Alibaba is entering the fray of digital speaker assistants in a bid to compete with Amazon The Chinese company unveiled the Tmall Genie X1,' which will go for about $73. Jack Ma, Chairman of Alibaba Group, speaks with reporters following his meeting with President-elect Donald Trump at Trump Tower, January 9, 2017 in New York City. Alibaba on Wednesday unveiled a new AI-powered smart speaker due to hit the market in August. There's a big new player in the competition to infiltrate homes with smart speakers: Chinese online sales giant Alibaba. The e-commerce company unveiled its Tmall Genie speaker Wednesday in Beijing.

Machine learning has had fruitful applications in finance well before the advent of mobile banking apps, proficient chat bots, or search engines. Given high volume, accurate historical records, and quantitative nature of the finance world, few industries are better suited for artificial intelligence. There are more uses cases of machine learning in finance than ever before, a trend perpetuated by more accessible computing power and more accessible machine learning tools (such as Google's Tensorflow). Today, machine learning has come to play an integral role in many phases of the financial ecosystem, from approving loans, to managing assets, to assessing risks. Yet, few technically-savvy professionals have an accurate view of just how many ways machine learning finds its way into their daily financial lives.

As Amazon gears up for next week's annual Prime Day sale, the online shopping behemoth has also opted to lower the barrier of entry for Prime subscriptions. With Prime members previously having to sign up for the service online, Amazon Echo owners can now opt in for a Prime Membership simply by saying "Alexa, sign me up for Prime". Doing so will not only save users time but also money, netting Echo owners a year's membership for $79 - $20 less than the usual price. For those who already have Prime, Amazon is also offering a couple of incentives to invest in an Echo. People who use Alexa will get access to Prime Day deals two hours earlier than regular users and receive a range of Echo-exclusive offers.

Baidu, China's top search engine, which has invested in an artificial intelligence lab with the Chinese government, recently launched a device based on its own siri-like "Duer OS" system. The Tmall Genie is currently programmed to use Mandarin as its language and will only be available in China. It is activated when a recognised user says "Tmall Genie" in Chinese. Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to.

Just two months after Amazon announced it was "doubling down" on its Echo ecosystem, the company has confirmed that its Alexa voice platform has passed 15,000 skills. Impressive, especially in comparison to Google Assistant's 378 voice apps and Cortana's meager 65 -- but what's more impressive is the rate at which Alexa is gaining these skills. Alexa reached 15,000 skills in June -- during this month alone new skill introductions increased by 23 percent. The milestone also represents a 50-percent increase in skills since February, when Amazon officially announced it had hit 10,000 -- and even that figure was triple what it was the previous September. Alexa is gaining skills rapidly, which is no doubt part of Amazon's plan to maintain its dominance in the voice-powered device landscape -- it's on track to control 70 percent of the market this year.

Amazon's Alexa voice platform has now passed 15,000 skills -- the voice-powered apps that run on devices like the Echo speaker, Echo Dot, newer Echo Show and others. In the meantime, Amazon's Alexa is surging ahead, building out an entire voice app ecosystem so quickly that it hasn't even been able to implement the usual safeguards -- like a team that closely inspects apps for terms of service violations, for example, or even tools that allow developers to make money from their creations. In the long run, Amazon's focus on growth over app ecosystem infrastructure could catch up with it. In addition, Google Home has just 378 voice apps available as of June 30, Voicebot notes.

Since the days of punch cards, the human-computer interaction landscape has undergone great developments. Scientists are constantly trying to find new ways to bridge the gap between man and machine. The effort has led to the invention of keyboards, mice and touch screens, which made computational power more accessible. Computers themselves have undergone great changes. We gradually moved from mainframe computers to PCs, laptops, smartphones and beyond.

Amazon's Alexa voice platform has now passed 15,000 skills – the voice-powered apps that run on devices like the Echo speaker, Echo Dot, newer Echo Show and others. The figure is up from the 10,000 skills Amazon officially announced back in February, which had then represented a 3x increase from September. The new 15,000 figure was first reported via third-party analysis from Voicebot, and Amazon has now confirmed to TechCrunch that the number is accurate. According to Voicebot, which only analyzed skills in the U.S., the milestone was reached for the first time on June 30, 2017. During the month of June, new skill introductions increased by 23 percent, up from the under 10 percent growth that was seen in each of the prior three months.

Vian Chinner is the founder of SA startup Xineoh, which specializes in the application of mathematical modeling and machine learning to ad technology. The "machine" in question here isn't quite the kind we might imagine though, but rather a clever algorithm used to monitor consumer's behavioral patterns, mining important data so as to anticipate purchasing decisions and offer relevant recommendations likely to have shoppers reaching deeper into their wallets. But while for years' machine learning has been the territory of a limited few, it's now fast becoming an imperative for businesses looking to understand and maximize the impact of their carefully monitored marketing spend. Where once we might have been amazed by Amazon.com's As AI starts to filter into our day-to-day lives, influencing everything from the music we listen to, to the coffees we order, it's becoming difficult for more traditional businesses to compete with their artificially assisted counterparts, who are better able to capitalize on shrinking attention spans and widespread time poverty.

The $230 Amazon Echo Show went on sale for the first time last week, and with it came visual cards, video, and other elements developers can use to create Alexa skills. Beyond news and entertainment video, the largest category of the fewer than 10 visual skills available at launch was food. Calorie counter Track by Nutritionix has added visuals telling you how many calories are in a food; OpenTable books restaurants; and you can now place Starbucks orders with the new visual interface. The fact that food is popular early on among Alexa skills that utilize the new visual interface built for Echo Show isn't a surprise -- food sucks without visuals. With voice alone, the Food Network skill was not sexy.