The latest iteration of Amazon's Fire TV Stick, first launched in the US last October, is finally UK-bound. While the little streaming dongle still won't admit 4K is a thing, it boasts a quad-core processor that Amazon says makes it 30 percent faster than the previous generation of Fire TV Stick. Navigating around the new "cinematic" Fire UI should be pretty slick, then. The £40 steamer also supports the speedy 802.11ac WiFi protocol, but the biggest upgrade has to be the snazzy new Alexa remote.

US tech giant Apple is reportedly not working on Siri-powered speaker just like Amazon Echo, an artificial intelligence (AI)-based speaker that can be controlled by voice. "The future goal of the technology is to utilize Siri as an'omnipresent AI assistant across devices' rather than have a central hub," Times reported on last week. How Siri would become omnipresent is not known at this point. Earlier this week, Apple acquired Israel-based start-up RealFace that develops deep learning-based face authentication technology. Set up in 2014 by Adi Eckhouse Barzilai and Aviv Mader, RealFace has developed a facial recognition software that offers users a smart biometric login, aiming to make passwords redundant when accessing mobile devices or PCs, as reported yesterday.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella spoke at a public event in India on Monday, stressing upon the immense potential of artificial intelligence (AI), calling it the "ultimate breakthrough" in technology. "Because for all the advances in computer interface, there is nothing to beat language [the ability to do human-level speech recognition]," he said during a fireside chat with Nandan Nilekani -- India's premier technocrat and the brain behind the Aadhaar identification system. The chat was streamed live on the Microsoft Developer page on Facebook. Nadella and Nilekani were later joined by Binny Bansal, CEO of Flipkart, India's largest e-commerce company that announced a cloud partnership with Microsoft's Azure. Calling AI "the third run time", Nadella said, "If the operating system was the first run time, the second run time you could say was the browser, and the third run time can actually be the agent. Because in some sense, the agent knows you, your work context, and knows the work. And that's how we are building Cortana. We are giving it a really natural language understanding."

American business publication Fast Company has released its list of the most innovative companies of 2017. The annual list ranks enterprises that "tap both heartstrings and purse strings and use the engine of commerce to make a difference in the world" according to its website. Amongst the top ten artificial intelligence and machine learning companies are tech giants Google and IBM and startup Iris AI. AI companies also dominated the top 10 global businesses across all sectors with Amazon at number one. Amazon was selected as the leading company for "offering even more, even fast and even smarter".

Since the past 4-5 years, we have seen a change in the shopping behavior of users, both online as well as offline. It has resulted from user's reviews and recommendations about the products ranging from fashion to home to technology, all thanks to social websites like Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and many other global as well as regional social sites. Social commerce is a term, coined by Yahoo in 2005, as a set of online shopping tools that take into account the user liking patterns, sharing reviews, information and advices on products, as per their usages, thus affecting the sales of those products. There are two types of social commerce strategies -- one is offsite where the e-retailer brings in the social angle from external social platforms, separate from their own websites, thus enhancing the sales and second is onsite social commerce platform where the website/platform uses its own channel to enhance sales based on content, context, and reviews etc. AI and ML Tech comes into play after these reviews and recommendations have been provided by the users and then placing the same in front of potential buyers for better decision making. Artificial and machine learning technologies have been used by giants like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple for more than a decade to enhance their platforms for better user experience which can now be seen to be mandatory adaptation for most of the internet based businesses, not only as it shows better ROI, but also open countless doors for future digital opportunities.

Barbie has been a princess, a chef, an astronaut and now, the popular doll is set to become a computer animation. Mattel has unveiled its 3D Barbie Hello Hologram that lives inside a box and comes to life when a child says the magic words, 'Hello Barbie'. Children can command the digital assistant, which Mattel says will cost less than $300, to change clothes, setup reminders, dance to pre-programmed music and ask the AI various questions. Barbie has been a princess, a chef, an astronaut and now, the popular doll is set to become a computer animation. Mattel has unveiled its 3D Barbie Hello Hologram that lives inside a box and comes to life when a child says the magic words, 'Hello Barbie' Mattel unveiled the latest Barbie to its collection.

ORLANDO – From Watson to Siri, Alexa to Cortana, consumers and patients have become much more familiar with artificial intelligence and natural language processing in recent years. Pick your terminology: machine learning, cognitive computing, neural networks/deep learning. All are becoming more commonplace – in our smartphones, in our kitchens – and as they continue to evolve at a rapid pace, expectations are high for how they'll impact healthcare. As it sparks equal part doubt and hope (and not a little hype) from patients, physicians and technologists, a panel of IT experts at HIMSS17 discussed the future of AI in healthcare on Sunday afternoon. Kenneth Kleinberg, managing director at The Advisory Board Company, spoke with execs from two medical AI startups: Cory Kidd, CEO of Catalia Health, and Jay Parkinson, MD, founder and CMO of Sherpaa.

Prior to that, Siri made adding an event to your calendar or quickly looking up the weather as easy as a simple push of a button on your smart phone. At what point does "Siri, tell me the weather" or "Alexa, play music" become "I'll have a cheeseburger and fries" or "What aisle can I find the peanut butter on?" or "Does this shirt come in small"? As we move away from assistants who perform simple automated tasks, 2017 has the potential to turn voice assistant technology into a virtual customer service functionality. The convergence of chatbots and virtual voice assistants has the potential to completely change the retail experience. For years, we have heard rumors about quick service retail (or QSR) replacing humans with touch screen tablets.

In the immortal words of Steve Jobs: "A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them." You might believe that customers will love your movie, your product, your job opening- but they may not even know it exists. The job of a Recommendation Engine is to open the customer/user up to a whole new world of products and possibilities, which they would not even think of directly searching for themselves. A Recommendation Engine plays a vital role in increasing the chances of a user buying a product. In today's world, with tons of data from searched products available (thanks to the digital data explosion), it is very easy to find what people are likely to buy – just by looking at their'intent' data. Needless to say, right analysis of such BIG data is absolutely necessary.

Amazon Lex is the tech that powers Alexa, which is used in the Amazon Echo (above) and Fire TV. With the rise of personal assistant chatbots, the tools required for organizations to build their own assistants are being moved to the cloud to give developers the ability to leverage these technologies in their products. Foremost among these tools is Amazon Lex, the speech recognition and natural language processing technology that powers the Alexa virtual assistant, used in the Amazon Echo speaker and Fire TV digital media player. TechRepublic's smart person's guide to Amazon Lex is an introduction to the language processing technology. This "living" guide will be updated periodically as further integrations are released.