The deputy director of a large county human services agency, she's been wrestling all week with staff turnover and media coverage about long wait times for services. Heading home on Friday evening, she worries that she might spend the rest of her career playing defense at work. After a Saturday morning of chauffeuring her kids to soccer games and music lessons, Natalie collapses on the couch. She relaxes to music from one of her favorite radio stations, wondering how Pandora always manages to serve up exactly the songs that fit her mood. After she's had a chance to unwind, Siri gives her the week's top headlines, reminds her that her niece's graduation is coming up, recommends a gift for the niece, and, when Natalie confirms the choice, places an order. Later, Natalie's fitness band reminds her that it's time to head to the gym for a session with her trainer. On the way to the gym, Waze alerts her to an accident ahead and automatically routes her around it.

Cisco introduces Spark Assistant and Spark Room 70, and lays out its AI roadmap. Cisco this week is holding its annual reseller conference, Partner Summit, in Dallas. When Rowan Trollope, SVP & GM of IoT and Applications at Cisco, delivered his keynote today, the company unveiled its AI-powered voice assistant with the not so inventive name of "Cisco Spark Assistant." There is, of course, a veritable cornucopia of voice assistants out there, as we can ask Siri, Google, Alexa, Cortana or other popular AIs a question and get a prompt answer back. The reasons that communications and collaboration industry professionals should care is because the Spark AI is entirely focused on improving meetings.

Pikachu is virtually inescapable in the tech world, and that includes the smart speaker in your living room. The Pokémon Company has previewed Pikachu Talk, an app meant for Alexa- and Google Assistant-powered devices like the Amazon Echo and Google Home. The name says it all, really: you can hold conversations with the iconic yellow critter. We wouldn't expect deep discussions when Pikachu can only respond with variants of its name ("pika pika!" isn't exactly My Dinner With Andre material), but it's bound to be fun for at least a little while if you're a Pokémon fan. You may be waiting a while to try this.

Sales is tricky, even for humans. With all our creativity and intuition for how each other works, you'd think the art of marketing would be a task kept exclusively in human hands. However, recent development on the artificial intelligence (AI) front means that to experience success as a business, that's just not the case. We're talking about more AI developments than helpful Siri giving you the quick answer to win an argument or telling you about the weather. AI systems have changed the way businesses operate, especially when allied with Big Data and deep learning tools.

Your smartphone alone may use dozens of AI applications. Artificial intelligence is quickly becoming the next transformational technology. Market intelligence firm Tractica forecasts that revenue generated by AI will soar from $1.4 billion in 2016 to $59.8 billion by 2025. What may surprise you even more is how pervasive the technology has become over the last several years. A number of recent advances in AI have already made their way into our daily lives.

A YouTuber who goes by the name Tester Junkies uploaded a video Wednesday showing Amazon's Alexa voice assistant caught in an infinite loop, pushing out the same phrase again and again. The user basically gave Alexa the voice command on an Echo Dot speaker "Bark, Alexa, set a reminder for 1 second." After 1 second, Alexa responds, "Bark Alexa set a reminder for 1 second" and keeps repeating it. Essentially what happens is that the user has set a reminder for Alexa to reminder for itself. When being asked, "What is the reminder for" the user repeats himself with the same command.

You are free to share this article under the Attribution 4.0 International license. There are benefits and drawbacks of using smartphone and internet technology to administer mental health care, report researchers. Interacting with a machine may seem like a strange and impersonal way to seek mental health care, but advances in technology and artificial intelligence are making that type of engagement more and more a reality. "Talking to a machine may feel like a safer way to share experiences without feeling ashamed." Online sites such as 7 Cups of Tea and Crisis Text Line are providing counseling services via web and text, but hospitals and mental health facilities have not widely used this style of treatment.

This past summer proved to be the official tipping point for voice-first shopping for many consumers. With Amazon's Echo Dot ranking as the "best-selling product from any manufacturer in any category across Amazon globally" during Prime Day 2017 and Google Home pairing up with Wal-Mart and The Home Depot, the era of AI-assisted selling officially had its breakthrough during the first half of 2017. Additionally, according to a recent Gartner study, sales of voice-activated speakers with artificial intelligence capabilities will reach $3.52 billion by 2021, signaling that adoption of voice-enabled speakers will only continue over the next few years. Though e-commerce continues to gain ground on in-store purchasing, we are collectively a group of consumers who often use our voice throughout our purchasing journeys. Whether it is asking for a different size or color, checking if our product is in stock or simply expressing how we want to pay, we are used to these interactions.

In 2016, restless tech-industry forecasters enjoyed a rare moment of consensus: Whatever else might be coming next, everyone seemed to agree that bots would be a big part of it. The analyst Benedict Evans, in a representative essay, located a promising future specifically in chat bots -- conversational interfaces for artificial intelligence, designed to assist with particular tasks. Facebook, the year before, created a personal-assistant chat bot, and the company would soon open its Messenger app up to outside developers, who it hoped would create more bots to help people shop, look things up or otherwise organize their lives. Amazon's Echo, by then already a surprise mainstream success, provided a tailwind: Here was a widely used artificial intelligence just sitting there on millions of countertops. These predictions were self-interested, of course.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are timely subjects that spark the public imagination. In 2016, between $26 billion and $39 billion was invested in AI, according to recent estimates from the McKinsey Global Institute, a leading private-sector think tank. That number is three times the amount spent just three years prior, an increase driven by entrepreneurial activity and technological advancements. Although thousands of venture firms are investing in sexy machine learning projects, there are very real benefits that machine learning and AI are realizing now, not in a future timeline of self-driving cars and full home automation. Smart investors and observers should consider following companies that are solving these five issues.