, I learned how to code watching YouTube videos and I am a Google Drive paying customer so one should read this article knowing that I have a preference for Alphabet products but in this fake news and paid influencers era please believe me I am not getting paid in any way by Google or any of its subsidiary corporations. I have a preference for its products like any of you reading this article have his or her preference for Facebook as a social media or Apple for its products instead of Android. Nevertheless I always try to be objective in my opinions especially in regard to artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science. In October 2017, Google CEO came out with a pretty strong Ai focused statement and said that "Google is now an Ai first company".

Apple has now confirmed that its HomePod smart speaker won't come with manual EQ adjustment options. This means users will not have the ability to manually alter the sound of the device to match their bass or treble preference. Apple Senior VP of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue announced Wednesday during a Pollstar Live conference that the highly anticipated HomePod won't make it possible for users to make EQ adjustments on their own. In the absence of manual adjustment controls, the Amazon Echo rival will rely on analytics to automatically set levels for each song that is played, according to Apple Insider. The announcement could be upsetting for audiophiles and people who prefer to make manual adjustments to their music.

Alphabet's Google is arguably the first mover in using AI among its "big tech" peers -- a category from which I'm excluding IBM, which arrived early to the AI party. The company has been pouring massive sums of money into infusing AI -- particularly machine learning -- into its products and services. For instance, in its core search business, Google uses AI to improve the relevancy of the ads it shows users, and on YouTube, it employs AI to serve up music and video selections based on a users' previous listening and viewing habits. Like Amazon and Apple, the company also has an AI-powered smart assistant: Google Assistant started out its life helping Android-powered smartphone users, and is also now incorporated into the company's smart speaker, Google Home.

We investigate how to address the shortcomings of the popular One-Class Collaborative Filtering (OCCF) methods in handling challenging “sparse” dataset in one-class setting (e.g., clicked or bookmarked), and propose a novel graph-theoretic OCCF approach, named as gOCCF, by exploiting both positive preferences (derived from rated items) as well as negative preferences (derived from unrated items). In capturing both positive and negative preferences as a bipartite graph, further, we apply the graph shattering theory to determine the right amount of negative preferences to use. Then, we develop a suite of novel graph-based OCCF methods based on the random walk with restart and belief propagation methods. Through extensive experiments using 3 real-life datasets, we show that our gOCCF effectively addresses the sparsity challenge and significantly outperforms all of 8 competing methods in accuracy on very sparse datasets while providing comparable accuracy to the best performing OCCF methods on less sparse datasets. The datasets and implementations used in the empirical validation are available for access: https://goo.gl/sfiawn.