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Streaming services have changed the way in which we experience content. While recommendation systems previously focused on presenting you with content you might want to purchase for later consumption, modern streaming platforms have to focus instead on recommending content you can, and will want to, enjoy in the moment. Since any piece of content is immediately accessible, the streaming model enables new methods of discovery in the form of personalized radios or recommendation playlists, in which the focus is now more on generating sequences of similar songs that go well together. With now over 700 million songs streamed every month, Anghami is the leading music streaming platform in the MENA region. What this also means, is that the amount of data generated by all those streams proves to be an invaluable training set that we can use to teach machine learning models to better understand user tastes, and improve our music recommendations.

We hear a lot about artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and digital assistants these days. But what does it all mean? Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and others are aggressively imbuing their products and services with "intelligence." We're told that computer systems will become smarter, will anticipate our needs, proactively serve us, and understand us in various contexts and via multiple methods including voice, text, inking and motion. The digital "face" of this promising tech comes in the form of assistants like Cortana, Assistant, Siri, Alexa, and Bixby.

Content marketing has been around since 1895, when the John Deere company started a magazine for farmers. Fast forward to today, when brands have infinite media options for engaging customers--web sites, blogs, videos, social media, podcasts, and webinars among them. Each medium offers a different way to tell a story, educate prospects, and turn customers into advocates. And as 2018 approaches, newer forms of content marketing are gaining traction, including virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and virtual assistants like Amazon's Alexa. Here are 7 trends content marketers are predicting for 2018.

Conversational AI, or making human and computer interactions more natural, has been a goal since technology became ubiquitous in our society. Our mission is to bring conversational AI tools and capabilities to every developer and every organization on the planet, and help businesses augment human ingenuity in unique and differentiated ways. Today, I'm excited to announce Microsoft Azure Bot Service and Microsoft Cognitive Services Language Understanding (LUIS) are both generally available. Azure Bot Service enables developers to create conversational interfaces on multiple channels while Language Understanding (LUIS) helps developers create customized natural interactions on any platform for any type of application, including bots. Making these two services generally available on Azure simultaneously extends the capabilities of developers to build custom models that can naturally interpret the intentions of people conversing with bots.

To meet growing consumer expectations in a digitally-driven world, companies have to deal with huge amounts of real-time data and create personalized consumer experiences to stay relevant. As such, they are increasingly employing newer technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), cognitive computing and robotics, among others. From Apple's assistant Siri to self-driving cars, evolution of AI has been transformational, to the extent that it seems to replicate human characteristics, intellect and behaviour. While scientists and experts including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have warned against the risks and hazards associated with fully developed and self-aware AI machines, the market is expected to grow rapidly. According to a recent International Data Corp. (IDC) report, AI is expected to drive worldwide revenues from nearly $8 billion in 2016 to more than $47 billion in 2020, across a broad range of industries.

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Samsung isn't going to let Apple hog the smart speaker limelight early next year. A new report reveals the South Korea giant is preparing to introduce its Bixby-powered speaker in the first half of 2018, so it is now expected to go head-to-head with the Cupertino giant's HomePod. On Thursday, Bloomberg learned from people familiar with Samsung's plans that the South Korea tech company is planning to launch its Bixby-powered smart speaker in the first half of the following year. While this may seem like Samsung's entry to the voice-controlled devices market is coming in late, its release would just be enough for it to rival Apple's HomePod, which is already scheduled for launch in the first quarter. Since the Bixby-powered speaker will compete with not only the HomePod but also established smart speakers like Amazon's Echo series and Google's Google Home, Samsung is setting its new product apart from its rivals by promising a device that's strongly focused on audio quality and efficient management of connected home appliances. The Bixby speaker is also said to have the advantage of synchronizing seamlessly with Samsung TVs, Galaxy phones and other Samsung products.

Microsoft is continuing to infuse more AI smarts into its Bing web search, Cortana digital assistant and Office 365 services. At a press and analyst event in San Francisco on December 13, company officials showed off some of the incremental AI-powered updates it is introducing to these services. Microsoft's overriding message was that in addition to providing big-bang AI advances, like its just-unveiled quantum-computing development kit, it also is delivering more "everyday AI" ones, too, by integrating AI-driven tech into its core products and services. At a time when news and other information is under increased scrutiny for bias and intentional fakery, Microsoft is adding multiple viewpoints to Bing search results. Asking Bing "is cholesterol bad?" will result in two different answers to that question.

Researchers have identified an incredibly smart method used by fruit flies to categorise odours – and it's so clever it could be applied to powering recommendation algorithms for the likes of Netflix or Spotify. In the same way that YouTube might want to flag up videos similar to the one you've just watched, fruit flies – like many other animals – need to know which smells are similar, for finding food and avoiding poisonous substances. The team from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California has found that fruit flies have an especially clever way of categorising odours which lets them recognise differences with a very fine level of accuracy. "In the natural world, you're not going to encounter exactly the same odour every time; there's going to be some noise and fluctuation," says one of the researchers, Saket Navlakha from Salk. "But if you smell something that you've previously associated with a behaviour, you need to be able to identify that similarity and recall that behaviour."