German luxury car maker Daimler is set to combine a range of digital customer support experiments into a single voice-activated app that is available whether users are driving their cars, sitting at home or on the go. Chief digital officer Sabine Scheunert said on Tuesday that Daimler will soon introduce a digital assistant called'Ask Mercedes' that ties together previous trial projects on platforms such as Google and Facebook. Scheunert said'Ask Mercedes' will be available in several markets and languages immediately before being rolled out globally, without providing further details. 'Ask Mercedes is a new cognitive assistant available any time to support customers in exploring all the functions of their Mercedes-Benz vehicles,'the firm said at the Lisbon Web Summit. Mercedes is one of Daimler's leading car brands.

New York State's power grid is built to accommodate only a few hours of the highest short-term load of the year. More than 90% of the time, that oversized capacity sits idle--costing rate-payers $17 billion over the past decade. That number will nearly double to $30 billion over the next 10 years if changes aren't made. But New York technology companies are diving into this problem and others, and have some promising solutions. While other startup ecosystems boast the next best dating app, New York City startups are integrating business and technology to solve the world's most pressing energy problems.

Chatbots, voicebots, Alexa skills, Google actions, intelligent assistants -- these are different all, yet possess a single common denominator: they're conversational apps. Underlying every conversational app is the exchange of words between humans and machines. Today's technology is mature enough to create high-level conversation, using broadly available building blocks. The building blocks required to develop a modern conversational application. Let's describe these building blocks in more detail!

Music fans keen to get the name of that catchy song playing in the background have a new tool to help them out. Google has extended a facility launched with their flagship Pixel 2 smartphones that lets the firm's Assistant find out for you. Any device equipped with the smart voice activated aide will soon be able to take advantage of the feature, which is similar to the popular Shazam app. Music fans keen to get the name of that catchy song playing in the background have a new tool to help them out. Google has extended a facility launched with their flagship Pixel 2 smartphones that lets the firm's Assistant find out for you To activate the feature, users first need to trigger the assistant by saying'OK Google' or'Hey Google'.

Google Assistant is now able to identify songs that are currently playing out loud. The new feature was made available this Tuesday through a software update and should work on any Android smartphone that has Google Assistant enabled. One of the new features that Google introduced on its Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 flagship Android smartphones was the ability to recognize songs even when users are offline. Google also promised during the Pixel 2 launch that a similar feature would be made available to other Android smartphones through Google Assistant. Now, it looks like the search engine giant has delivered on it promise as the feature appears to be already available on some Android smartphones, as first discovered by 9To5Google.

Most of the prominent companies agree that Artificial Intelligence is the future for sales and marketing, as reported by Enrique Dans who wrote for Forbes recently. It shouldn't come as a surprise when the tech giants are already researching and improving their proprietary AI products. Its iconic "Google Brain" is a big deep learning research project that has been underway since 2011. It has been instrumental in improving the company's existing products such as image searching, Google assistant, etc. To showcase the power of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning the company has also provided many nifty AI experiments on their website for the users to interact with.

The second-generation Amazon Echo smart speaker has received a new firmware update that fixes an audio issue. The firmware update has finally pumped up the bass of the Echo speaker, which is now able to deliver better sound quality. The second generation Amazon Echo received mostly positive reviews when it was first released on Oct. 31. However, many users as well as reviewers complained about the lack of bass that the speaker was able to output compared to the first generation Echo speaker. The Verge said on its initial review that the new Echo speaker sounded "thin and flat," while CNET said that it had "weak bass at high volumes."

In the hundreds of researcher and executive interviews we've been fortunate enough to conduct in the last three years, few artificial intelligence applications are brought up more than marketing and advertising. During talks with execs and researchers from companies ranging from Facebook to Baidu, and IBM to AT&T, marketing has been a perennial theme in conversations of AI's hottest applications. We'll begin with examples of what's currently viable in the AI marketing world: Below are seven extremely prevalent example applications that we've decided to highlight for this article, accompanied by a brief description of how the AI approach works, and companies currently leveraging the application. In this section of the article I've aimed to stay away from (a) applications with limited traction (speculative or burgeoning applications are reserved for the next section), and (b) AI applications that have only partial overlap with marketing today (IE: fraud and security could / should be considered to be their own category, and will not be referred to here as a marketing application). A complete list of currently viable AI marketing applications would be much more broad, but we've decided to focus on some of the most popular uses in marketing today: In 2005, if you "searched" an eCommerce store to find a product, you'd be unlikely to find the result you had in mind unless you knew it's name or title exactly.

Forecast is a series exploring the future of AI and automation in a variety of different sectors--from the arts to city building to finance--to find out what the latest developments might mean for humanity's road ahead. We'll hear from Nikolas Badminton, David Usher, Jennifer Keesmaat, Heather Knight, Madeline Ashby and Director X, among others. Created by Motherboard in partnership with Audi. It all started in a bar in 2014. Weary of watching his friends spend their nights swiping left or right on dating apps like Tinder, Justin Long of Vancouver decided to automate the process.

We're all familiar with Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant--virtual assistants that help you save time and get things done at home like check the weather, turn on your TV, set a reminder, or summon your car from the garage. These products are great in your personal life, but what about at work? Have you ever been late for a meeting, either because you don't know how to connect or you're wandering the halls trying to find an available room? How many times have you forgotten to record a meeting or write down action items? What if you had a virtual assistant that could do all of those things and more? Imagine how much more productive you could be by focusing on what's important – getting work done with your team.