Amazon.com Inc wants to be your new executive assistant at work. The company on Thursday said that Alexa, its increasingly popular digital aide that shoppers command by voice, is now programmed to handle a range of tedious office tasks. Businesses can buy Alexa devices that help employees dial into conference calls, manage their calendars, find open meeting rooms and - not surprisingly - order work supplies from Amazon. Amazon is looking to make money in the long term from people shopping with Alexa and using it - rather than Apple Inc's Siri or Alphabet Inc's Google Assistant - as their go-to voice technology Amazon wants Alexa to be everywhere, and it needs more voice data to feed and'train' it so that talking to the assistant feels like talking to a friend. The company is looking to make money in the long term from people shopping with Alexa and using it - rather than Apple Inc's Siri or Alphabet Inc's Google Assistant - as their go-to voice technology.

Artificial intelligence has received its fair share of hype recently. However, it's hype that's well-founded: IDC predicts worldwide spend on AI and cognitive computing will culminate to a whopping $46 billion (with a "b") by 2020, and all the tech giants are jumping on board faster than you can say "ROI." But what is AI, exactly? According to Hilary Mason, AI today is being misused as a sort of catch-all term to basically describe "any system that uses data to do anything." A truly artificially intelligent system is one that learns on its own, one that's capable of crunching copious amounts of data in order to create associations and intelligently mimic actual human behavior.

Like rival assistants Alexa and Siri, Google Assistant keeps adding new features, including identifying songs and controlling Chromecast. But now it can help users find local businesses, too. Instead of just providing a top list, however, Google Assistant will ask several questions to get the right nearby shop that fits the user's needs. To be clear, this isn't just to advise users of the best nearby restaurants, which Amazon's Alexa has been doing for years. The new Google Assistant questionnaire helps find specialists, like plumbers and electricians.

April 27, 2017, people walk past an Amazon Go store, currently open only to Amazon employees, in Seattle. Amazon Go shops are convenience stores that don't use cashiers or checkout lines but use a tracking system that of sensors, algorithms, and cameras to determine what a customer has bought. Ultimately, Amazon wants to sell Amazon and Whole Foods shoppers alike, even more, goods and services, including stuff they might not even realize they need. In the world of customer service, we're experiencing the rise of chatbots, virtual digital assistants, and artificial intelligence (AI) agents, answering basic queries which allow humans to tackle more complex problems and improve the speed and efficiency of decisions. Emerging technology such as machine-learning applications, chatbots, and mobile messaging will play a much more significant role in customer interactions in the next five years.

It has been an absolute banger of a news week for Destiny 2 . The popular first-person shooter/role-playing game hybrid was embroiled in controversy about deceitful in-game systems before developer Bungie posted an apologetic blog post detailing the near future of the game. All of the improvements Bungie outlined for Destiny 2 seem necessary and valuable, but none of them are as important as being able to finally talk to your favorite video game. Destiny fans may recall that the Ghost is the quippy little robot who floats around your character and does most of the talking for your silent protagonist. With the Destiny 2 Ghost skill on your Alexa-enabled device, you can use voice commands to bypass the many, many hours you would otherwise spend staring at menus in the game.

The Google Home Mini might be 40 percent off right now, but if you'd rather have a Google smart speaker with a little more oomph you might not have to wait much longer. Mountain View's self-calibrating Home Max will be released on December 11th according to a Best Buy listing spotted by 9to5Google. This could be a gaff, but Google did say the $400 device would be out before year's end. And, well, today being November 30th means the company doesn't have much time left to fulfill that promise. The 11th feels like an odd placeholder date, though.

Google Assistant on your Google Home is going to get a lot more useful this week. The AI butler has recently been updated to support commands that have up to two conditions. Meaning, now you can tell your smart speaker to do things like the bump the temperature in your kids' room and start playing Slayer's "South of Heaven" in there as a lullaby. Or, if you'd rather set the mood in your living room rather than give your offspring nightmares, you could ask Assistant to dim the smart lights and start streaming something from Google Play on your TV. It's wholly separate from the Routines Google promised back at the Pixel 2 event earlier this fall, too.

Alexa could soon be coming to work with you. At Amazon's annual re:Invent conference, the company revealed its plans to make the voice-activated virtual assistant office-friendly with an Alexa for Business platform, which will come with specific skills for the workplace. Initial features are likely to include apps for teleconferences and data organization, as well as enhanced security layers that could authenticate multiple people in one space. Sources say the company is probably going to announce a new marketplace for the Alexa for Business platform, too. Alexa hit the consumer market three years ago, and now boasts more than 20,000 skills developed by third parties.

A Scottish university reached the final three of a prestigious international competition dedicated to advancing conversational artificial intelligence (AI). A team of Phd students from Heriot-Watt saw more than 100 entries from 22 countries including the likes of Harvard and Princeton to become the only UK institution to be placed in the Alexa Prize. A nine-strong team, named What's Up Bot, won plaudists from judges for their artificial intelligence software named Alana, which can understand and respond to human conversation. The annual competition is organised by online retail giant Amazon and is named after the Alexa voice command system that powers Amazon Echo. The team of PhD students from Heriot-Watt's school of mathematical and computer sciences finished behind fellow finalists, the Czech Technical University and eventual winners, the University of Washington, at a ceremony held in Las Vegas on Tuesday, 28 November.

Inc. AMZN -2.71% wants workers to ask its virtual assistant Alexa to book conference rooms and launch meetings, as the company races against rivals to make the office the next major inroad for voice-recognition devices. Amazon has built a wide lead in the field with its popular at-home Echo speaker, which launched in late 2014. The company is now counting on its new service, dubbed Alexa for Business and available immediately, to spark a surge in voice computing in the workplace. The online retail giant plans to announce the initiative here Thursday at its annual conference for its Amazon Web Services cloud-computing unit. Even before Amazon made a push into business, RBC Capital Markets predicted that by 2020, Alexa device installations could reach 128 million.