I still have my Chatty Cathy doll, clothes and all. Never will I forget the excitement of waking up one Christmas morning to this delightful new "best" friend. This pull-string "talking" doll manufactured by the Mattel toy company was all the rage during my youth. With a quick Google Search, I learned that she was only in production from 1959 to 1965 and I'm guessing I was five at the time. Let's not go there with the math… Chatty Cathy was cutting edge back then and I find it not unreasonable to compare the soon to be released AI friend that Mattel is calling Aristotle to the 1960's toy sensation.

When Amazon's Echo hit the market, it was basically just a voice-operated speaker. Don't get me wrong--it was an attractive piece of technology and it responded well to voice commands, but a lot of people ended up with an Echo asked Alexa a few basic questions, like: What time is it? Click here for a list of Alexa commands you're not using but should be. Here's the question I get over and over again: What else can Alexa do? The answer is: Much more than just take commands.

Millions of people own smart devices that do simple things like adjust temperature, turn down lights or lock doors when they go out. You can buy a connected fridge that tells you when you have run out of food or set up security cameras that tell you when suspicious movement is detected. There is even a toothbrush that tells you what areas of the mouth you have neglected and an intelligent hair brush that does … something. Depending on which market forecast you believe, the install base for connected devices could be anywhere between 20 billion to just over 30 billion by 2020. A recent prediction by IHS cited by Forbes said that there will be 75.4 billion devices by 2025.

Just recently I wrote an article for Venture Beat where I retold the story of the chess playing king and the traveling sage. The sage, in return for beating the king at chess, requests that the king pays his reward in rice - one grain on the first square of the board, two on the second, four on the fourth and then so on. After losing, the king quickly discovered he could not pay his debt, for on the 20th square he needed to place 1,000,000 grains of rice, on the 40th 1,000,000,000 grains of rice. And, finally on the 64th square, the king would have had to put more than 18,000,000,000,000,000,000 grains of rice - equal to about 210 billion tons. The point behind all of this is to start thinking about the power of exponential growth and how it is impacting our world and our future.

SAN FRANCISCO: Microsoft announced on Friday (Jan 13) a deal to buy Maluuba, a Montreal startup focused on making machines able to think the way people do. Bringing on board Maluuba co-founders Kaheer Suleman and Sam Pasupalak, along with their team from the startup, was intended to accelerate Microsoft's "ability to develop software so computers can read, write and converse naturally," the company said. Microsoft did not disclose financial terms of the acquisition. "Maluuba's vision is to advance toward a more general artificial intelligence by creating literate machines that can think, reason and communicate like humans - a vision exactly in line with ours," Microsoft artificial intelligence and research group executive vice president Harry Shum said in a blog post. "I'm incredibly excited about the scenarios that this acquisition could make possible in conversational AI." Tech giants Apple, Samsung, Google and Microsoft are all vying to develop the most sophisticated connected assistant - working to give software the ability to understand what people say and even anticipate desires or needs.

"Ohhh, you've got a new collar? Good boy! Do you want to go for a walk? I should have been so embarrassed saying these words. I was talking to a dog, which obviously didn't understand what I was saying, and not surprisingly, gave no reply at all; yet I thought nothing of it, and the other people around me thought the interaction (such as it was) was perfectly normal. No one gave me a second glance.

Now is the time of the year when every marketer should well reflect on the achievements of 2016 and holistically examine what the New Year is going to mean for marketing, branding, and business. With this article I proceed with a good tradition by following-up on my previous and related articles for 2016, 2015, and 2014. As we all know, paying attention to what's on the horizon does offer valuable insights. Knowing the below-listed 16 marketing trends which I consider as highly relevant for 2017, should help you to build, expand, and keep strong brands. Although this should have been ingrained in every marketer s DNA for years, however, with all the data, tech, and buzzwords flying around, one of the biggest marketing challenges of 2017 will be to stay calm, focused, and to be obsessed with the only one that matters: Your customer! How to identify her, to reach her, to engage her, to make her purchase, to have her stay loyal, to make her to recommend you, and to have her even re-purchase more of your products in the future? There is a certain risk that (marketing) managers – more than ever – get confused and fall into the trap of mixing up data-driven insights with a real customer-centric business philosophy. Therefore successful companies and brands don t worship the data gods for the sake of it; instead they have a comprehensive and deeply rooted digital transformation strategy in place which is flanked by a crystal clear marketing action plan. Enhanced and lived by every employee of the organization and not only by a chief digital officer who very often is floating around the company in search for a home base.

Microsoft announced Friday that it has acquired the Canadian artificial intelligence (AI) startup Maluuba. The acquisition will help Microsoft develop artificial intelligence with improved language understanding and communication skills. Although it is yet to release an artificially intelligent voice assistant such as the Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa, the company has, in recent years, been strengthening its AI capabilities. In September 2016, the company joined hands with Facebook, Google, Amazon and IBM to launch a nonprofit called the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society, or the Partnership on AI for short, aimed at advancing understanding of AI for the general public. With the acquisition of Maluuba, Microsoft will have an edge in terms of natural language processing.

In what The New York Times is calling The Great AI Awakening and Forbes has dubbed The Year of AI, 2017 is shaping up to be obsessively focused on artificial intelligence, a field that has been around for awhile (remember playing checkers against a computer?) Because the technology has finally reached its tipping point, AI, and its close relative machine learning, have taken a variety of industries by storm, bringing self-driving Ubers to the streets of San Francisco (and then carting them away); robotic vacuum cleaners to dirty household floors; and natural language processing to chat bots and IVR communications. With AI already embedded into these industries, it's easy to find examples of how the technology is shaping fintech. Below are eight areas of fintech into which AI has made inroads. Each area is ranked and rated (out of 5 stars) based on how it is currently influenced by AI and based on AI's potential to add value. AI is already a standard tool in robo advisory.

THIS past Christmas, millions of people will have opened boxes containing gadgets with a rapidly improving ability to use human language. Amazon's Echo device, featuring a digital assistant called Alexa, is now present in over 5m homes. The Echo is a cylindrical desktop computer with no interface apart from voice. Ask Alexa for the weather, to play music, to order a taxi, to tell you about your commute or to tell a corny joke, and she will comply. The voice-driven digital assistants from America's computer giants (Google Assistant, Microsoft's Cortana and Apple's Siri) have also vastly improved.