Amazon Alexa users can now send SMS messages through the voice assistant, the company announced via TechCrunch. The Amazon feature comes as Apple takes pre-orders for its own smart speaker: the HomePod. The Apple device will allow users to send iMessages and SMS text messages by using Siri. As of Tuesday, U.S. Alexa users can send text messages to their contacts in the Alexa app by simply asking the voice assistant. Alexa already has a voice calling and its own messaging system.

For buyers of AI technology, the two largest gaps in expectations vs. reality are the current capability of A.I. and what implementation of these tools actually looks like. Artificial intelligence is facing a PR problem today. Ironically, many of the people building AI software can take a bit of blame for it. As a business building a new category of software, it's difficult to strike the balance between exciting people about your solution and over-hyping the possibilities, and there are still a lot of misconceptions about both the technology and the human impact of deploying A.I. within companies. Our company, Talla, has spoken with thousands of executives in the last couple years and now I want to set the record straight regarding the state of the ecosystem and what adopting A.I. means for your organization. The two largest mismatches in expectation vs. reality for buyers are: How much can A.I. agents really help you and your people?

The following article about artificial intelligence for UX has been written by Josh Sutton, Global Head, Data & Artificial Intelligence at Publicis.Sapient. Publicis is one of the world's largest. Editing and formatting added by the TechEmergence team. For information about our thought leadership and publishing arrangements with brands, please visit our partnerships page. The world is transforming at a faster rate than we have seen before.

So much for needing your phone to send text messages. Thanks to a new software update, you can now use Alexa to deliver SMS text messages to any phone. There are some caveats, however. It only works for Alexa users in the US with an Android device that also have the Alexa app installed on their phone. You also can't use the feature to text 911 or participate in group text messages.

Give us your feedback Thank you for your feedback. Whether you leave business school to become a corporate manager, a professional high performer or an entrepreneur, you will spend much of your time on tasks unrelated to your expertise. Only the most senior executives now have dedicated personal assistants and so the more mundane work of email, scheduling meetings and booking travel eats up your time. A new generation of employees is looking for ways to reclaim that time so they can spend it finding solutions to serious problems: the work that will get them credit and help them advance. This work also develops their expertise and helps them remain valuable when artificial intelligence finally becomes clever enough to do all the most predictable tasks.

Pine64 has released a budget-friendly single-board computer with the high-powered Rockchip RK3399 system on chip (SoC). Available from around $60, the RockPro64 board comes in two flavors, either with the hexa-core RK3399 SoC or the RK3399Pro, Rockchip's first "artificial-intelligence processor". Unveiled at CES 2018, it combines a CPU, GPU, and neural-network processing unit (NPU). As noted by CNX-Software, a number of RK3999-based boards have been released in the past week but, priced at around $200 each, they've been aimed at business customers rather than home developers. The RockPro64 with 2GB of RAM will cost between $59 and $65 and will be available from March, while the RockPro64-AI will cost $99 but won't be available until August 1, according to Pine64.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) isn't a bright, shiny toy that's going to fade away after the newness wears off--in fact, far from it. The AI market is booming, impacting everything from HR to customer service to--you guessed it--marketing. A recent survey found 58 percent of CMOs around the globe believe they'll have to compete in AI to succeed within the next five years--and that means getting the ball rolling today. Here are five key ways AI should impact your marketing strategy and, in turn, your marketing budget. According to a recent study from Techmergence--Machine Learning Marketing--Expert Consensus of 51 Executives and Startups--companies are widely using AI to help generate new revenue, secure competitive differentiation, and enhance marketing efforts.

If you got a Google Home Mini to go with your Android phone this Christmas, one of the first things you probably asked it to do was send a text. But instead of asking what you wanted to say, your Google Home said this: Sorry, I can't send texts yet. But starting today, if you ask the same question to your Amazon Echo, it will happily oblige. Here's how to send SMS text messages with Amazon Echo. Echo devices have long been able to send messages to each other, but now Amazon has expanded that to the Android community as a whole, adding hundreds of millions of new devices to its ranks.

Kraft and Pringles are among some of the few. It only takes a couple seconds, but Amazon gave consumers their first listen to Alexa's new voice. The change is part of a 90-second ad running during Sunday's Super Bowl LII, called "Alexa Loses Her Voice." The ad starts with a very concerned Jeff Bezos discovering his prized digital assistant has lost her voice, with the company scrambling to replace it. Alexa's replacements feature some hilarious alternatives, including chef Gordon Ramsey, rapper Cardi B, actress Rebel Wilson, and actor Anthony Hopkins, who is downright creepy as he answers an Amazon Echo Spot owner.

Today's artificial intelligence market is not easy to quantify. Besides the lack of consensus on a coherent definition for "artificial intelligence" as a term, the field's nascent stage of development makes it difficult to carve out silos or hard barriers of where one industry or application ends, and another begins. In one of our more popular recent articles, we aimed to derive a valuation of the artificial intelligence market, based on current market research and our own insights. In this week's article, I've set out to determine more of a "lay of the land" of the AI industry, including it's various segments and application areas. If you're interested in how developments in machine learning and AI might impact your own company or business, then keeping an eye on trends of industry and application growth is pertinent; we hope that this article will be a good jumping off point to some of the most thought-out assessments of AI and it's "segments" as we could collate from the web.