If you've been waiting for Google to bring its smart Home speaker to the UK, you may only have to hang on a little bit longer. A Google spokesperson confirmed to Engadget today that the contoured cylinder will make its journey across the Atlantic in the second quarter of this year, giving the Amazon Echo some much-needed competition in the process. Details are scarce right now but Rick Osterloh, Google's SVP of Hardware, told BBC reporter Rory Cellan-Jones that he believes the Home's "AI skills and vast data" will give it the edge over its rival. The Echo has been on sale in the UK since September 2016 and has already gained support from various local apps and services, which may put it slightly ahead of Google's offering at launch. As for release date and price, Google will provide more information in the near future.

Mobile World Congress 2017 -- Telef--nica has taken a bold leap into the age of artificial intelligence with its launch today of a new digital assistant called Aura, which appears to be the product of a two-year research initiative at the Spanish telco that has been a closely guarded secret. Unveiled in Barcelona on the cusp of this year's Mobile World Congress, Aura sounds and works much like Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL)'s Siri or Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN)'s Alexa, allowing customers to check on details of their Telef--nica service -- and ask for problems to be resolved or new features to be provided -- using a voice interface on a mobile device. Judging by the demonstration at Telef--nica's offices in Barcelona, Aura works at least as effectively as the digital assistants developed by the web giants but differs in one important respect: It stores and can act upon all of the information about a particular user that is relevant to his or her relationship with the operator. In fact, Telef--nica balks at the "digital assistant" label, preferring to think of Aura as a "cognitive intelligence" system than a neat bit of voice-recognition software.

The most basic and well known application of NLP is Microsoft Word spell checking. Text analysis, also known as sentiment analytics is a key use of NLP. Businesses are most concerned with comprehending how their customers feel emotionally and use that data for betterment of their service. Email filters are another important application of NLP. By analyzing the emails that flow through the servers, email providers can calculate the likelihood that an email is spam based its content by using Bayesian or Naive based spam filtering.

Universities will get £17m to help them develop pioneering robotics and AI as part of the plans to support the'booming' sector, which is behind smartphone voice and touch recognition technology and digital assistants such as the iPhone's Siri. AI also forms the bedrock of video games and music and film recommendations services, as well as improving online customer services, and is used in fraud detection tools used by banks. Among the projects supported with the money from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is a move by the University of Manchester to develop autonomous robots for hazardous environments such as nuclear facilities. Researchers at Imperial College London will use some of the funds to try and make advances in the field of surgical micro-robotics. A major review of AI will also be carried out by Professor Dame Wendy Hall, Regius Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, and BenevolentTech chief executive Jerome Pesenti.

On February 9, 2017, two technology market leaders made announcements: SAP unveiled its next-generation intelligent ERP system, and Nvidia announced that demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications was driving demand for its graphics platform. On the face of it, these announcements were business as usual – routine sound bites that proliferate in the tech news landscape. Look a bit deeper, though, and you realize that this day marked a profound shift in both the way businesses use technology and the implications for the rest of us. For decades, developing a computer that could think has been the Holy Grail of technology. And while we have made tremendous progress in our ability to process vast amount of data, the "thinking" part has remained mostly elusive. We are still stuck between two diametrically opposed visions of AI – on one side, it's the smart but deeply dystopian world of HAL ("2001: A Space Odyssey") and on the other, it's a simpler world of devices like Alexa or Siri playing songs or ordering items for us.

Sony Corp. and Line Corp., Japan's most popular messaging service, are considering joining forces to develop devices powered by artificial intelligence. The companies are exploring opportunities around digital personal assistant technology to co-create a new communication experience, Sony said in a statement at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, on Monday. Sony unveiled concept earphones powered by Xperia Agent, a virtual butler that responds to voice commands and head gestures. While Sony's Xperia smartphones are an also-ran in a market dominated by Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co., Chief Executive Officer Kazuo Hirai has resisted pressure to shutter the mobile business. He argues it will serve as a springboard into the nascent market for wearable and interconnected devices known as the Internet of Things.

The company is working on a new feature that would allow its voice-enabled assistant to distinguish between different voices, according to a report form Time. SEE ALSO: Hey, Siri: How'd you and every other digital assistant get its name? The feature, which for now is reportedly called "Voice ID," enables Echo devices to recognize the voice of the main account holder associated with the speaker. Such a feature could be used to prevent others in the house from making purchases or using voice commands. Though Time reports the technology has been in the works for more than a year, it's not clear when, or if, the company will launch the feature. The underlying tech is reportedly ready, but the report speculates the Seattle-based company could be delaying the feature due to privacy concerns.

For all of Alexa's many skills, one major thing Amazon's voice assistant is currently missing is the ability to distinguish who is actually speaking to it. According to a new report from Time magazine, however, the online retail giant is currently working to make that a reality. As Time's sources inside Amazon explained, the feature would use a "voice print" to verify each speaker's identity and primary account holders could set Alexa to require their voice print for specific commands. That means that the person with the credit card tied to the account could set their Echo to require their voice for purchases and restocking the fridge. The Voice ID feature, which has reportedly been in development since 2015, could also help ease some of those Alexa headaches and accidental shopping sprees.

Task-oriented dialog systems have been applied in various tasks, such as automated personal assistants, customer service providers and tutors. These systems work well when users have clear and explicit intentions that are well-aligned to the systems' capabilities. However, they fail if users intentions are not explicit. To address this shortcoming, we propose a framework to interleave non-task content (i.e. everyday social conversation) into task conversations. When the task content fails, the system can still keep the user engaged with the non-task content. We trained a policy using reinforcement learning algorithms to promote long-turn conversation coherence and consistency, so that the system can have smooth transitions between task and non-task content. To test the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we developed a movie promotion dialog system. Experiments with human users indicate that a system that interleaves social and task content achieves a better task success rate and is also rated as more engaging compared to a pure task-oriented system.

Alexa has always been able to hear your voice but it might be able to actually recognize it soon. Amazon is developing technology for the Echo lineup of home assistant devices that would allow it to recognize the voices of individual users, according to Time. As Time notes, this feature is expected to be applied for general use and security applications. For instance, Alexa could require purchases to need a specific user's voice in order to fully process orders. While Amazon has finished developing much of the technology for voice ID, secondary issues like privacy concerns have delayed the feature rollout, which does not yet have a definite release date.