Amazon's voice technology has made its way into Major League Baseball. Earlier this month, the Seattle Mariners became the first professional sports franchise to place Amazon Echo devices inside stadium suites. At Safeco Field, fans at each of the 59 suites can now use their voice to order food, change TV channels, play music, and even have Alexa -- the AI powered voice assistant built into the Echo -- sing "Take Me Out To The Ballgame." GeekWire had a chance to test out the new technology this week before the Mariners took on the Oakland Athletics. Fans can use Alexa for its normal capabilities -- asking about the weather, playing music, providing news updates, etc.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been around for decades as a computer-science discipline. More recently, it's become part of our daily lives in the form of voice-powered digital assistants, recommendation engines, image-tagging services, etc. We've also seen a crescendo of vendor marketing around "intelligent systems" and how you'll be left behind if you don't buy now. Watch this webinar replay to see what steps CIOs and tech leadership should be taking to ensure that their organization uses AI to best effect while minimizing the downsides.

Consumer and business users alike are abuzz about the potential of natural language processing (NLP) and how it enables voice assistants as front ends for routine and even specialized tasks. NLP is a set of technologies that enables machines to interact with humans in a natural language to deliver information and insights as if speaking to another person. It's a great equalizer as a front end because there's no need for users to memorize keystrokes or commands. The core components of natural language processing include syntax analysis for parsing sentences and identifying parts of speech; entity recognition for identifying persons, products, events, media and locations; and sentiment analysis for determining the sentiment expressed in the text. Each of these elements helps the program understand the sentence structure, facts posed and emotion conveyed, respectively.

As expected, the opening keynote of Google's I/O 2017 developer conference was a doozy. For two and a half hours, CEO Sundar Pichai and a handful of execs rattled off a staggering list of futuristic features and products: A camera that understands what it sees! AI tools a high-schooler can use to help detect cancer! To watch the address was to feel like the future had just arrived, all at once, right before you eyes. Then you go down the list of actual new things, the stuff you can try right now.

Google just concluded its I/O 2017 keynote, where executives led by CEO Sundar Pichai laid out the company's future roadmap for Android, Google Assistant, Google Home, virtual reality, and much more. Instead, the company has settled into a pattern of releasing information about what it's doing (and what it wants to do) for developers at I/O, instead of trying to wow consumers or the press. You might call that boring, but that's also a misguided notion, because there was much to glean from Pichai and the rest of the Googlers who presented onstage. So here are the 10 most important takeaways from today's I/O keynote. Android's mobile dominance hasn't stopped growing.

Google served up a bevy of announcements, technologies and goodies for developers, but it also highlighted a much larger strategy where the search giant still organizes the world's information, but also begins creating systems that'll add context, delight you and potentially provide more insights. Artificial intelligence and machine learning is Google's competitive advantage and will be embedded everywhere. Google CEO Sundar Pichai talked AI non-stop during his Google I/O keynote and he's rearchitecting the company to be "AI-first." The extent of Google's AI reach is everywhere from Google Photos to Google Assistant to Google Cloud Platform to damn near every other product or service the search giant has. Google's AI efforts will even tap into human resources as it pivots to target job searches.

Silicon valley giant Google on Thursday (18 May) at its annual conference announced an Artificial Intelligence (AI) first strategy. Its no longer mobile first it is in AI in mobile now. AI moves into the consumer space with almost all Google's applications that come bundled with Android actively using it. Everyone knows Google through its eponymous search bar, Gmail icon, and Google maps it is part of every netizens life. These software application or even the algorithm is not Google.

Humans are forgetful; we need calendar reminders, notepads, schedules, and assistants. But the co-creator of Siri, Apple's digital assistant, says artificial intelligence technology could make forgetting an archaic problem of the past. Tom Gruber, the AI guru and Siri co-creator, believes that AI technology could help improve human's shortcomings. During the TED 2017 conference on Tuesday, Gruber said it is inevitable that once artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, the technology will be used to enhance human cognition and memory. "What if you could have a memory that was as good as computer memory and is about your life?" Gruber asked the audience, as Recode reports.

Amy works just like a human assistant, except she's not human. It's an AI bot made by X.ai, a company specializing in scheduling assistants that respond to natural language. Amy is so good at what she does that I find myself thanking her for booking a meeting, forgetting she needs no more thanks than my microwave. It's impossible to ignore all the buzz about AI bots. Last month, Facebook's David Marcus announced that over 30,000 bots have been built since the opening of its Messenger app to bot developers in April.

Artificial intelligence (AI) based voice assistants have become common among smartphones since last year and are expected to continue on the growth spiral, at least till 2021, according to projections published Thursday by research firm Ovum. "Ultimately, a digital assistant is just another user interface. It will only be as good as the ecosystem of devices and services that it is compatible with. Partnerships between tech giants and local service providers will therefore be key differentiators," said Ronan de Renesse, practice leader, Ovum Consumer Technology team and author of the report. "Here is a disconnect between the'know-it-all, do-it-all' approach that current digital assistants are aiming toward and the highly personalized virtual assistance experience that consumers have dreams/nightmares about. Whoever can bring personal consumer data in a secure, non-creepy way to digital assistance will be able to bridge that gap and capture most of the opportunity."