Emerging technology trends signal a future with screenless interactions between businesses and consumers, with voice, augmented and virtual reality, wearable devices, and artificial intelligence slowly but surely removing the traditional graphic user interface (GUI) from the equation. "The next decade will be even more disruptive for how customers interact with brands," said Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen at last month's Summit EMEA. Here are the numbers to back it up. It also predicts that 85% of customer interactions will be managed without a human by that time. In fact, 72% termed it a "business advantage." The majority, 31%, said virtual personal assistants.

Overview: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Cognitive Computing are increasingly integrated in many areas including Internet search, entertainment, commerce applications, content optimization, and robotics. The long-term prospect for these technologies is that they will become embedded in many different other technologies and provide autonomous decision making on behalf of humans, both directly, and indirectly through many processes, products, and services. AI will anticipated to have an ever increasing role in ICT including both traditional telecommunications as well as many communications enabled applications and digital commerce. Fast growing AI technologies for consumer facing industries include chat bots and Virtual Personal Assistants (VPA) and smart advisors. These technologies leverage autonomous agents to enable an ambient user experience for applications, services, and enhanced commerce.

In the case of Google Home, you can add text or number "ingredients" when you create an applet, ingredients that can then be used in the subsequent actions. A text ingredient might be a tweet you want posting, or a number ingredient might be the temperature at which you want to set your thermostat. So to create a Google Home command to send a tweet, select Twitter as your action, then choose Post a tweet. The {{TextField}} ingredient (the words you spoke after the voice command trigger) should already be filled out as the Tweet text. You can adapt these examples to whatever purpose you like.

Ushering in the biggest changes to the Skype user interface in years, the messaging app that made "to Skype" a verb for video chat is today taking a page from Snapchat's playbook as part of a larger move to distinguish itself from competitors. Perhaps most noteworthy among the new tools and features is Highlights, a storytelling tool that allows people to share temporary snippets of their lives, much like Instagram or Snapchat Stories. Highlights can be seen by your Skype contacts and expire seven days after publication. Also like Snapchat, the new Skype camera is available with a simple swipe right and allows you to add expression to a photo by drawing on it or adding stickers or text. The new version of Skype will roll out to Android users worldwide over the next month and arrive on iOS in July, according to a Skype blog post published today.

A global study finds several new categories of human jobs emerging, requiring skills and training that will take many companies by surprise. The threat that automation will eliminate a broad swath of jobs across the world economy is now well established. As artificial intelligence (AI) systems become ever more sophisticated, another wave of job displacement will almost certainly occur. It can be a distressing picture. But here's what we've been overlooking: Many new jobs will also be created -- jobs that look nothing like those that exist today.

Despite the massively larger size of the Google Home speaker, the winner of "who can actually hear a user" is the Echo Dot, which was able to hear me from farther away and without me having to look at it. After seeing the poor feedback of Watson in Bridge Crew, I decided to take my four digital assistants for a spin. After 21 questions across four assistants, I learned that Alexa cannot give basic information about Amazon Prime videos, none of them can properly understand which movie you're looking for information for, and none of them can actually recommend stuff. Also, Google still needs to learn how to round up. I also learned I'm going to need a bigger set of questions. First, the purpose of this test is to test the assistants on the one skill that is a must-have for a disembodied speaker: Information retrieval and processing. This is not a comprehensive test, but is indicative of the types of questions that one might ask based on conversation, i.e. two or more people are having a conversation and they reach a question that needs an answer. To begin with, I summarise the results, mostly for fun. After that, you can browse what I found the most interesting 40 questions, and the varied (or non-varied) answers offered by each assistant for those. This piece is not intended to be illustrative on who is the "best" assistant.

Yes, Apple saved the most substantive changes for its tablets, so it's tempting to overlook the enhancements on the iPhone side of things. That would be selling the iOS 11 update short. While this initial beta iOS 11 feels more like a continuation of iOS 10 than an entirely new version, it does introduce some noteworthy changes that can expand what our phone can do. Some are available now, such as a customizable Control Center and Siri-powered translation tools, and others are on the horizon, like Apple Pay support for transferring money and augmented-reality-friendly apps. Here's what we like -- and what we don't -- so far.

Conversational interfaces where called a break-through technology by MIT Technology Review. Another article went on to say... "We think the next era will belong to "the conversational layer" -- both text- and voice-driven -- that will use chat, messaging, or natural language interfaces to interact with people, brands, services, and bots." This conversation layer is powered by conversational or dialog agents. Done right, the agent can greatly improve customer experience and get more tasks done through automation. I grabbed this deck from a Stanford class that provides a good technical overview of NLU and conversational agents.

THE ORIGINAL MACHINERY question, which had seemed so vital and urgent, eventually resolved itself. Despite the fears expressed by David Ricardo, among others, that "substitution of machinery for human labour…may render the population redundant", the overall effect of mechanisation turned out to be job creation on an unprecedented scale. Machines allowed individual workers to produce more, reducing the price of many goods, increasing demand and generating a need for more workers. Entirely new jobs were created to oversee the machines. As companies got bigger, they required managers, accountants and other support staff.

A few days ago I attended Google I/O 2017 in Mountain View and I would like to share what I learned. As always there were so many parties the night before I/O. I went to two parties: Women Techmaker's dinner with over 1000 other women at GARField park near Googleplex, and the Android Study Group (ASG) mixer at LinkedIn. The best part of Google I/O, besides the incredible learning, was hanging out with friends. On the first day of I/O, Sundai Pichai opened the Google Keynote which can be summed up with this message: mobile first to AI first.