AI helped triple NVIDIA's data center revenue in the most recent quarter, with the company's CFO, Colette Kress, saying: "AI has quickly emerged as the single most powerful force in technology. If you have an Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) Echo speaker in your home, have ever used Alphabet's (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google Assistant, or talked to Apple's Siri, then you've interacted with artificial intelligence on some level already. Amazon's most lucrative business, its Amazon Web Services (AWS), now offers machine-learning services (part of the broader AI market) to improve natural-language processing, image analysis, and speech generation across apps and services that use AWS. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Alphabet (A shares), Alphabet (C shares), Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Nvidia.

Google is finally bringing its Home speaker to Canada. It took a while, but at least the tech titan didn't wait two years like it did with Android Pay, which just recently made its way to the country. If you're in Canada, you can now pre-order the smart speaker from the big G's online store or Best Buy for $179 CAD. Best Buy will throw in a free Chromecast, too, and is slashing $50 off the price of a Philips Hue starter kit if you order it at the same time. The Home comes loaded with Google's voice-activated Assistant, which will arrive in the region knowing both English and French.

Apple is expected to release iOS 11 this fall alongside the iPhone 8; however, the company could give the world a preview of features that could be included in the update during the Worldwide Developers Conference next week. The update for iPhones and iPads could come with features for Siri and Apple Music. Here's a roundup of expected iOS 11 features and other rumors: For iOS 11, Apple is rumored to be revamping Siri with contextual learning abilities and deep integration with iMessage and iCloud, Israeli site the Verifier reported in March. The virtual assistant is expected to get an improved level of artificial intelligence. Siri reportedly will be able to follow through with voice commands, have the ability to learn a user's habits and offer action options based on context of content, somewhat resembling Samsung's voice assistant Bixby.

Apple is expected to announce plans next week to make its Siri voice assistant work with a larger variety of apps, as the technology company looks to counter the runaway success of Amazon's competing Alexa service. But the Cupertino company is likely to stick to its tested method of focusing on a small amount of features and trying to perfect them, rather than casting as wide a net as possible, according to engineers and artificial intelligence industry insiders. Currently, Apple's Siri works with only six types of app: ride-hailing and sharing; messaging and calling; photo search; payments; fitness; and auto infotainment systems. Apple Inc is expected to announce plans next week to make its Siri voice assistant work with a larger variety of apps, as the technology company looks to counter the runaway success of Amazon.com The product is believed to be aimed at bringing Apple AI into the home, and will have a higher price tag that the Amazon range, which begins at $49 (£49) for the Echo Dot.

The U.S. trade deficit rose in April to the highest level since January. The politically sensitive trade gap with China registered a sharp increase. The Commerce Department said on Friday that the U.S. trade gap in goods and services climbed 5.2 percent to $47.6 billion in April from March. Exports dropped 0.3 percent to $191 billion, pulled down by a drop in automotive exports. Imports rose 0.8 percent to $238.6 billion as Americans bought more foreign-made cellphones and other goods.

Chatbots, robots, virtual assistants, and other devices powered by business algorithms are rapidly joining the ranks of workers in every industry and profession. But instead of fearing artificial intelligence (AI) and the resulting job losses, it's up to human resource (HR) professionals to cultivate these innovations for the opportunities they bring to the company. I tuned in to a recent episode of Changing the Game with HR entitled Reimagining HR: Will Machines Replace the Human Side of Business? to hear a group of smart thinkers share their insights on AI with SAP Radio host and moderator Bonnie D. Graham. "All of us suffer from information overload, so why can't we use technology smartly to do some of the analysis, the filtering of data for us?" he said. "We have really tough decisions to make in our lives every day, so why can't we use those cognitive applications to narrow down options and make recommendations for us? That way, AI will be a good thing for humanity and not the worst thing to ever happen to humanity."

Artificial Intelligence ('AI') is a runaway success and we think it is going to be one of the biggest, if not the biggest driver of future economic growth. There are major AI breakthroughs on a fundamental level leading to a host of groundbreaking applications in autonomous driving, medical diagnostics, automatic translation, speech recognition and a host more. We're only at the beginning of these developments, which is going in several overlapping stages: We have described the development of specialist AI chips in an earlier article, where we already touched on the new phase emerging - the move of AI from the cloud to the device (usually the mobile phone). This certainly isn't a universal movement but involves inference (the application of the algorithms to answer queries), rather than the more computing-heavy training (where the algorithms are improved through iteration rounds with the help of massive amounts of data). Since GPUs weren't designed with AI in mind, so in principle, it isn't much of a stretch to assume that specialist AI chips will take performance higher, even if Nvidia is now designing new architectures like the Volta with AI in mind at least in part, from Medium: Although Pascal has performed well in deep learning, Volta is far superior because it unifies CUDA Cores and Tensor Cores.

Apple will install a chip for carrying out artificial intelligence processing on future iPhones, according to a new report. The chip, called the Apple Neural Engine, will bring new capabilities to mobile devices that will revolutionise how we use our phones, inside sources suggest. The AI-enabled processor will handle tasks normally only managed by humans such as facial and speech recognition and could even alert us if it thinks we are getting ill. The new chip, called the Apple Neural Engine, would bring new capabilities to mobile devices that will revolutionise how we use our phones, inside sources suggest. The chip will handle tasks are normally only managed by humans such as facial and speech recognition.

Artificial intelligence is no longer reserved for sci-fi flicks, but the technology is still alien to many enterprise IT teams. Nevertheless, one adoption trend is clear: the public cloud will be the go-to destination for most enterprise AI workloads. "I'm not saying that AI won't happen in the enterprise in people's data centers, but this is a workload that will predominantly happen in the cloud," said Rob Koplowitz, principal analyst at Forrester Research. Some organizations will choose to keep AI applications -- particularly those that contain sensitive customer data -- in-house, as they do for other workloads with strict security or compliance requirements. But, in general, public cloud AI services will be the predominant model, agreed Adrian Bowles, lead analyst at Aragon Research.

As a rule, Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference is predictable: New versions of iOS, macOS and watchOS are the stars of the show, and anything else is gravy. WWDC 2017, however, is shaping up to be different. Although there hasn't been much talk about what the new software will entail, the rumor mill has kicked into high gear with word of new Macs, new iPads and even a smart speaker. All told, operating systems may actually be the least exciting part of Apple's keynote. But which products are likely to steal the spotlight, and which ones are just wishful thinking? That's what we're here to sort out.