With the success of Amazon's Echo and it's voice-controlled assistant Alexa, the smart speaker war is heating up to battle for the hub of home automation. Traditionally, these devices needed to be operated with buttons, a remote, or other physical controls, limiting their capabilities. As AI becomes more mainstream and customers demand more from their devices, the need to become more user-friendly grows. Consumers want instantaneous responses without having to hunt down a remote, or get up to approach their device - the demand for far-field voice activation is just around the corner. Far-field voice technology is involved in Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Apple HomePod amongst others, but how? Far-field speech recognition is far more complicated than we might have initially though, and Tao Ma, Principal Architect, AI Platform & Research at JD.com has shared with us some of his work in the area including the background, system design and architecture of these systems.

Hong Kong, China It's 2050 and the world revolves around you. From the contents of your fridge to room temperature -- digital assistants ensure your home runs smoothly. Your screens know your taste and show channels you want to see as you enter the room. Your car is driverless and your favourite barman may just be an android. Predictions for an AI-dominated future are increasingly common, but Antoine Blondeau has experience in reading, and arguably manipulating, the runes -- he helped develop technology that evolved into predictive texting and Apple's Siri.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised take a prominent place within organizations in 2018, and the coming year will mark the beginning of the democratization of AI. In other words, a much broader range of companies and government departments will use AI. "Throughout 2018, AI performance will continue to improve," says Chirag Dekate, research director at Gartner. "The increased availability of AI capabilities embedded in applications and platforms like cloud office suites and deep neural network (DNN)-based virtual assistants, such as Alexa and Siri, will boost intelligent conversational interfaces to products and services." Gartner's latest CIO survey of 3,160 CIOs from 98 countries, found that 21% of CIOs are already piloting AI initiatives or have short-term plans for them.

Ms Perkins told BBC Newsnight's Emily Maitlis that while the film maker is now seen as a "repulsive monster", at the time he was "an extremely exciting person to be around".

Much has changed in the wealth management industry since robo-advisors first made their appearance a decade ago. Talk of disrupting the advisor-client relationship has given way to a new generation of innovative technology solutions that enhance and augment the fundamental ways that investors invest and advisors advise. Today, robo-advisors can be seen as part of a broader movement to digitize wealth management, embodied in the term: WealthTech. Technology derived from wealth management firms, research tools that generate investment solutions, and platforms to support financial advisors -- all fall under WealthTech. Finance is becoming a technology play.

Whether your interaction with artificial intelligence (AI) is limited to science-fiction or you spend more time in your day talking to Siri and Alexa than actual humans, you can't hide from the fact AI is changing the world. This week, the UK's new digital strategy was launched, which dedicated £17.3m to research and development of robotics and AI. Out of the industries welcoming this technology with open arms, finance and banking is one of the biggest. It's not hard to see why: when companies are dealing with large amounts of data, handing over control to a machine learning system that can analyse and understand information much faster than a human being is an obvious benefit. Where is this new technology having an impact in the finance sector?

Have a question about taxes, vehicle licensing or simply need the phone number for a state agency? If you live in Mississippi, just ask Alexa, Amazon's digital assistant that has been programmed to also work with state and local governments. In fact, Mississippi is one of several governments that uses so-called chatbots to handle a range of basic but frequently asked questions. In Utah, teenagers can solicit help reviewing questions that might be on a driver's test. In Los Angeles, residents can get detailed information about city-sponsored events.

Earlier this summer, Amazon launched the invitation-only Amazon Echo Look to help people feel confident about learning to dress themselves. Today, the device is connecting to Amazon Spark, so users can ask each other for fashion advice. Combining the two means you can use Amazon's Instagram-like social media platform to crowdsource votes on your outfits, getting opinions from real users instead of just Amazon-hired "fashion specialists." The Echo Look takes full-body selfies and already provides fashion advice through machine learning. Now, with the addition of Spark, human insight will be added into the mix.

"Star Wars: The Last Jedi" has been a box office success, racking up more than $220 million during its opening weekend, and is a hit with critics but its audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is barely floating above 50 percent as the result of what appears to be an organized review bombing campaign. Of the more than 116,000 audience reviews "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" has received so far, just 55 percent have been positive. Many of the negative reviews take issue for what the viewers perceive to be too political and pushing a "social justice warrior" agenda. It's not often that a film was well received by critics as "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" struggles to please fans. While the franchise has a giant and rabid fan base, it appears the audience review section has been invaded by the only group more dedicated than Star Wars diehards: trolls.

Artificial intelligence has been around for a while and it is definitely here to stay. Everyday experiences with Siri, Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa are all powered by AI. In 2016, Deloitte Global estimated that 2.5 trillion pictures would be shared or stored online. If you want to search for a certain picture you took one night while eating pizza, AI or Google can help show a filtered result of all photos of you having pizza. In short, we have to accept the fact that AI is here to aid human intelligence and make our lives better. Now let's focus on marketing: AI influences analytics, social media communications, outbound marketing and even content marketing.