It depends who you ask. AI might be a hot topic but you'll still need to justify those projects. Back in the 1950s, the fathers of the field Minsky and McCarthy, described artificial intelligence as any task performed by a program or a machine that, if a human carried out the same activity, we would say the human had to apply intelligence to accomplish the task. That obviously is a fairly broad definition, which is why you will sometimes see arguments over whether something is truly AI or not. AI systems will typically demonstrate at least some of the following behaviors associated with human intelligence: planning, learning, reasoning, problem solving, knowledge representation, perception, motion, and manipulation and, to a lesser extent, social intelligence and creativity. AI is ubiquitous today, used to recommend what you should buy next online, to understand what you say to virtual assistants such as Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri, to recognise who and what is in a photo, to spot spam, or detect credit card fraud. At a very high level artificial intelligence can be split into two broad types: narrow AI and general AI.

Chances are, if you've ever used a digital assistant, you've run up against a problem that's proven difficult to solve: They may be good at certain helpful tasks, but they aren't great conversationalists. It's easy to understand why that might be something companies like Amazon.com Besides the obvious--people would presumably prefer an alternative to barking out carefully formatted commands--it could also make the assistants more useful. A few ideas: They could better understand what they're being asked to do, leading to fewer errors. They could help lead people toward information they need that they might not know exactly how to ask for. Or assistants could set people at ease at critical times, making people more likely to use them.

According the New York Times, Amazon paid $1.1 billion for Ring, which makes security cameras and video doorbells which stream live video and audio to smartphones. Ring was an early portfolio company of Amazon's Alexa Fund, which got off the ground in 2015. Amazon invested an unknown amount in the startup as part of a funding round in March 2016, according to Crunchbase. As I wrote in our recent feature, the Alexa Fund's main goal is to seek out startups that might extend Alexa into new parts of consumers's lives. It lets users ask Alexa to show them their front door video feed on an Echo Show's video screen.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is 2018's hot topic not just in HR, not just in global business, but for millions of people around the world. More consumers will experience AI when they buy as 30% of companies globally are projected to use AI in their sales process within the next two years. Revenue in the AI software market could reach nearly $60 billion globally by 2025. For TA leaders, AI is here. Within the next few years, AI will be deployed in 95% of talent acquisition technology solutions, according to research by Talent Tech Labs.

As we've entered the infancy of the AI age, the fallacy in this thinking has revealed itself in some spectacular ways. Google's first generation of visual AI identified images of people of African descent as gorillas. Voice command software in cars struggled to understand females, while working just fine for males, putting women's safety in jeopardy. During the 2016 presidential election, Facebook's algorithms spread fear-stoking lies to its most vulnerable users, allowing a foreign power to meaningfully swing the election of the most powerful office in the world. Even efforts to make AI palatable for consumers have revealed bias.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has entered our daily lives like never before and we are yet to unravel the many other ways in which it could flourish. All tech giants such as Microsoft, Uber, Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Oracle, Intel, IBM or Twitter are competing in the race to lead the market and acquire the most innovative and promising AI businesses. AI is already being used in everyday life with applications including speech recognition, smart cars, fraud detection, security surveillance, music recommendations and AI-powered personal virtual assistant such as Cortana (Microsoft), Siri (Apple) or Alexa (Amazon). Discussions on AI are generally dappled with the terms, 'Machine Learning' and'Deep Learning'. Moreover, they are often interchangeably used.

Amazon Echo's voice assistant Alexa is ever-present in the AI world. The Echo is the best-selling device on the market, and it boasts a variety of capabilities beyond what we could have imagined from consumer technology just a few years ago. The question is no longer whether Alexa is useful for consumers, but rather how to get the most out of her 25,000-plus skills and more than 4,000 connected devices. Consumers often purchase digital assistants with smart homes in mind, but with so much functionality available, it can be hard to pin down exactly how Alexa can contribute. Here are the top smart home devices to pair with the assistant.

Life can be a little more relaxed and a little less chaotic when you employ a routine. The same goes for the smart speaker in your home. While the aptly named "Routines" feature on the Amazon Echo may get a lot of attention, the Google Home is every bit as capable of making your life easier. The Google Assistant utilizes a feature it calls "Shortcuts," which allows you to customize a phrase to say to perform a string of actions you can program in the Google Home app. It's all pretty effortless as long as you spend time to setting things up.

There is a lot you can do with Alexa. Here's how you can add skills. A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. There is a lot you can do with Alexa. Here's how you can add skills.

Every single type of business is being transformed by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). The increasing availability of intelligent tools has resulted in an AI revolution. Companies of all sizes are now implementing these features into their operations. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the financial technology (fintech) space. Stock trading is being automated, virtual assistants are easier than ever for companies to set up, and most banking tasks can be done through digital portals.