The internet is overflowing with tips on how to hack your health. From increasing cognitive function by drinking butter-spiked coffee to tracking sleep, stress, and activity levels with increasingly sophisticated fitness wearables, ours is a culture obsessed with optimizing performance. Combining this ethos with recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, it's practically inevitable that the next frontier in achieving superhuman status lies in the rapidly developing field of brain augmentation. Artificial intelligence has already proven its value in making software more intuitive and user-friendly. From voice-activated personal assistants like Alexa and Siri to smarter app authentication through facial recognition technology, we have reached the point where people are starting to trust that the machines are here to improve our lives.

Via Forbes: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the most transformative forces of our times. While there may be debate whether AI will transform our world in good or evil ways, something we can all agree on is that AI would be nothing without big data. Even though AI technologies have existed for several decades, it's the explosion of data--the raw material of AI--that has allowed it to advance at incredible speeds. It's the billions of searches done every day on Google that provide a sizable real-time data set for Google to learn from our typos and search preferences. Siri and Cortana would have only a rudimentary understanding of our requests without the billions of hours of spoken word now digitally available that helped them learn our language.

Digital assistants are a kind of software agents that reside on a device and help the user to perform tasks in more intuitive and efficient way. In most of the scenarios, the digital assistant is voice enabled and in some case, it can be text or gesture controlled. This article aims at covering the current landscape of voice-enabled digital assistants available today and their application in the field of automation. The most popular digital assistants that are available today are Apple's Siri, Google Assistant, Microsoft's Cortana and Amazon's Alexa. "By 2019, at least 25 percent of households in developed economies, digital assistants on smartphones and other devices will serve as the primary interface to connected home services" – Gartner "The virtual digital assistant market will reach $15.8 billion worldwide by 2021" – Tractica Let's have a look at these digital assistants from different companies.

Up until very recently, computers needed a complicated and extremely precise set of instructions in order to accomplish even the simplest of tasks. Who among us remembers programming via punch cards? Computer programming languages have evolved over the years, but the biggest step has been moving towards the elimination of complicated programming. In other words, teaching computers to learn for themselves, dubbed machine learning. Because machine learning is such a promising leap forward in technological ability, it has the very real potential to affect every person in every field of business in the near future.

Emerging technology trends signal a future with screenless interactions between businesses and consumers, with voice, augmented and virtual reality, wearable devices, and artificial intelligence slowly but surely removing the traditional graphic user interface (GUI) from the equation. "The next decade will be even more disruptive for how customers interact with brands," said Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen at last month's Summit EMEA. Here are the numbers to back it up. It also predicts that 85% of customer interactions will be managed without a human by that time. In fact, 72% termed it a "business advantage." The majority, 31%, said virtual personal assistants.

Overview: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Cognitive Computing are increasingly integrated in many areas including Internet search, entertainment, commerce applications, content optimization, and robotics. The long-term prospect for these technologies is that they will become embedded in many different other technologies and provide autonomous decision making on behalf of humans, both directly, and indirectly through many processes, products, and services. AI will anticipated to have an ever increasing role in ICT including both traditional telecommunications as well as many communications enabled applications and digital commerce. Fast growing AI technologies for consumer facing industries include chat bots and Virtual Personal Assistants (VPA) and smart advisors. These technologies leverage autonomous agents to enable an ambient user experience for applications, services, and enhanced commerce.

In the case of Google Home, you can add text or number "ingredients" when you create an applet, ingredients that can then be used in the subsequent actions. A text ingredient might be a tweet you want posting, or a number ingredient might be the temperature at which you want to set your thermostat. So to create a Google Home command to send a tweet, select Twitter as your action, then choose Post a tweet. The {{TextField}} ingredient (the words you spoke after the voice command trigger) should already be filled out as the Tweet text. You can adapt these examples to whatever purpose you like.

Ushering in the biggest changes to the Skype user interface in years, the messaging app that made "to Skype" a verb for video chat is today taking a page from Snapchat's playbook as part of a larger move to distinguish itself from competitors. Perhaps most noteworthy among the new tools and features is Highlights, a storytelling tool that allows people to share temporary snippets of their lives, much like Instagram or Snapchat Stories. Highlights can be seen by your Skype contacts and expire seven days after publication. Also like Snapchat, the new Skype camera is available with a simple swipe right and allows you to add expression to a photo by drawing on it or adding stickers or text. The new version of Skype will roll out to Android users worldwide over the next month and arrive on iOS in July, according to a Skype blog post published today.

A global study finds several new categories of human jobs emerging, requiring skills and training that will take many companies by surprise. The threat that automation will eliminate a broad swath of jobs across the world economy is now well established. As artificial intelligence (AI) systems become ever more sophisticated, another wave of job displacement will almost certainly occur. It can be a distressing picture. But here's what we've been overlooking: Many new jobs will also be created -- jobs that look nothing like those that exist today.

Despite the massively larger size of the Google Home speaker, the winner of "who can actually hear a user" is the Echo Dot, which was able to hear me from farther away and without me having to look at it. After seeing the poor feedback of Watson in Bridge Crew, I decided to take my four digital assistants for a spin. After 21 questions across four assistants, I learned that Alexa cannot give basic information about Amazon Prime videos, none of them can properly understand which movie you're looking for information for, and none of them can actually recommend stuff. Also, Google still needs to learn how to round up. I also learned I'm going to need a bigger set of questions. First, the purpose of this test is to test the assistants on the one skill that is a must-have for a disembodied speaker: Information retrieval and processing. This is not a comprehensive test, but is indicative of the types of questions that one might ask based on conversation, i.e. two or more people are having a conversation and they reach a question that needs an answer. To begin with, I summarise the results, mostly for fun. After that, you can browse what I found the most interesting 40 questions, and the varied (or non-varied) answers offered by each assistant for those. This piece is not intended to be illustrative on who is the "best" assistant.