One of the biggest challenges for a marketer is implementing an effective personalized campaign -- one that fits not just a target demographic, but their unique set of customers. But personalized marketing spans a vast spectrum of choices and dimensions, meaning there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all personalized marketing campaign. The best way, the right way, the only way…those are all dependent on your business and the challenges you're facing. That doesn't offer much clarity, so we've created ABC-Commerce, a fictitious business that will help us illustrate the benefits of AI driven personalized marketing. We'll be using them as our example throughout this post.

USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham asks people about getting their news on Snapchat. We've been watching the NBC News Stay Tuned newscast, which is tailored for the young people who use Snapchat, and it's quite different from the NBC Nightly News we've been watching on network TV for years. This is a good thing. Savannah Sellers is the co-host of NBC's new Stay Tuned news show for Snapchat (Photo: Snapchat) If we want to get the next generation watching news, this could be the way to do it. Hire two young hosts, put them in hip attire, use language that assumes you know very little ("O.J. Simpson became famous for pushing yards on a football field") have fast-moving graphics, quick cuts and split screens, eliminate lengthy sound bites and tell young folks the essence of the story.

Mario Gamper, Vice President of Strategic Design, discusses why AI assistants might force Experience Design into a rhetorical turn. Here's a thing I'm curious about: What impact will the advent of AI assistants have on the design teams that create digital user experience and interfaces? As the success of gadgets like Alexa show, we're edging towards a paradigmatic shift to voice as our main mode of interacting with computers. This shift will send shockwaves through the design discipline. When the center of digital UI moves beyond visual, designers will probably need a new curriculum--one that includes a fundamental education in rhetoric and persuasion.

Science fiction turns fact--the term artificial intelligence seems ubiquitous at the moment, whether it's marketing technology firms boasting about superior processing power for campaign personalization or the coming singularity and robot apocalypse. Those of us in the trenches of the digital advertising world have become immune to the lure of buzzwords, no matter how many times and in how many contexts they are repeated. But at some point our curiosity bests us and we have to ask, "How much of this is the real deal and what's sheer hype?" AI is an even more unusual case--sure, chatbots and virtual personal assistants are neat, but how does that relate to the digital media world, and more precisely digital advertising and media monetization? In the end, it's all about UX--AI has the potential to be the ultimate user experience tool. But to see why, we have to take a step back and consider the roots of AI, or really--and pardon the philosophical turn--intelligence itself.

Microsoft is building an artificial intelligence (AI) research hub to speed up the integration of AI into products and services. Harry Shum, executive vice president for Microsoft's AI and research group, spoke about the new lab, called Microsoft Research AI, for the first time this week at an event in the U.K. In a blog post, he wrote that the lab will combine various disciplines -- such as machine learning, perception, and natural language processing -- to develop more sophisticated AI. This integrated approach aims to develop systems that can understand language and take action based on that understanding. Machine reading, which combines AI disciplines such as natural language processing and deep learning, is an example. "We believe AI will be even more helpful when we can create tools that combine those functions and add some of the abilities that come naturally to people," Shum wrote.

Rotten Tomatoes vice president Jeff Voris, middle, with senior editor Grae Drake, right, are filmed by creative director Jimmy Johenning at the Beverly Hills offices of the review aggregation website. Rotten Tomatoes vice president Jeff Voris, middle, with senior editor Grae Drake, right, are filmed by creative director Jimmy Johenning at the Beverly Hills offices of the review aggregation website. How Rotten Tomatoes became Hollywood's most influential -- and feared -- website On a recent Wednesday morning, the staff of Rotten Tomatoes gathers in a Beverly Hills office, laptops open -- steeling themselves for the next onslaught of reviews for Hollywood's biggest upcoming movies. But first, supervising producer Cookie Zito gives an update. "We just found out'War for the Planet of the Apes' is certified," she announces, as a couple dozen Rotten Tomatoes employees break out in applause.

Science fiction has shaped the aesthetics and sounds of tech today. So, here's a question: what if Apple's Siri talked to 2001: A Space Odyssey's HAL 9000? The subject: why Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant have feminine voices and why HAL - not to mention, IBM's Watson - talk like guys.

Jefferson Graham demonstrates that Apple's Siri actually does have a sense of humor. Watch what happens when he says, "Hey Siri, I'm a little silhouette of a man," on TalkingTech. A link has been sent to your friend's email address. A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. Jefferson Graham demonstrates that Apple's Siri actually does have a sense of humor.

Benchmarked by industry forerunners and expanding explosively by its own methodology, the best customer experiences in natural language processing (NLP) are found through continued and correct application: a surprisingly difficult task, given the subtleties of human expression. In the late '90s, the Internet first emerged as a vast, unknowable expanse. The first companies to address this digital mass – Google, Yahoo, eBay – built broad-based search engines to identify and isolate monetizable elements of this new medium, and to provide a clear map of what was worth seeing and experiencing on the web, based on each search engine's proprietary means of scoring content relevance. Upon analyzing the mass of unstructured data that makes up 80 percent of the user posts, email, messaging and other documented assets that comprise the Internet, businesses are challenged to understand what's relevant. Natural language processing, along with machine learning, have developed into fast-growing fields that businesses are using to make more efficient decisions.

According to police, Guy told Berman she needed money for a dress-making business. She promised to pay him back, but always made excuses, including that she had cancer. Eventually Berman's son found out and intervened.