Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and others are aggressively imbuing their products and services with "intelligence." We're told that computer systems will become smarter, will anticipate our needs, proactively serve us, and understand us in various contexts and via multiple methods including voice, text, inking and motion. The digital "face" of this promising tech comes in the form of assistants like Cortana, Assistant, Siri, Alexa, and Bixby. As smart speakers and the AI genies they harbor begin finding a place in our homes, and as those same digital sprites serve us through our phones and PCs, the promise of an AI-assisted existence is becoming a reality. But what's behind the magic of our speaking, "Hey, Cortana," and her - its - response?

MTV's "TRL" recently welcomed Poppy, a rising star with hologram-perfect skin, an avant-garde Japanese schoolgirl wardrobe and a voice like Betty Boop's on benzos. For much of the show, she perched silently on the couch and methodically stacked candies on a glass table. A longhaired handler called Titanic Sinclair accompanied her, explaining, "I'm just making sure she doesn't malfunction." Poppy proved a tough interview. Asked what she thought of the Grammys, which had aired the night before, she chirped: "Um, I don't really remember them."

It's no secret that AI is being applied to virtually everything, but this was a big week for enterprise conversational AI. Salesforce's Einstein debuted a platform for businesses to deploy bots on apps and websites, Facebook Messenger is coming to the web, and Microsoft Word now has a Resume Assistant imbued with intelligence from LinkedIn. It's pretty exciting to see Microsoft begin to incorporate insights from LinkedIn into products like Cortana and Microsoft Word. Using AI to determine the best job title to put on a resume can be powerful, as Indeed demonstrated last month at VB Summit, but the most intriguing part of the assistant may be its ability to surface good examples of work experience derived from LinkedIn public profiles written by humans. Salesforce's bots can be configured to only operate when a business is closed, and if the bot lacks confidence in its answer to a question or a high-value lead lands on your website, the conversation can be routed to an experienced (human) customer service agent.

Looking back, things probably started to unravel when my wife, Katie, found me tucked up in bed, talking to another woman. 'Goodnight,' she heard me say. 'Sweet dreams,' came the woman's obliging response. The next morning, Katie walked past the sitting room door to catch me muttering something about the weather. 'I wasn't talking to you,' I replied.

For the last 15 years we've had to stare at screens to interact with the magic inside. But machine learning is changing the way we communicate with our devices, and our relationship with them is becoming more real, and downright emotional. Before you shrug off the notion of a humanized machine, or shake your head at its potential dangers, it is important to recognize that the industry has always attempted to provide an emotional input to our virtual ecosystem. Take Clippit, Microsoft's creepy but helpful talking paper clip--or even the smiling Mac. If you were to open up a '90s version of Microsoft Office, Clippit would be there to make you happy (or angry).

Daimler's all-new Mercedes A-Class includes the automaker's own machine-learning and voice recognition technology in one of the industry's boldest attempts so far to take on its competitors. The Mercedes "MBUX" dashboard system is capable of understanding what you say, and even more importantly, what you mean, similar to Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri or Alphabet's Google Assistant. The vehicle also uses artificial intelligence to make sense of commands and even anticipate them by learning the preferences and habits of up to eight different users. Voice instructions can command everything from navigation to infotainment. One big difference is that unlike its cloud-based rivals that are available only when online, the Mercedes assistant uses embedded software from Nuance Communications to continue functioning when data connections fail.Continue reading for another video, more pictures and information.

Remember just a decade ago when buzzwords like "mobile," "social" and "the cloud" were still fairly new and exciting? These innovations forced businesses to re-evaluate their priorities and rethink how to use technology to engage their audiences. Now, technology develops faster than business can implement it. This rapid pace of innovation begs the question: What's next? In 2018, a few major trends are expected to reach their peak.

So it's been an interesting first few weeks with the Echo and am happy to say Echo 2nd Gen has finally delivered on its promise of improved sound quality over 1st Gen Echo, with the 3rd firmware since launch. If you are confused about a lot of the negative reviews, old firmware is the likely cause of most of them regarding poor sound quality. Want to keep this short and spare all the gory details, but there was a bug in the launch version of the firmware, which was fixed after a few days, but the first fix, while satisfying some, was not, in my opinion a full fix and left the mid-range frequencies muted and tinny. Today I noticed that Alexa's voice in this unit sounded much more like Alexa's voice on Gen 1 Echo's I own and, after playing some music, suspected they had upgraded the firmware again, and indeed they have. The current firmware is 592452720 and it's a massive improvement over both the original and updated version 592452420.

Marketers have been talking about artificial intelligence (AI) marketing for some time now. But many are still wondering, what exactly can AI marketing do for us right now? To find out, Econsultancy recently held a gathering of over 400 marketers for Digital Outlook 2018 in Singapore and invited subject matter experts to speak on AI marketing and other topics trending in digital. In his talk, Chandra Kumar, CEO WiselyWise, stated that, despite many setbacks over its long history, AI marketing may now be ready for mass adoption. He proceeded to describe four concrete things that marketers can use AI for right now.

Cross-industry collaboration Announced in a blog post today, Microsoft said the institute will look for ways to directly integrate AI research into Cortana. The organisation is being co-funded by Microsoft Research, Cortana Research and the RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. The Institute is unique in its intention to directly combine research with real-world implementation. Currently, AI researchers tend to operate independently of the engineers building applications such as Cortana. The Cortana Intelligence Institute will bridge the gap, providing researchers and engineers with a two-way link to each other.