The new Amazon Echo Look seems like a logical enough extension of Alexa, the company's AI-powered digital assistant. Previously, Alexa lived inside speakers. That progression belies just how much more the Echo Look could know about you than other Alexa hardware does--especially if Amazon ever unleashes the full power of its machine learnings smarts. Amazon envisions the Echo Look as a way to get fashion advice. Command it to take a photo of you, repeat across various clothing options, and get a recommendation of what you should wear. Along the way, Amazon will also suggest clothing you might want to buy.

Amazon has unveiled its new device - The Echo Look. The Echo Look uses a camera to give people fashion advice and even take a picture or video of their outfit using just their voice. The hands-free camera is being billed as a "style assistant."

Over three-quarters of consumers in the U.S. have used voice commands to operate a digital device, indicating a comfort with voice-activated services -- but adoption of digital home assistants is still comparatively low, with only 11 percent of consumers saying they own an Amazon Echo/Dot or Google Home, according to new research from GfK. Put simply, people are used to the idea that they can command a device with their voice: 69 percent have used speech to send a text, ask a question, or make a search on a smartphone. But with digital home assistants like Amazon Echo and Google Home introduced less than two years ago, it may take a little bit longer for the average consumer to warm up to the idea of using voice-activated intelligent assistants to power more aspects of their daily lives. But while these devices haven't reach critical mass yet, the bridge is there: As stated, a majority of consumers already use voice commands on their smartphones. And, moreover, voice commands have an inherently "human" element; unlike VR or Google Glass, people ask for information using their voice absolutely everywhere, everyday, and they always have.

Smart speakers are getting increasingly popular and tech giants Google and Apple could not have been left behind in the race. While Amazon was the first to operate in the segment, Google jumped onto the bandwagon last year and now Apple is ready to give it competition. According to Apple tipster Sonny Dickson, Apple is all set to release its smart speakers soon. Dickson tweeted Thursday saying: "Apple is currently finalizing designs for their Alexa competitor, expected to be marketed as a Siri/AirPlay device." He further added that the device would be using Beats technology, which the company uses for some iPhone accessories and will run on iOS.

The rumors saying that Apple is working on a Siri-based Amazon Echo rival are back, with a noted insider saying that Apple is currently finalizing the design for the unnamed product. "Apple is currently finalizing designs for their Alexa competitor, expected to be marketed as a Siri/AirPlay device," Sonny Dickson said on Twitter. Apple is currently finalising designs for their Alexa competitor, expected to be marketed as a Siri/AirPlay device. Dickson, who has a decent track record when leaking details about unreleased Apple products (especially iPhones) also said the upcoming Echo rival is "believed to carry some form of Beats technology, and is expected to run [an iOS variant]." The insider did not mention anything about an actual launch date for the product, or a price.

Ideas about artificial intelligence (AI) have tended to swirl around without offering me much to think about. I use Siri and Hello Google on my iPhone, I'm aware of the increasingly powerful social media algorithms, and I've watched, with some interest, the accomplishments of IBM's Watson. Yet I haven't really thought much about it. The developments and decisions made about AI over the next couple of years may well affect our lives and the lives of our descendants. It's best to get to know a bit about what is going on, especially when it comes to personal privacy, and also to ensure that our children learn about the positive and negative aspects of artificial intelligence. Over the past several days I've read Maureen Dowd's long and detailed report in Vanity Fair, Elon Musk's Future Shock, describing the unbridled, and sometimes turbulent Silicon Valley debate about AI.

Almost everyone loves to spend their leisure time to watch movies with their family and friends. We all have the same experience when we sit on our couch to choose a movie that we are going to watch and spend the next two hours but can't even find one after 20 minutes. We definitely need a computer agent to provide movie recommendation to us when we need to choose a movie and save our time. Apparently, a movie recommendation agent has already become an essential part of our life.. According to Data Science Central "Although hard data is difficult to come by, many informed sources estimate that, for the major ecommerce platforms like Amazon and Netflix, that recommenders may be responsible for as much as 10% to 25% of incremental revenue."

You've heard the rumblings of the robots, right? When I make a customer service call and get an eerily nuanced answer from a chatbot, I hear the rumbling of the robots. When I call out to my digital assistant and Siri/Alexa/Cortana makes a wise-cracking response, I feel the rumblings. I can't help but love my Roomba, and I have mixed feelings about the robot that assembled my car, but what about the more nebulous forms of Artificial Intelligence? Up to 50 percent of the human workforce may be replaced by machines, a 2013 Oxford study predicts, and McKinsey estimates that 60 percent of all jobs have least 30 percent of activities "that are technically automatable, based on technologies available today."

Amazon is off to a profitable start in 2017. The company's first-quarter sales jumped 23 percent to $35.7 billion, beating analyst expectations, and top executives pinned part of that spike on the Alexa ecosystem. "We're very encouraged by the customer response to Echo products," one exec said during Amazon's financial call today. "Not only the products, but the ability now to use tablets as Echo devices, since we spread the Alexa technology to many of those devices. We're also happy with the success we've had with developers; there are now more than 12,000 Alexa skills, so we think that's all foundational."

"It is the embodiment of human intelligence and there is really nothing more at present than a thin veneer of that – we simply don't have the computing power to build a neural network like the human brain," Nathan Lowe, managing director, ASI Solutions, said in an interview. "AI is something that performs a specific set of tasks in a human-like way. Human intelligence has creativity, innovation, sentience, morals, gut feel, is situation aware, bias, feelings, and has learned from its mistakes. AI like this is not going to happen for a while," he said. Lowe has been with ASI since 1999 and became managing director in May 2015.