While the rest of the world will have to wait a little longer, Samsung yesterday rolled out voice functionality for its new assistant Bixby to Galaxy S8 owners in South Korea – and it turns out the little virtual helper has some mad skills to show off. Though Bixby was mostly designed to perform simple voice commands like making calls, setting reminders and calendar appointments as well as launching apps, it turns out the assistant can also spit some fire raps for you. We've teamed up with Product Hunt to offer you the chance to win an all expense paid trip to TNW Conference 2017! South Korean residents are flocking to YouTube to upload videos showing Bixby rhyme over various beats – both old and new school – and it sounds surprisingly good, even though my Korean is practically non-existent. As you can expect from any voice-enabled virtual assistant, the lyrics hardly qualify as what you'd call quality hip-hop, but it's still entertaining to see your phone trying to rap.

You've probably had regular help from a virtual assistant by phone or online, assisting you with basic tasks such as directing your call or giving you your bank balance. The companies that employ them think so, too, and are applying these AI/robotic processes to more and more of their everyday business operations. Often called out for being slow to change, the insurance industry is beginning to catch up quickly. Carriers like Celina and USAA are using AI in their daily operations and reaping the benefits. As a result, insurers are now either delivering, or in the process of delivering, a great digital experience to consumers.

The Google Home speaker finally went on sale in the UK in April and while it's a neat little smart speaker, it has some catching up to do. The Amazon Echo has already managed to garner more than 10,000 skills and the Home has very few. While the search giant works with developers to build up its selection, there are still some very useful things you can do with the smart speaker. Here's a selection of what we think are the best. One of the big draws for Google Home is the ability to use voice control on Chromecast and Chromecast Audio devices.

If you let your imagination run wild in the world of automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language understanding (NLU), and you throw in a little fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD), you can come up with several illegal uses for systems such as Alexa Voice Service, Google Home, Siri, and Cortana that will give you pause. As I have previously written, Alexa is the "killer app" for the Internet of Things (IoT). It is not dangerous, at least not in its present form. But just for fun, let's play pretend in our world of infinite possibilities. Please note: I'm going to use "Alexa" for the wake word in the following examples.

There have been many different attempts to create a J.A.R.V.I.S type of AI system to act as a personal assistant, able to interact with you and automate things. These have been from high profile people like Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) creating a version on J.A.R.V.I.S in his home, voiced by Morgan Freeman. This system has linked simple things like lights, music and toasters which all have IoT devices that you can link together, to more elaborate items such as a t-shirt dispenser, motors to open the curtains and face recognition door system. The brains behind are based on a chat bot and mobile app that the user can integrate with. Other J.A.R.V.I.S examples and developments range from simple lights and desktop interactions, to Amazon Alexa being used to control interactions with apps called J.A.R.V.I.S.

Some weeks ago, in this column, I had spoken of how today's information technology (IT) services workforce needs to be radically retrained or face retrenchment. While the thrust of that column was about changing today's process-bound technologists, I had started by harking back to the days when I had first learnt how to programme a computer, and had spoken of a man named Desmond, an Anglo-Indian poet and musician with whom I had been teamed up during that computer-training class. I ended the column by talking about how poets may displace programmers. I have also earlier spoken of the need to back women-led start-ups, arguing that the rate of success of such start-ups is reportedly higher than those led by men, and the fact that women are less likely to be financed creates an arbitrage opportunity for investors who are canny enough to see this opening. To give you an idea of the size of this gap, IBM Corp.'s research has evidently shown that women-led start-ups are likely to be 15% more profitable on average, but are 40% less likely to be funded. Any investor with a half a brain would jump on this opportunity, assuming of course that the other half of their brain could be used to pick the right bets from among the minuscule pool of women-led ventures (less than 8% of start-ups).

Being human entails not being perfect, and they're mostly okay with that; but when you're trying to do something that has no room for error, such as running a business, it might be time to try a more'intelligent' approach. You could stick to the basics and rough it out the traditional way, but when all your competitors are moving ahead, shouldn't you too?There's only so much a person can do. You might be the best at your job but that doesn't mean you have to do it alone. If you wanted to, you could decipher reams of data, anticipate your needs even before you know what they are, identify the solutions, interpretations and predictions and make sure your activities run smoothly; wouldn't you rather leave it to artificial intelligence (AI) and just do what you're supposed to really be doing? An AI (although programmed to) has your best interests in mind and makes the growth of your business its priority.

The biggest reveal at the Oracle Modern Customer Experience (CX) event held in Las Vegas from April 25 to April 27 was the debut of Oracle Adaptive Intelligent apps for CX. Adaptive Intelligent Offers (AI Offers) is the first app in a planned portfolio of artificial intelligence applications that will eventually span CX, ERP, human capital management, and supply chain management. The introduction was no surprise. Oracle said a CX app would come first when it announced Oracle Adaptive Intelligent apps last September. Since then the company has been refining the behind-the-scenes automated machine learning capabilities.

An unprecedented voice-transcription technology can tell you not only what's being said, but who is saying it. The web app, named Trint, can listen to an audio recording or a video of two or more speakers (or just one) engaged in natural speech, then provide a written transcript of what was said. Unlike Siri or Google Talk, Trint is designed to transcribe long blocks of text. While news organizations have invested heavily in video content, the ability to optimize those clips for search engines remains elusive. Trint's technology is still nascent, but it could eventually give new life to vast swaths of non-text-based media on the internet, like videos and podcasts, by making them readable to both humans and search engines.

This post will guide you through installing Apache Prediction IO machine learning server. We'll use one of its templates called Recommendation to build a working recommendation engine. The finished product will be able to recommend customized products depending upon a given user's purchasing behavior. You've got bunch of data and you need to predict something accurately so you can help your business grow its sales, grow customers, grow profits, grow conversion, or whatever the business need is. Recommendation systems are probably the first step everyone takes toward applying data science and machine learning.