Artificial Intelligence is beginning to have transformative effects on consumers, enterprises, and governments around the world. The impacts are contributing by automating repetitive task, creating efficiencies, ubiquitously improving user experience, and creating ways for humans to improve our cognition. 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.

Amazon wants you to have long, real conversations with Alexa, its popular personal digital assistant. The e-tail giant recently released new tools to app developers that allow Alexa to whisper, show emotion and pause naturally, like we humans do. And that's just the start, says Rohit Prasad, Amazon's head scientist for Alexa, who is playing a key role in the retailer's efforts in artificial intelligence for Alexa--using computers to converse with us. "I truly believe that for AI to be useful in our daily lives, it has to be something you can connect with," Prasad said in an interview here. "Conversation is the next step, to be more human-like."

Samsung's virtual assistant, Bixby, was introduced to the Galaxy S8 smartphones last week in South Korea and it appears to have a skill that goes beyond just making calls and setting reminders. Many users have asked the digital helper to'please rap' or'please beatbox' and had discovered that the AI was able to bust out a beat on command. However, what some have found intriguing was the rapping AI took a stab at Apple's voice assistant – in one of the verses Bixby said'I am better than Siri'. The rapping AI took a stab at Apple's voice assistant – in one of the verses Bixby said'I am better than Siri' (highlighted letters) Users can make apps Bixby-enabled, which will let Bixby support almost every task that the application is capable of performing using the conventional interface. Any task a human user can do via touch commands, the AI will have the ability to do as well.

Amazon wants you to have long, real conversations with Alexa, its popular personal digital assistant. The e-tail giant recently released new tools to app developers that allow Alexa to whisper, show emotion and pause naturally, like we humans do. And that's just the start, says Rohit Prasad, Amazon's head scientist for Alexa, who is playing a key role in the retailer's efforts in artificial intelligence for Alexa--using computers to converse with us. "I truly believe that for AI to be useful in our daily lives, it has to be something you can connect with," Prasad said in an interview here. "Conversation is the next step, to be more human-like."

Ikea, what in the name of eftersökt are you planning?! The design store -- where roughly a bajillion millennials have purchased a build-it-yourself cabinet and whatever a "frakta" is -- recently released an online survey that asks respondents what they want from an artificially intelligent assistant. SEE ALSO: The Ikea shopping bag madness continues. "Do we, for instance, prefer talking to a machine, or do we rather want it to be more human-like?" asks a woman's voice in a short animated introduction to the survey. "Should it have a human personality, so it can be friendly, funny or impatient? Do we want our technology to grow up with us?"

Montreal-based start-up Lyrebird is looking to change that with an artificially intelligent system that learns to mimic a person's voice by analyzing speech recordings and the corresponding text transcripts as well as identifying the relationships between them. Introduced last week, Lyrebird's speech synthesis can generate thousands of sentences per second--significantly faster than existing methods--and mimic just about any voice, an advancement that raises ethical questions about how the technology might be used and misused. The ability to generate natural-sounding speech has long been a core challenge for computer programs that transform text into spoken words. Artificial intelligence (AI) personal assistants such as Siri, Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana and the Google Assistant all use text-to-speech software to create a more convenient interface with their users. Those systems work by cobbling together words and phrases from prerecorded files of one particular voice.

You may not recognize her face, but you know her sweet, robotic voice. She's inside your phone and knows your calendar by heart. She boasts her encyclopedic knowledge all the time, but you don't mind. She is Siri -- aka Susan Bennett, the voice actress behind Apple's witty digital assistant. Bennett has also loaned her voice to other familiar brands like Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Cartoon Network, Waze and Delta Airlines.

Technology is redefining how we bank – from mobile apps to online account management – we increasingly use digital means to make our money and data work harder for us. The technology already exists to have the nuances of our voices analysed to gain access to our bank account, or for Artificial Intelligence algorithms to check your account spending to help you better save for a life-goal or target. Increasingly we are also seeing the emergence of new fintech solutions to consumer banking issues – with the convergence of technology allowing devices like Amazon's Echo, for example, being able to buy products for you with just the direction of your voice. But where might this convergence be heading? What technologies could banking customers have access to in the near future?

Sometimes it's hard to remember how single people met each other before dating apps like Tinder. Did we go out to bars? It's amazing how quickly we've adapted to swiping through thousands of potential partners while half-watching reruns of Friends. And although I've never talked to a woman who didn't have complicated feelings about being on a dating app (as a single woman myself, whether I love or loathe Tinder changes every time I open it), there's very little comprehensive research on the wider effects of mobile dating. So Glamour conducted our own survey of 1,000 women and talked to experts to find out whether apps have really changed how we date.