SAP Ariba unveiled an AI-powered assistant named Procurement today to speak with buyers and suppliers about orders in a conversational interface. The announcement was made onstage at SAP Ariba Live conference in Las Vegas. "Through its bot, the company plans to enable buyers and suppliers to converse with their SAP Ariba applications much as they would Siri or Alexa," the company said in a statement shared with VentureBeat. "Leveraging machine learning, the bot will be able to train and learn about a user's preferences and a company's policies and procedures and guide actions in line with them to reduce errors and speed processing." The Procurement bot will be part of "a portfolio of bot applications that SAP is developing by the end of the year," SAP said in a statement.

My mother waited two months for her Amazon Echo to arrive. Then, she waited again -- leaving it in the box until I came to help her install it. Any device that requires vocal instructions makes my mother skeptical. She has bad memories of Siri. "She could not understand me," my mom told me.

AI is already influencing all areas of business – but should prove especially useful for the finance industry. This will, however, require a significant change in the way lenders approach their customer base, according to Richard Harris, Head of International Operations at Feedzai, which specializes in machine learning services for businesses, speaking at White Clarke Group's Auto Captives Summit in November. Harris argues that - with computing power now a fraction of what it was a decade ago - every lender can integrate artificial intelligence and machine learning into their business to provide highly personalized services that focus on individuals, not customer groups. He told the Summit: "In the past, what we did was build scorecards or we built rules. We made decisions about people by putting them in a bucket. Such as: where are you from? Where did you go to school? How long have you been in employment? How much is your house worth? All these criteria of stability and probability were used to make decisions about individuals. The time has come to stop putting people in boxes. You've got all this processing power; it's cheap. You've got machine learning algorithms which can look down to a very fine-grained level of detail at hundreds of different factors. You don't need to group people anymore. "Let's treat people as individuals!

"Hello Google, find me the nearest parking lot." "Play music from my favourite playlist." Today, as we command, converse, and engage with Google's voice assistant or Apple's Siri, we often communicate with them as we would with a real-life personal assistant. These Artificial Intelligence-powered applications are up to the task, too, providing results that are crisp, precise, and personalised. Several factors such as user preferences, geographical location, dialect, and previous digital footprint etc are automatically evaluated to identify results that are most relevant to the end-user. When AI pioneer and advocate Alan Turing said'a computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human', this was exactly what he meant. But global giants like Google and Apple are not the only brands leveraging AI to drive user engagement.

A four-year-old boy saved his mother's life by using her thumb to unlock her iPhone and then asking it to call 999. Roman, who lives in Kenley, Croydon, south London, used the phone's voice control - Siri - to call emergency services. Police and paramedics were sent to the home and were able to give live-saving first aid to his mother. During the 999 call Roman told the operator he thought his mum was dead because "she's closing her eyes and she's not breathing". Roman, his twin brother and a younger brother were all in the house at the time.

Baidu shares fell on Wednesday, after chief scientist Andrew Ng announced he is leaving the company less than three years after joining. Ng announced his departure in a post on Medium late Tuesday. Baidu shares were down more than 1½ percent in market hours, trading around 168.51. Ng had joined the company in 2014 to help help develop new businesses around artificial intelligence and machine learning, areas Baidu has previously identified as a major strategic focus. Baidu told the Financial Times it will not hire a direct replacement, but instead move Ng's teams into the AI Group, which will be headed by current vice president Haifeng Wang.

Nick Hunn is the founder and CTO of WiFore Consulting. Author of "The Essentials of Short Range Wireless", Nick has been closely involved with short range wireless and communications, designing technology that helps to bring mobility to products, particularly in the areas of telematics, M2M, smart energy, wearables and mobile health. Currently, he is working on appcessories and hearable devices and chairs the Bluetooth Hearing Aid Working Group. Forget the Internet of Things (IoT) – it's a bubble. The majority of products currently claiming to be IoT devices are just the same, vertical Machine to Machine (M2M) products we've always had, but taking the opportunity to benefit from a rebrand.

Every time you ask Siri for directions, a complex chain of cutting-edge code is activated. It allows "her" to understand your question, find the information you're looking for, and respond to you in a language that you understand. This has only become possible in the last few years. Until now, we have been interacting with computers in a way that they understand, rather than us. We have learned their language.

Samsung unveiled Bixby, its own virtual assistant, designed to make using your next phone easier. Starting with the Galaxy S8, which is slated to be unveiled March 29, Samsung is positioning Bixby different than Apple's Siri, Google Assistant or Amazon's Alexa in that it can learn and adapt to the needs of its users. "[I]nstead of humans learning how the machine interacts with the world (a reflection of the abilities of designers), it is the machine that needs to learn and adapt to us," Samsung's executive vice president and head of R&D for software and services InJong Rhee wrote on the company's blog. "With this new approach, Samsung has employed artificial intelligence, reinforcing deep learning concepts to the core of our user interface designs. Bixby is the ongoing result of this effort." Unlike Siri, Google Assistanr or Alexa, there is a dedicated physical button on the phone.

Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa are currently in a showdown over which will be the AI assistant of choice for travelers, according to a Bloomberg report. Marriott International Inc. is testing the voice assistants at its Aloft hotel in Boston's Seaport district and will choose which it will launch more broadly across its locations. The hotel group is testing the digital assistants to see which is better for guest services, such as turning on lights, closing drapes, controlling room temperature and changing TV channels through voice commands. Marriott's Toni Stoeckl told Bloomberg the company is "looking for the ideal solution to make this a global platform." He added that Aloft hotels act as a "tech incubator" for new concepts and a positive trial may determine whether digital assistants, and which one, will be integrated at other Marriott chains.