What will it take for AI to become mainstream in business? We're in the midst of a breakthrough decade for artificial intelligence (AI): More sophisticated neural networks paired with sufficient voice recognition training data brought Amazon Echo and Google Home into scores of households. Deep learning's improved accuracy in image, voice, and other pattern recognition have made Bing Translator and Google Translate go-to services. And enhancements in image recognition have made Facebook Picture Search and the AI in Google Photos possible. Collectively, these have put machine recognition capabilities in the hands of consumers in a big way.

Scavenger hunts have existed for generations. I've written an app for Amazon's Alexa platform that modernizes scavenger hunts. The premise of the game doesn't change: find ten random items located in your home -- or around your neighborhood -- within an hour. Except that it is Alexa who facilitates the game play. My app is free to enable if you're one of the millions of people who own an Amazon Alexa.

Amazonians and investors alike, rest assured: Jeff Bezos knows artificial intelligence is a big deal. The Amazon CEO took a few paragraphs in his annual shareholder letter to explain how the company is using AI throughout its business, having recognized and embraced the "external trend." The letter itself focuses on the idea that Amazon is still in "Day 1," still a startup that's well aware that irrelevance and excruciating decline begins when you reach Day 2. Bezos outlined three major categories that artificial intelligence falls into at the company: visible products and moonshots, core operations, and enterprise cloud. "The outside world can push you into Day 2 if you won't or can't embrace powerful trends quickly. If you fight them, you're probably fighting the future. Embrace them and you have a tailwind," Bezos writes.

Samsung will delay the full rollout of the Bixby virtual assistant on its upcoming Samsung Galaxy S8 smartphone series, but if you want to change the S8's dedicated Bixby button to do something else? You'll likely be out of luck. Samsung is disabling third-party workarounds that previously allowed users to customize what the Galaxy S8's Bixby button could do, according to XDA Developers. On the left side of the phone, the S8 has a physical button that is used to activate the Bixby assistant. As XDA Developers reports, the closed loophole comes as part of a pre-release update patch from Samsung. By using the free All In One Gestures app on Google's Play Store, early Galaxy S8 users could previously reset the phone's Bixby button to perform tasks like opening the camera or launching a preferred app.

The coming five years will see a sweeping shift in how businesses prioritize and process activities and tasks. Current technologies and ways of doing things will become obsolete. Ways of accessing information will change too as more businesses embrace assistants powered by artificial intelligence (AI). Marketing automation will come to the fore, and businesses will worry less about errors as AI-powered technology takes on more of the work around calculations. We explore some of the dramatic changes businesses can anticipate with Artur Kiulian, an expert in artificial intelligence.

My son's disappointment is the exact problem that Mattel believes it can fix with Aristotle, a $349 voice-activated speaker launching in May that functions like Google Home or Amazon Echo devices. But rather than rule the entire house, Aristotle is built to live in a child's room--and answer a child's questions. In this most intimate of spaces, Aristotle is designed to be far more specific than the generic voice assistants of today: a nanny, friend, and tutor, equally able to soothe a newborn and aid a tween with foreign-language homework. It's an AI to help raise your child. "We tried to solve the fundamental problem of most baby products, which is they don't grow with you," says Robb Fujioka, senior vice president and chief products officer at Mattel.

"Hey Siri, how's the weather today?" "OK Google, remind me to pay the power bill." "Alexa, tell me a joke!" Bots are eating the world. Whether you are an enterprising app developer building the essential software to bring a virtual Taylor Swift into your Slack chats, or just lonely and in need of a dumb, annoying virtual friend to message you on Facebook, we seem to be clear on one thing: Many experiences, apps, sites, and products are going to be replaced with bots. It's official: "Bot for X" is the new "Uber for X." And sure, bots are cool.

For over a decade now, the biggest selling points of premium smartphones have been all about physical design. But in the coming years, the consumer electronics market is poised to experience a radical shift -- one that every investor should start paying attention to today. When Steve Jobs officially unveiled the first iPhone to the world in 2007, there was enormous hype surrounding its groundbreaking touch interface -- and for good reason. By blending input and display into a single place, Apple managed to redefine the mobile device entirely. In the years that followed, Apple introduced a great number of incremental improvements and it was always the physical redesigns that stood out and spurred sales the most.

Albert might look like a mirror but don't be fooled - this self-reflective display does far more than let you check yourself out. Albert, a new home computer run on artificial intelligence (AI), can tell you how to tie a bow tie, play music and even find a recipe for supper. The creators say that Albert also has a character and users can change his voice, gender, accent and even his sense of humour. Albert, the AI-powered computer which looks just like a mirror, can give users the weather, what's in the calendar and even a summery of the day's news The AI-powered computer will give you the weather, what's in your calendar, a summary of the main news stories. It can also understand commands such as play music, stream videos, control lights, play games and even pull up your favourite recipe.

Google Home owners beware: Burger King is plotting to hijack your smart speakers with its latest advertising campaign. The 15-second TV ad ends with a Burger King employee asking: 'OK Google - what is The Whopper burger?' - a phrase designed to cause the device to reel off facts about the popular patty. Even those without device won't necessarily escape: Burger King president José Cil told Buzzfeed it'could trigger' other devices too, including Android cell phones - leaving many on Twitter unimpressed. Both the Google Home speakers and those cell phones that have the Google app's voice-activated function active are constantly listening for the phrase'OK Google'. That's a signal for the machine to treat whatever is said next as either a command - the speaker can be used to dim a home's lights, for example - or a search query.