Voice is uncharted territory for most marketers, as it's still a nascent space. Right now, there's significant opportunity for brands to get on board with voice shopping and forge the way as more consumers purchase smart speakers and get accustomed to interacting with digital assistants. Amazon is leading the pack in the space with the greatest market share, and it appears set to build on its first-mover advantage in selling smart speakers with its line of Echo devices that range in price from $50 to $230. The company is able to sell the products at a loss if it means getting people hooked on its e-commerce platform or registering them for a membership to its Prime service. Amazon's acquisition this week of smart doorbell maker Ring could further boost Alexa's shopping strategy by giving consumers a way to authorize access to their homes for deliveries.

In recent years many of us have begun to relying on Alexa, Siri, and other virtual assistants to play our music, set our alarms, and schedule our appointments. Now, the Airbus company is designing a similar mission assistant to help astronauts complete everyday tasks on the International Space Station. Airbus is developing the Crew Interactive MObile CompanioN (nicknamed CIMON) in collaboration with Space Administration at the German Aerospace Center. It's set to be the first time that artificial intelligence (AI) has been used on the ISS in this manner. CIMON takes the form of a spherical, free-flying robot that can move independently around the station It's about the size of a medicine ball, and weighs roughly 11 pounds.

Police tell the San Bernardino Sun that a man was carjacked Tuesday after he used the app to meet two women in a cul-de-sac. Investigators say he was talking to the women when three armed men robbed him and drove off in his car.

Get out of the way, Tinder. There's a new dating app on the scene hoping to disrupt the way we find that one special person to eventually melt down in an IKEA with over the relative merits of a Kvikne wardrobe versus a Trysil. Described by Wired as "a sort of 23andMe meets Tinder meets monogamists," Pheramor's secret to success is your DNA. That's right--for a low-rate of $19.99 plus a $10 monthly membership fee, the Houston-based online dating startup promises to match local singles who are compatible not only socially but genetically. The app's matching algorithm analyzes 11 special "attraction genes" supposedly linked to our pheromones--olfactory signals that some believe trigger attraction.

Patients at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston soon will use high-tech assistants to help them navigate their hospital stays. They could use Google Home to page a nurse, request spiritual care, or find out when their doctor is scheduled to arrive. Already, Beth Israel Deaconess has tested how both the Alexa and Google Home ambient listening devices might work with inpatients. The medical center is also considering how these technologies could be used to help physicians with tasks such as accessing patient data without having to click through electronic files. Such applications could be just the start of advances ushered in by consumer tech giants, says John D. Halamka, MD, MS, chief information officer for Beth Israel Deaconess and dean for technology at Harvard Medical School.

Artificial intelligence has quickly evolved from science fiction to digital assistants such as Alexa and Siri learning about our daily lives. A.I. applications are interpreting MRIs and will soon be operating self-driving cars. In personal finance, many of us interact with chat boxes on bank web sites. And in the investing world, robo-advisors are managing portfolios for retail investors. "But we haven't seen the penetration of AI within institutional finance," said Richard Johnson, vice president of market structure and technology at Greenwich Associates on a recent webinar about the evolution of A.I. and current levels of adoption on Wall Street.

Training an algorithm to predict future outcomes, using a PCA algorithm to uncover clients' personality traits, uploading a corpus of text to extract sentiment and grouping 650 000 lines of CRM and weblog data to cluster clients with machine learning all sounded like unreachable rocket science to me a while ago. Now I do it as easily as I use Excel or Illustrator. They are my new secret weapons. In 5 years "proficient in machine learning" will be a must-have on any manager's resume (just like project management or strategic thinking/analytical thinking is today). Harvard Business Review says "The most important general-purpose technology of our era is artificial intelligence, particularly machine learning (ML). But for now it's still a rare skill, a strong competitive advantage that only early adopters hold. And this might surprise you, but it's already within arm's reach. It's changed my brain a bit. As our lead data scientist Bernardo Nunes puts it…I've invested in a "growth ...

Alexa already can translate words and short phrases from and into a variety of languages, but Yahoo's sources say that Amazon is pushing for a true multilingual assistant that can perform more complex translations. Such a system would need to be aware of cultural as well as linguistic details, as well, as most language is dependent on contextual and situational cues. Yahoo's sources also note that eventually, Alexa will be able to translate conversations with multiple people speaking different languages at once, perhaps as an outgrowth of it's recognition systems for multiple users now. Obviously, this is all future-focused; you won't be able to use Alexa to go to that wedding in Japan just yet.

Naturally, the Hello displays also double as speakers, letting you jam out to some music while you're cooking or walking around your home or office. They should blend in nicely with your furniture, since they have a minimalist, wooden finish that makes them easy on the eye. Archos will be launching them later this summer in 7 and -8.4-inch versions, and the company told us pricing should be between $130 and $150 for the smaller device and $170 and $200 for the larger one.

The Amazon Echo kicked off the smart speaker trend a few years ago, but it's no longer alone. There are dozens of smart speakers already on the market in 2018 and a ton more are coming. You need to decide which voice assistant you prefer (there are now four--Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, and Cortana) and what features are most important to you. Does it need to play Spotify? Does it need to connect to your other speakers and smarthome gadgets?