In a country with low insurance penetration, AI could be the solution to improve the reach and profitability of insurance companies in India. The last three years have seen a massive upswing in the use of AI across different business verticals. And insurance, being one of the oldest industries, has multiple use-cases that can improve every aspect of business from underwriting to distribution to claim management. Insurers, in India and overseas, are aggressively investing in startups and small teams to unleash the power of AI in insurance. Let us see how AI is and will be disrupting the insurance industry.

SLUG: Everything Happens for a Reason HED: Black Mirror's Dating App Episode is a Perfect--and Heartbreaking--Portrayal of Modern Romance ALT HED: If You're Single, Black Mirror's Dating App Episode Will Break Your Heart DEK: In tackling the nightmarish world of dating apps, Black Mirror's "Hang the DJ" perfectly captures the desperation not only in trusting algorithms to find us a perfect love, but also in trying to date in this era at all. It's an understatement to say that romance took a beating this year. From the inauguration of a president who has confessed on tape to sexual predation, to the explosion of harassment and assault allegations that began this fall, women's confidence in men has reached unprecedented lows--which poses a not-insignificant issue among those who date them. Not that things were all that much better in 2016, or the year before that; Gamergate and the wave of campus assault reporting in recent years certainly didn't get many women in the mood, either. In fact, the past five or so years of dating men might best be described by involved parties as bleak.

Google's AI system assisted researchers in New Zealand in identifying calls of native birds -- Kakariki and Hihi -- using acoustic sensors after sifting through 15,000 hours of audio captured in and around Wellington. The Google Brain team, a core group focused on deep learning, used a trained Tensorflow model to label spectrograms and validate results to classify bird songs in real time. Tensorflow is an open source software for machine learning (ML) developed by the Google Brain team that was launched in 2015. Since then, Google has been running ML on different data sets -- from tracking seacows to diagnosing diabetic retinopathy and other health challenges. Linne Ha, director of Google Research and Machine Intelligence, shared updates on Google's ambitious Project Unison that's attempting to create text-tospeech (TTS) voices for lowresourced languages. There are 6,000 languages globally and 400 of them have over a million speakers.

It's been a banner year for the smart home, with new players and new products flooding the market. It's never been easier or less expensive to convert an ordinary home into a technological wonderland. The biggest developments have come with the widespread adoption of voice control, with Amazon's Echo family way out in front in terms of new products and third-party support. But the Noon Lighting System, which shipped late in the year, is easily the most exciting smart home product we've seen to date. We reviewed a lot of great products this year--and we encountered a few dogs as well--but this list represents our picks for the best of the best.

Inspired by Seth Louey I decided to share this list of virtual AI assistants for digital marketers. Hope you will find some useful assistants to carry out your marketing tasks. Spend less time coming up with content strategies and crafting social-media posts. Maisie's goal is to help you be more effective with your marketing so you can successfully grow your business. It's built for marketing, sales and others working on driving growth for companies.

A saying often heard from companies like Google and Microsoft is that they want to democratize AI. That's a nice word, democratize -- it's got "democracy" in it -- but it's unclear how these companies define democratization, and, like AI, it has an air of hype to it. Democratization in almost every context means delivering opportunities and benefits to everyone, but what exactly does democratization of AI mean to tech giants currently hoovering up much of the world's AI talent supply? Google chief scientist Fei-Fei Li has talked about it in relation to tensor processing units, and CEO Sundar Pichai in relation to AutoML, machine learning made to create machine learning. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella describes democratization as putting AI in the hands of "every developer, every organization, every public sector organization around the world."

By Sameet Gupte Customer experience (CX) has become the quintessential scale to choose between brands, and poor experience is a way of falling short in the buyer's journey to seamless interaction. However, over time businesses have begun to adopt and understand that a key component to building their CX strategies is around the customer. With rising expectations, the climb to the top is getting steeper in this rapidly evolving space. Each year there are predictions that CX will make the purchase decision easier and further improve the customer-business relationship. It has been rightly doing so with the increasing number of communication channels, CX metrics, and tools to support the point of contact.

Internet-connected lights, locks and laundry machines are close to becoming everyday household items, thanks in part to voice-activated speakers such as Amazon's Echo and Google Home. Market research groups are seeing increased sales of lights that turn off when you say'good night,' smart locks that let in your friends before you get home and similar smart-home gadgets. However, installing them could also be giving hackers a key to your home. As people get voice-activated speakers and online security cameras for convenience and peace of mind, are they also giving hackers a key to their homes? Many devices from reputable manufacturers have safeguards built in, but safeguards aren't the same as guarantees.

More than seven out of every ten marketers are trusting just one technology to make sense of all their challenges in 2018. And it just might succeed ... if it doesn't also take their jobs. Or if privacy regulations reduce the amount of data available to power it. Artificial intelligence is set to be the most transformative technology in marketing in 2018, according to more than 345 CMOs, CEOs, and marketing experts I surveyed recently. This past year, marketers learned that they had too much data. Too much to understand, and too much data to react to.

If you're in the market for a smart speaker, soundbar, or portable Bluetooth speaker, your decision process just got a little bit more difficult. On December 27, tech titan LG announced its full 2018 audio lineup, featuring a Dolby Atmos-enabled soundbar, a premium AI speaker with Google Assistant, and a line of life-proof, portable speakers built to withstand the elements. The LG ThinQ speaker comes with Google Assistant built in, so you can use your voice to inquire about the weather, answer nagging trivia, and control other smart home devices, among other things. LG is pushing the speaker as an accessory built to interface directly with its other SmartThinQ products, which range from refrigerators to air purifiers to Roomba-like vacuum cleaners. We don't yet know what sort of specs or pricing to expect; the ThinQ could be a competitor for the Amazon Echo around $100, or more of a Sonos-type solution in the $200 range, depending upon audio quality.