File photo: This product image provided by Amazon shows the Amazon Echo. Yes, voice technology is amazing. You can ask your phone a question. You can talk to your speaker system and book an Uber. With the right setup, your voice can lock the doors, dim the lights and change the thermostat.

Google's October 4th event might include more for Chrome OS fans than the rumored Pixelbook. David Cannon and 9to5Google have spotted multiple app references to Google Assistant coming to Chromebooks. Google's Home app notes that some Assistant apps will work with Chromebooks, for instance, while the Chat with your Assistant app recently started listing compatibility with the Chrome machines alongside the usual gaggle of Android releases. There was code hinting at Assistant support in the past, but these public nods suggest that support is imminent. There's no guarantee you'll see Google talking about Assistant on the 4th, but it wouldn't be at all shocking.

When is milk not milk? This is no trick question -- it's a distinction that artificial intelligence (AI) is going to have to learn to make in order for eMerchants to fully leverage the potential of machine learning. To one customer, "buy milk" means buy a gallon of whole milk; to another, a 1.4-liter jug of unsweetened vanilla almond milk. Digital shopping lists, apps and virtual assistants must understand this and not force the customer to spell it out each time before these platforms can successfully become the new normal. "We think about things in shorthand, not in terms of specifics," Dave Barrowman, Skava VP of Innovation, told PYMNTS' Karen Webster in a recent webinar.

If virtual assistants have been the breakthrough technology in this year's smartphone software, then the AI processor is surely the equivalent on the hardware side. Apple has taken to calling its latest SoC the A11 Bionic on account of its new AI "Neural Engine". Huawei's latest Kirin 970 boasts a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU) and is billing its upcoming Mate 10 as a "real AI phone". Samsung's next Exynos SoC is rumored to feature a dedicated AI chip too. Qualcomm has actually been ahead of the curve since opening up the Hexagon DSP (digital signal processor) inside its Snapdragon flagships to heterogeneous compute and neural networking SDKs a couple of generations ago.

Artificial Intelligence a concept everyone is familiar with. And even if your only experience of AI is from watching films, you'll have no trouble understanding bots. Bots are arriving in Facebook, Skype and a number of other services. In this context bots are computer assistants. They will appear in your favourite messaging app including Facebook Messenger and Skype.

There's a good chance that your first smart home device will be a smart speaker. For one, it works just fine as a way to play music from your smartphone or the cloud. But if you start talking to it, the speaker will respond to your commands. It can do things like look up the weather and sports scores, turn on your coffee maker, read you a book or even change the channel on your TV. Our favorite smart speaker is the Amazon Echo.

MOBA games are currently one the most popular online game genres. In their basic gameplay, two teams of multiple players compete against each other to destroy the enemy's base, controlling a powerful unit known as "hero". Each hero has different abilities, roles and strengths. Thus, choosing a good combination of heroes is fundamental for the success in the game. In this paper we propose a recommendation system for selecting heroes in a MOBA game. We develop a mechanism based on association rules that suggests the more suitable heroes for composing a team, using data collected from a large number of DOTA 2 matches. For evaluating the efficacy of the line-up, we trained a neural network capable of predicting the winner team with a 88.63% accuracy. The results of the recommendation system were very satisfactory with up to 74.9% success rate.

With each generation, the Apple Watch's purpose has seemed to shift. The first one demonstrated what Apple thought a wearable should be, and the second tried to be the perfect workout companion. When it came time to build the Series 3, though, Apple took everything it got right with the fitness-friendly Series 2, polished it up, and threw an LTE radio inside. And lo, the $399 Apple Watch Series 3 became the first of a new breed of Apple devices -- it straddles the line between smartwatch and phone, with a dash of iPod thrown in for good measure. For those who'd rather play it safe, Apple also built a $329 Series 3 with just GPS and no cellular connection.

Human resources has been slower to come to the table with machine learning and artificial intelligence than other fields -- marketing, communications, even health care. Artificial intelligence is transforming our lives at home and work. At home, you may be one of the 1.8 Million people who uses Amazon's Alexa to control the lights, unlock your car, and receive the latest stock quotes for the companies in your portfolio. Similarly, in the workplace, artificial intelligence is evolving into an intelligent assistant to help us work smarter. Artificial intelligence is not the future of the workplace, it is the present and happening today.

Shopping is a necessity for every human being. And when we shop, we tend to buy products recommended by people we trust. That's why, in the digital age, any online shop you visit uses some sort of recommendation engine. Recommendation engines are data filtering tools that make use of algorithms and data to recommend the most relevant items to a particular user. In simpler terms, they're nothing but an automated version of a "shop counter guy."