One of Mark Zuckerberg's key New Year resolutions for 2016 was to build his own "simple AI bot" that could help him with the household tasks. Remember the image of the butler, Jarvis from Iron Man? That's a classic Hollywood example of how AI works. But, what precisely is Artificial Intelligence and how can it solve the most common UX problems today? Artificial Intelligence (or AI) is an advanced human-like computerized system that has the ability to intelligently manage the activities and systems which humans usually do manually. While bots like Apple's Siri and Amazon's Echo are programmed to take on our most mundane tasks, bots like Google's Deep Dream are inherently creative, helping users in problem-solving, thereby improving their experience.

Voice AI is emerging as a winner among the many new outlets for brands to express themselves. In the twenty years since Google and Amazon were founded, the physical world has begun to be transformed into a huge voice-activated web fueled by smart speakers, Google Home, and Amazon Echo. Forty-five million voice-assisted devices are currently in use in the U.S., and eMarketer projects that number will rise to 67 million by 2019. Amazon Echo, and its brain, Alexa, own nearly 70 percent of the smart speaker market and Steve Rabuchin, VP Amazon Alexa said, "Our vision is that customers will be able to access Alexa whenever and wherever they want." "That means customers may be able to talk to their cars, refrigerators, thermostats, lamps and all kinds of devices in and outside their homes."

On August 31, 2012, four Amazon engineers filed the fundamental patent for what ultimately became Alexa, an artificial--intelligence system designed to engage with one of the world's biggest and most tangled data sets: human speech. The engineers needed just 11 words and a simple diagram to describe how it would work. A male user in a quiet room says: "Please play'Let It Be,' by the Beatles." A small tabletop machine replies: "No problem, John," and begins playing the requested song. From that modest start, voice-based AI for the home has become a big business for Amazon and, increasingly, a strategic battleground with its technology rivals. Google, Apple, Samsung, and Microsoft are each putting thousands of researchers and business specialists to work trying to create irresistible versions of easy-to-use devices that we can talk with. "Until now, all of us have bent to accommodate tech, in terms of typing, tapping, or swiping.

Soon enough, your breakfast bar could be your search bar. Your lamp could be how you shop for lightbulbs. Your Chevy or Ford might be your vehicle for finding a YouTube video, like the classic SNL skit of Chevy Chase's send-up of President Gerald Ford, to make a long drive less tedious. And you won't have to lift a finger--all you'll need to do is turn toward one of those inanimate objects and say something. Welcome to a future where your voice is the main signal for the elaborate data grid known as your life. Two decades ago when Amazon and Google were founded, only a seer could have predicted that those companies would eventually start turning the physical world into a vast, voice-activated interface.

Two Texas men who were killed earlier this year may have been lured to their deaths by an online dating app used by the pair's killers, investigators said Monday. Harris County sheriff's investigators said the app, which was not named, might have been used to entice Glenser Soliman, 44, and An Vinh Nguyen, 26, The Houston Chronicle reported. Soliman, a nurse at St. Luke's Medical Center, was found dead a few miles from his residence on Feb. 25 after being declared missing on Feb. 16. Nguyen, a student studying hotel and restaurant management at the University of Houston, has not been seen since March 31. Deputies believe the student is dead, but his body has not been found.

Google Home doesn't have a huge range of on-demand music services on offer (Google's services and Spotify are your biggest choices), but you can add one to the list today. Deezer has launched Home support for its streaming music service, giving listeners in several countries a hands-free music source if they're not fans of the larger providers. The stand-out is voice control over Deezer's semi-automatic Flow playlist -- you can tell Home to "play your Flow" and get a highly personalized playlist with very little effort. Not surprisingly, Deezer is catering to its core European audience first: it's starting today with support in France and Germany, while the US, UK, Australia and Canada are due later in 2017. You probably won't rush to sign up for Deezer if you weren't already a member, but look at it this way: few music services outside of the majors work with voice-guided speakers, so this could be a reason to stick to Deezer if you were thinking of jumping ship.

Have you ever felt guilty about leaving your dog home alone, wishing there was a way to calm it? Amazon's Audible may have the answer - a good book. Dog behavior expert Cesar Millan has teamed up with the firm to create audiobooks for dogs, which use human voices to tell stories to dogs when nobody is at home, keeping then company. Dog behavior expert Cesar Millan (pictured) teamed up with audible to conduct their own study to see what impact audiobooks have on dogs when their owners are away. By using a speaker along with one of the audiobooks, users can play one of a range of audible's audiobooks, with recommended titles including: According to a demonstration video by Millan, having to be away from our dogs can be a stressful situation, joined by guilt and shame for having to be away from our pets for long periods of time, for example when going to work.

Online review communities are dynamic as users join and leave, adopt new vocabulary, and adapt to evolving trends. Recent work has shown that recommender systems benefit from explicit consideration of user experience. However, prior work assumes a fixed number of discrete experience levels, whereas in reality users gain experience and mature continuously over time. This paper presents a new model that captures the continuous evolution of user experience, and the resulting language model in reviews and other posts. Our model is unsupervised and combines principles of Geometric Brownian Motion, Brownian Motion, and Latent Dirichlet Allocation to trace a smooth temporal progression of user experience and language model respectively. We develop practical algorithms for estimating the model parameters from data and for inference with our model (e.g., to recommend items). Extensive experiments with five real-world datasets show that our model not only fits data better than discrete-model baselines, but also outperforms state-of-the-art methods for predicting item ratings.

If you want to dip your toe into the world of smart home tech, the easiest place to start is with smart light bulbs. Broadly speaking, they're easy to setup and use, come with enough features to give you a sense of what's possible, and run the range of affordable and simple to expensive and complex. But there are still some questions as to how useful or necessary smart light bulbs are. After all, it's just a light bulb, how revolutionary can they be? Well, I just wrapped up testing a whole bunch of new smart bulbs to find the best right now and learned plenty along the way.

Over the last few years, AI assistants have been on the rise. First, as a fun feature set, now ingrained as part of our daily lives. The personal brand experience, that is, how you interact with technology and brands is rapidly transforming. But will AI assistants and voice platforms rule the space? What do you think about the voice platform?