When Siri is asked whether she has a boyfriend, the iPhone's digital assistant is usually quick to deflect the question with a quip about drones always trying to pick her up. Takechi is the creator of Hikari Azuma, a miniskirt-wearing avatar. She can hold a basic conversation and wake you up in the morning by turning on the lights. Hikari will message you at work and greet you when you return home. She'll also set you back about ¥300,000.

Think back to the best shopping experience you ever had. Chances are it involved a well-informed and upbeat salesperson who engaged with you, asked about your needs and guided you through the purchase. You left knowing you made the right decision. This kind of conversation-driven sale--high on empathy and knowledge, low on price and haggling--has long been a staple of successful retail loyalty. It focuses on understanding the needs of consumers and delivering an exceptional experience.

Amazon is reportedly planning to release a new version of its smart speaker Echo on Tuesday that includes a screen for making video calls. The original Echo is a digital assistant that can play spoken song requests, answer questions about a sports score, report the weather or read the news. Amazon is expected to announce a new Echo smart home speaker on Tuesday. The big difference: it'll come with a screen that allows users to make video calls, The Wall Street Journal reports. The 7-inch touch screen will also display answers to spoken questions with Google-like search results, the Journal adds.

When Siri is asked whether she has a boyfriend, the iPhone's digital assistant is usually quick to deflect the question with a quip about drones always trying to pick her up. Takechi is the creator of Hikari Azuma, a miniskirt-wearing avatar. She can hold a basic conversation and wake you up in the morning by turning on the lights. Hikari will message you at work and greet you when you return home. She'll also set you back about ¥300,000.

Amazon surprised everyone when, in late 2014, it unveiled a standalone digital assistant that was not only good, but blew away the competition in both quality and aesthetics. The Echo - a cylindrical speaker with microphone - now accounts for just over 70% of all digital assistant use in the US, leaving its nearest competitor, Google Home, well behind. It's an important new market, even if the idea of talking to an object in your home still comes uneasily to many of us. In a new report, Emarketer estimated 36 million Americans will use a voice-activated assistant at last once a month - an increase of 129% on this time last year. Amazon, as I mentioned, already has the lion's share.

Headlines about mass data breaches have become ominously routine, and yet password convenience still trumps security for most people. That's why, year after year, the world's most popular log-on remains "123456," a password so obvious it accounted for 17 percent of the 10 million compromised passwords analyzed by Keeper Security, which sells a log-in management service. The answer, of course, is to get rid of passwords altogether. Biometric technology--especially fingerprint scanners--have been steadily replacing the need to type in a password, which can easily be guessed by hackers wielding smart algorithms. Now, with the world increasingly embracing voice-activated devices like the Amazon Echo and Google Home, companies are starting to create technology that recognizes a person's speech patterns. Facial recognition is starting to catch on as well.

Whether you use Cortana, Siri, or Ok Google, your smartphone or computer's ability to recognize your voice and answer your questions is a function of deep learning. The software has been trained to recognize the myriad ways a word can be pronounced, then understand the various types of questions that might be asked, and to provide an appropriate answer to meet your needs. Using data about when your home needs light, temperature adjustments, and more, smart home technology allows customers to reduce energy usage and save money. When combined with voice recognition tools, smart homes can have profound applications for disabled consumers. If you take pictures on your smartphone and store them in various cloud applications, you may have already encountered apps that will sort and organize albums based on various features.

With the permission of both sales people and the customers, calls are recorded and stored in the cloud (as both audio and video files). Gong goes through a first-pass machine transcription of the calls and then applies NLP to work around the inaccuracies of the initial transcription and deal with the complexity of human to human interactions. In contrast to the relatively straightforward human to machine interaction in the case of Siri or Amazon Echo, the sales conversations Gong is tackling are free flowing, multi-party, and riddled with interruptions and speech fragments. The text of the transcription is categorized by pre-set topics such as "budget," "timeline," "pricing," "competitors," and "urgency." The analysis of the conversation shows which topic was discussed, when, and by whom, how much a sales person is talking vs. listening, which questions are asked, and the objections raised.

Amazon may soon combine its Echo home speakers and Kindle tablets into a single device that will feature a touchscreen and video calling, the Wall Street Journal reported. Few technical details are available about the hybrid Echo, but as the Journal reports, the device, which is expected to be announced as soon as Tuesday, will have a 7-inch touchscreen that can visually display data like answers to Alexa questions and purchasing information. The Echo touchscreen speaker is slated to cost more than $200 and potentially could start shipping by next month. The news confirms leaks last week that hinted at a hybrid home clock-like Echo device. While Amazon has yet to release official images or details, last week's rumors line up with the basic details mentioned in the Journal's report.