You can pick up Amazon Echo for $30 below list price right now with this rare deal from Amazon. Amazon Echo is a hands-free speaker you control with your voice. Echo connects to the Alexa Voice Service to play music, provide information, news, sports scores, weather, and more--instantly. All you have to do is ask. Echo has seven microphones and beam forming technology so it can hear you from across the room--even while music is playing.

Let's pause for a moment, and take linguistic stock. Technology has many societal impacts, but perhaps one of its most visibly evident is how the tools we use change how we communicate with each other -- so, literally, how technology rewrites language itself. We see this in the willing stockpiling of techie jargon into individual vocabularies (the Androids, the iPhones, the lesser-seen Surface Books); the new word coinages (blockchain), the new and expanding uses for existing words (a'message' is a noun; 'message me' an imperative verb asking someone to send you an IM); the creative portmanteaus (glasshole is a particularly good one), the tech-obsessed idioms (I don't have bandwidth for that right now), and so on and on. We also get to glimpse the places where technology might be in the process of placing stress on social structures or societal norms. Again, glasshole is a great example of that -- a word that effectively contains the full story of Google Glass' abject consumer failure wrapped up in those two mocking syllables.

Remember the famous scene in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 2001: A Space Odyssey, when Hal 9000--the intelligent-turned-malevolent computer--regresses to his "childhood" and sings "Daisy Bell" as he's decommissioned by astronaut Dave Bowman? Its inspiration was a real-life Bell Labs demonstration of speech synthesis on an IBM 704 mainframe in 1961, witnessed by Arthur C Clarke, who later incorporated it into his 2001 novel and screenplay. Although Bell Labs' involvement in the field stretches back to the 1930s with Homer Dudley's keyboard-and-footpedal-driven Voder speech synthesis device, it's undoubtedly the classic Kubrick/Clarke movie that cemented the ideas of artificial intelligence (AI) and conversing with computers into the public mind. Depending on how old you are, we're now familiar with computerised voices, thanks to devices like Texas Instruments' popular 1978 Speak & Spell educational toy, Stephen Hawking's speech synthesiser (memorably sampled in the Pink Floyd song Keep Talking), GPS navigational systems in your car, and any number of public information and call handling systems. More recently, the combination of automatic speech recognition (ASR), natural-language understanding (NLU) and text-to-speech (TTS) has come to mainstream attention in virtual assistants such as Apple's Siri, Google Now, Microsoft's Cortana, and Amazon's Alexa. Download this article as a PDF (free registration required). To get a handle on how speech technologies work, we clearly need to know something about the mechanics of human speech and the structure of language. When we speak, air from the lungs passes through the vocal tract to produce "voiced" or "unvoiced" sounds (depending on whether the vocal cords are vibrating or not) that may then be modulated by the tongue, teeth and lips.

With facts about Apple's much-anticipated iPhone 8 scarce, rumors abound prior to its expected fall release -- so many that it's hard to keep up. It seems like every day there is new information about the iPhone 8, and Apple has hinted it's not so happy about that. CEO Tim Cook recently blamed the "pause" in purchases of its current iPhone models on rumors about possible iPhone 8 features during his second-quarter 2017 earnings call this week. Read: iPhone 8 Rumors: Mock-Up Video Shows How Apple's Next Edition Might Look If you're looking to buy the iPhone 8 this fall, here's an overview of the device's rumored features, release date and possible delay. The upcoming iPhone 8, which could also be called the iPhone X, iPhone Pro or iPhone Edition, reportedly will come with an OLED edge-to-edge display.

Everything from a new accessibility toolkit for smart cities, to an AI assistant, to a patrol car prototype were part of Microsoft's presentations at Smart Cities NYC '17. First on the agenda was Microsoft's announcement about its Smart Cities for All Toolkit to help city officials and urban planners design cities with inclusive features to assist people with disabilities. The toolkit was developed by G3ict and World Enabled as part of the Smart Cities for All initiative to give city leaders a strategic guide to benefit all citizens, including the approximately 1.2 billion people in the world with disabilities. The toolkit is the first step toward what Microsoft plans to be a long road to help cities become more inclusive. It's comprised of four new tools to address priority challenges and alleviate the top barriers for disabled individuals in smart cities. "The toolkit is meant to be guidance for city leaders to think about how to make the business of becoming a smart city accessible to everyone. They don't know where to start," said Kathryn Wilson, director of cities solutions worldwide public sector for Microsoft.

Furthermore, by 2020, the AI market is projected to reach $70 billion, driven by increasing computational power and improving approaches/applications with machine, deep learning, natural language processing and robotics and many a number of other technologies. The gain a better understanding of the perception of AI in the US, PwC surveyed 2,500 consumers and business decision makers. The objective is to better understand their attitudes towards artificial intelligence, and the future implications on business and society. I found the findings to be insightful and a few that are surprising! While the world has concerns and there are certainly obstacles to overcome, consumers in the survey believe that AI has the potential to assist in medical breakthroughs, democratize costly services, elevate poor customer service, and even free up an overburdened workforce.

For the most part, you are stuck with who you have consistently in your household. In recent years, we've been allowing other people into the household as well. These individuals are somewhat different than our flesh and blood relatives. For one thing, they aren't made of flesh or blood unless you have found a severely disturbing technology outlet. These people go by the name of Alexa, Siri, and Google.

Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives. Nothing good to say about Google Home and Amazon Echo. Perhaps you like the idea of a box in your living room that talks to you, turns the lights on for you, yet still can't make you breakfast. It seems, though, that Apple's SVP of worldwide marketing, Phil Schiller, isn't impressed with the ones he's seen so far. "Well, I won't talk to either one specifically, [I] don't want to. My mother used to have a saying that if you don't have something nice to say, say nothing at all," he said.

The Smart Machine Age is upon us and is likely to disrupt many different human processes, tasks, and activities over the next 10 years and far longer as the key technologies continue to develop. In the last decade, Data Management personnel solved business problems with data; in the next decade, highly capable machines using Artificial Intelligence Applications will solve problems with available data in a scale unheard before. Some of the by-products of this Smart Machine Age that we need to prepare for are Smart Workspace, Smart Data Discovery, Virtual Personal Assistants, Interactive User Interfaces, Cognitive Expert Advisors, and Smart Robots, to name just a few. Stephen Hawking has warned that the full growth of the "artificial intellect" could spell the doomsday for humanity. On the other end of the spectrum, many optimists believe that with full preparation, human society can look forward to a highly fruitful era of alliance between the human and the machine.

To provide you with this exclusive report, MyPrivateBanking has partnered with BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, to create The Complete Robo Advisor Research Collection. If you're involved in the financial services industry at any level, you simply must understand the paradigm shift caused by robo advisors. Investors frustrated by mediocre investment performance, high wealth manager fees and deceptive sales techniques are signing up for automated investment accounts at a record pace. And the robo advisor field is evolving right before our eyes. Firms are figuring out on the fly how to best attract, service and upsell their customers. What lessons are they learning?