Amazon's Echo Show is getting another new trick, err, skill. Now the gizmo will link with the cameras on your home network and display their respective feeds when you say something like, "Alexa, show the front door." A press release notes that this will work with cameras from Amcrest, Arlo, August, EZViz, IC Realtime, Nest and Vivint. And if you don't have a Show, saying the command phrase will give you an audio feed on your Dot or Echo. Better yet, Amazon has released the camera control API into the wild so developers can start cracking on even more implementations for it.

A leading economist has inadvertently caused a storm by saying he preferred the voice on the iPhone Siri virtual assistant to be male because he felt that made it more trustworthy. Nobel prize laureate Sir Christopher Pissarides's comments at a conference in Norway attracted fierce criticism. He told the BBC he apologised for upsetting people and his comment was meant to be "light-hearted". "It's a mistake and I'm sorry, but the audience was laughing." Sir Christopher was part of an all-male panel taking part in a Q&A audience discussion at the Starmus Festival in Trondheim about the future of humanity.

If you're a fan of Alexa, then this announcement might be good news for you. Amazon announced that they are adding a Display Cards feature to the voice assistant that will allow Alexa to respond visually to certain queries. Alexa will be able to produce visual responses to questions about the weather, to do and shopping lists, your calendar and show you Now Playing information for music. It's currently only available to developers, who can use the AVS Developer Console to enable Display Cards, but it gives us a better idea of what apps will look like across screens in Alexa's new GUI. This announcement goes hand in hand with the announcement of the Amazon Echo Show, an Echo device with a 7-inch touchscreen that's been criticized for its boxy appearance.

This article was written by Harry Chiang, a Financial Analyst at I Know First. "The big paradox here is that people think technology will lead to banking becoming more and more automated and less and less personalized, but what we've seen coming through here is the view that technology will actually help banking become a lot more personalized." Over the past few years, news articles have casually floated the term'Artificial Intelligence' around at an increasing rate. It's one of those buzzwords that somehow finds its way in to every tech-related conversation. Even the least tech-savvy person has a vague notion of what it is. The problem is, some of the more tech-savvy person don't have a much clearer notion of what it is either. The definition of AI ranges and has vague boundaries.

What is Apple Business Chat? How Apple Is Secretly Making Siri Indispensable. "Apple Business Chat with Apple Pay Cash is the most important iOS announcement since the release of Siri. It is a stunning new paradigm."--Brian Your smartphone has created a new world of communication systems that almost go unnoticed.

A new Siri icon spotted in iOS 11 appears to confirm rumours about the upcoming iPhone 8's design. Apple is widely expected to drastically change the look of the iPhone this year, with the company seemingly set to take a similar approach to Samsung. The Galaxy S8 ditched the physical home button for a stunning "all-screen" design, which makes all other handsets on the market look outdated, and the next iPhone will almost certainly follow suit. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

But while his peer scientists Yann LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton have signed on to Facebook and Google, respectively, Bengio, 53, has chosen to continue working from his small third-floor office on the hilltop campus of the University of Montreal. Shum, who is in charge of all of AI and research at Microsoft, has just finished a dress rehearsal for next week's Build developers conference, and he wants to show me demos. Shum has spent the past several years helping his boss, CEO Satya Nadella, make good on his promise to remake Microsoft around artificial intelligence. Bill Gates showed off a mapping technology in 1998, for example, but it never came to market; Google launched Maps in 2005.

Michael Schrage is a research fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE) and the MIT Sloan School of Management, and author of The Innovator's Hypothesis: How Cheap Experiments Are Worth More Than Good Ideas. Alexa and Cortana are acoustically at your service. Digital assistants and bots undeniably enhance our work lives in myriad ways. They're terrific; your wish is their command. And they literally acquire more "skills" every day.

Yoshua Bengio has never been one to take sides. As one of the three intellects who shaped the deep learning that now dominates artificial intelligence, he has been catapulted to stardom. It's a field so new the people who can advance it fit into one room together, and everyone--from tech startups to multinational conglomerates and the department of defense--wants a share of their minds. But while his peer scientists Yann LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton have signed on to Facebook and Google, respectively, Bengio, 53, has chosen to continue working from his small third-floor office on the hilltop campus of the University of Montreal. "I want to remain a neutral agent," he says as he sips rust-colored licorice water, which he pours from a carafe that acts as a weight for the mess of papers cluttering his desk. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter. Like the nuclear scientists of the last century, Bengio understands that the tools he's invented are powerful beyond measure and must be cultivated with great forethought and widespread consideration. "We don't want one or two companies, which I will not name, to be the only big players in town for AI," he says, raising his eyebrows to indicate that we both know which companies he means. One eyebrow is in Menlo Park; the other is in Mountain View. That's why Bengio has recently chosen to forego his neutrality, signing on with Microsoft.

The popularity and know-it-all nature of artificial intelligence platforms such as Siri and Alexa have given rise to more sophisticated digital communications, and more retailers are noticing the potential of these capabilities. Within three years, up to 45% of retailers plan to utilize artificial intelligence (AI) -- through chatbots or digital assistants -- to enhance their customer experiences, according to a survey from Boston Retail Partners (BRP).