You've heard the rumblings of the robots, right? When I make a customer service call and get an eerily nuanced answer from a chatbot, I hear the rumbling of the robots. When I call out to my digital assistant and Siri/Alexa/Cortana makes a wise-cracking response, I feel the rumblings. I can't help but love my Roomba, and I have mixed feelings about the robot that assembled my car, but what about the more nebulous forms of Artificial Intelligence? Up to 50 percent of the human workforce may be replaced by machines, a 2013 Oxford study predicts, and McKinsey estimates that 60 percent of all jobs have least 30 percent of activities "that are technically automatable, based on technologies available today."

Amazon is off to a profitable start in 2017. The company's first-quarter sales jumped 23 percent to $35.7 billion, beating analyst expectations, and top executives pinned part of that spike on the Alexa ecosystem. "We're very encouraged by the customer response to Echo products," one exec said during Amazon's financial call today. "Not only the products, but the ability now to use tablets as Echo devices, since we spread the Alexa technology to many of those devices. We're also happy with the success we've had with developers; there are now more than 12,000 Alexa skills, so we think that's all foundational."

"It is the embodiment of human intelligence and there is really nothing more at present than a thin veneer of that – we simply don't have the computing power to build a neural network like the human brain," Nathan Lowe, managing director, ASI Solutions, said in an interview. "AI is something that performs a specific set of tasks in a human-like way. Human intelligence has creativity, innovation, sentience, morals, gut feel, is situation aware, bias, feelings, and has learned from its mistakes. AI like this is not going to happen for a while," he said. Lowe has been with ASI since 1999 and became managing director in May 2015.

Google has long said that it wants to open up its Assistant to a broader ecosystem of hardware companies and developers. Today it's taking a major step in this direction with the launch of the Google Assistant SDK, which allows developers to build the Assistant's smarts into their own hardware prototypes. Those could be smart mirrors, Google Home-like appliances or a teetotaler's favorite robot bartender -- the world is your oyster. It's worth stressing that Google is only making the API freely available for building prototypes for now. If you want to commercialize a project, you still need written permission from Google.

Soon enough, Amazon's Alexa will shout out your grocery list. That's assuming developers take advantage of the new language framework that Amazon has added to its digital assistant. The idea is that the Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) will hopefully give Alexa more natural speaking patterns. Specifically, now Alexa is capable of whispering, bleeping out swear words and adding emphasis to a phrase in addition to changing volume, speed and pitch of its voice. The Amazon Developers page has sample code available too, so you can hear what Alexa is supposed to sound like before adding the SSML to your project. This is a pretty big step toward actually getting a digital assistant that sounds like a human in addition to it being another move from Bezos and Co. that opens the platform up to outsiders.

Amazon Echo and Google Home are duking it out for the crown as the top smart home hub in homes everywhere, making Alexa and Assistant household names -- but a very familiar ringer might soon enter the competition: the OG AI assistant herself, Siri. Apple's been rumored to have its own smart home speaker hub in development since last year, when multiple reports surfaced claiming to have insider info about the project. Those reports mentioned potential features like facial sensors and bigger and better speakers. Australian tech leaker Sonny Dickson is the latest to come forward with news about Apple's impending smart hub in a pair of tweets, claiming that work on the Siri-centric device could be close to completion. There's not much info to be had here -- you can only fit so many leaks into two tweets.

Phones are no longer simply "smart" -- they are equipped with everything you need to navigate modern life. And they're only getting smarter -- the artificial intelligence (AI) that we interact with every day is making the move to become a fully fledged, reliable personal assistant. With innovation at fever pitch in India and beyond, redefining the "smart" in smartphone is no mean feat. It means anticipating the needs of the consumer, and ensuring that a device is fully equipped to integrate into everyday life without causing disruption or inconvenience. As the resident PA that resides in the Panasonic Eluga Ray series of smartphones, Arbo could be to you what Jarvis is to Iron Man, given half the chance.

If you have seen the movie'Iron Man', you might remember Tony Stark's home computing system J.A.R.V.I.S; an artificially intelligent home computing system that took care of everything from the home's heating and cooling systems to Stark's hot rod in the garage. It looked pretty great on screen, but unlike to AI technologies today, Stark's AI assistant: Recently, Mark Zuckerberg created a code for another virtual assistant (also named Jarvis) to automate his home. While Mark's tool (controlled via iOS app) has a long way to go before it can emulate movie's J.A.R.V.I.S, it does come close and in the process, acknowledges the challenges that app developers face trying to integrate AI capabilities in their projects. In this post, we will discuss what these challenges are while taking the development of Mark's AI- powered digital assistant in context. Current machine learning software uses natural language processing (NLP) to convert text into data.

You probably have food that's been in your freezer longer than David Foster (nope, still not the composer) stayed at Google after leaving Amazon. After six months, Foster is vacating his position as vice president of Google's vice president of hardware product development, according to Bloomberg. In case you forgot, he played a role in the launch the Pixel phone and Google Home speaker's launches. Prior to that, he led hardware development on Amazon's Echo speakers, the Kindle Paperwhite and Voyage e-readers. Looking at his resume on LinkedIn, his short stay is something of an anomaly.

With work comes unavoidable tedium, burning an inordinate amount of time. For some, the time lost is enough to justify hiring an assistant–an expensive solution that can be difficult to scale. But some tasks once coordinated by costly humans are becoming automated. With advances in AI, a new, tech-based breed of assistants, often referred to as virtual assistants, are entering the market of support. If startups have it their way, my people won't get in touch with your people; instead, your bots will get in touch with my bots.