This week's news reminds me how much fun it is to be surprised by technology. Yesterday, the Paris-based AI startup raised $13 million, on top of an earlier $8 million investment, for technology that let developers put a voice assistant on nearly any device. Add this to recent advances from Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple Siri, and it's obvious that voice is becoming the new interface much sooner than many people, including yours truly, ever anticipated. These are exponential leaps forward in the steady progress from command-based interfaces to conversational ones. It's as if the machines themselves are disappearing -- the "thing" we're conversing with is some crazy fantastic blend of artificial intelligence, super computer, bandwidth, and what have you, that we never see.

Owners of a Samsung Galaxy 8 or Galaxy S8 can now try the smartphones' much-awaited virtual assistant, Bixby -- if you sign up. Bixby has not been officially launched in the United States, but Samsung announced Galaxy 8 owners can now sign up on its site to try a preview version of the feature. "New voice features are coming to Bixby and we're inviting you to get access first," the webpage says. Samsung touted Bixby as a part of the company's Galaxy S8 and S8 smartphones, but it didn't release the virtual assistant in time for the devices' April launch. Bixby's full version was reportedly set to launch to Galaxy users in the U.S. later this month.

A new rumor, which several tech pundits already have a hard time believing, suggests that Apple may replace its Siri AI assistant feature with the Google Assistant feature. Tech blog Androidguys reported the claim Thursday, suggesting that Google Assistant could replace Siri at some point, but that for the upcoming iPhone may have both Siri and Google Assistant as options users can choose. Still, several iPhone enthusiasts have already scoffed at the idea. The rumor comes at an interesting time, nearly one month to the day since Google announced Google Assistant support for the iPhone during its I/O Keynote presentation. With this support, iPhone users will be able to download Google Assistant from the Apple App Store, but Google made no indications that its Assistant feature would run on iPhones natively.

Two technology trends that drive us are hard to miss. Second is recent and disruptive advancements in Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence. Messaging Dominance in Mobile There are more than 2.5 billion smart mobile devices in the world, and people are spending more than 80% of their screen time on mobile devices. Messaging is the dominant activity on mobile and in fact, it's the fastest growing activity on mobile devices. The number of users on some of the messaging platforms are staggering, for example, there are more than 1 billion users each on Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.

So Artificial Intelligence (AI) is all the rage these days. AI and machine learning algorithms are increasingly being brought to bear on collaborative business workflows and processes for automation and to enable intelligent conversational experiences. There is a paradigm shift in digital workplace technologies and strategies to make enterprises more conversational and smarter. Such conversational environments require data, content, people, applications and overall technology to be in an intimate contextual flow and persistent. The incorporation of AI brings us to a new era of intelligent conversational environments and workspaces.

Now select users will get to test it. One of the most anticipated new features of the Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8 prior to the phone's launch in March was an artificial intelligence assistant named Bixby that you were supposed to be able to control by voice. Unfortunately while some of Bixby's capabilities made into onto the phones, the voice-based commands that would make Bixby respond more like the Google Assistant, Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana and Amazon's Alexa was delayed, at least in the U.S. (Bixby is fully operational in South Korea, where Samsung is based). On Friday, Samsung Electronics America announced it will give "select" Galaxy S8 and S8 users early access to Bixby's vocal capabilities as part of what it still considered an early preview test. Samsung hasn't disclosed how many Bixby testers will gain access to this sneak preview, which will let you hold down a Bixby button and start speaking to get the phone to send texts, change settings and make calls.

Samsung's virtual assistant Bixby generated untold levels of hype before the Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus launched, but the version we actually got to use still feels half-baked. While the company still hasn't locked down when Bixby's voice search and control features will go live, it just confirmed that brave users in the US can enroll in an "early preview test" to get a taste of what's coming down the pipeline. There's no word on how many people will be able to sign up, but Samsung says it's only looking for a "limited" number of beta testers. If you happen to make the cut, Samsung will collect information about Bixby's performance on your device, and may ask you for direct feedback. Samsung originally said that Bixby's voice features would launch sometime in Spring 2017, which is basically already over -- considering the amount of time it'll take to collect Bixby feedback and performance data from all these tester devices, it seems likely that the wait for a more complete Samsung assistant will be even longer than we expected.

Imagine a self-driving forklift reacting to an obstacle only after a minute. Or, the next best action for a customer being given to a call center agent only after the opportunity to provide this customer with a special offer is gone. Or, speech recognition and –generation systems that are used in customer engagement and customer service and that do not understand the customer. Things can be as mundane as having the ability of early identification that a shipment will be late plus suggesting, or directly initiating options to resolve the problem. In today's fast paced world companies need to more and more rely upon devices that include sensors and effectors. These devices – or things – are interconnected.

Heuritech was selected by a panel of judges from a shortlist of 32 startups, all exhibiting at Viva Tech. The judges included: Angela Ahrendts, senior vice-president of retail, Apple; Stewart Butterfield, founder of Slack; Sébastien Bazin, chairman and chief executive, Accor; and Daniel Zhang, chief executive, Alibaba. The winning company will meet with LVMH Group teams in charge of private equity investments and discuss a potential relationship with the group. "Last year when I was asked to do this, I said yes. I've always been passionate about technology and for me to be in touch with startups, tech startups, has always been a passion," Bernard Arnault, chairman and chief executive of LVMH, said at the event.

We recently attended Firebrand Talent's Put It To The Panel session in Melbourne that explored how AI is disrupting and enhancing marketing. While most of the experts on the panel concluded that marketers should embrace AI at every opportunity, there were some other interesting points made worth sharing. AI is not all about the grand self-driving cars and robots that replace humans. James Greaney, Data Planning Director at CHE Proximity, said we are already seeing a shift towards'little AI' – the bits and pieces of intelligence that could be done or are already integrated into our lives, such as predictive text in messaging. Another example is Amazon's one-click shopping experience, which gives customers the ability to make purchases on the internet with just one click of the mouse.