Google is adding functionality to allow Google Assistant to compete more directly with Amazon's Alexa, but what it really needs is to offer love and support to developers of smart home products. The company's failure to do this was visible on every stand where a smart home product was to be found at CES. They all worked with Amazon Alexa, but only a very tiny fraction worked with Google Assistant. Google's shopping functionality has involved linking the online ordering systems of retailers like Costco, PetSmart and Target with Google Home so it can offer a similar shopping experience to Amazon through the device. Measuring up to Amazon in this category is going to be tough because Amazon has one system through which millions of products are available globally, whereas Google will have to sign up lots of retailers in every locality where it aims to have this service available.

"If somebody like Google or Apple announced tomorrow that they had made [AI android] Ava, we would all be surprised, but we wouldn't be that surprised." Imagine a smart robot performing delicate surgery under the control of a surgeon. Or an artificial intelligence (AI) machine mapping genomic sequences to identify the link to Alzheimer's disease. Or psychiatrists applying AI in natural language processing systems on the voices of patients to assess their risk of suicide. You don't have to imagine anymore, because all of this is happening right now.

Alphabet Inc. subsidiary Google's (GOOG) artificial intelligence (AI) assistant is failing to catch on. A Bloomberg report this morning states that Chinese smartphone manufacturer Huawei, which uses Google's Android operating system for its phones, is developing its own voice-activated AI assistant. According to the report, Huawei's AI assistant, which will use local languages in China for communication, is targeted at the Chinese market and is intended to compete with the likes of Apple Inc.'s (AAPL) Siri and Amazon.com, This is the second such announcement after Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd (SSNLF), which also uses Google's mobile operating system in its phones, announced its own digital assistant last year. While Samsung has the largest number of mobile phone shipments, Huawei is ranked third. Huawei has also announced that it will pre-install Alexa, Amazon's voice assistant, on its Mate 9 phones.

As a part of Amazon's ongoing quest to make Alexa and its Echo devices deeply embedded within our lives, this week it added support for Microsoft Calendar accounts. If your account ends in Outlock.com, Live.com or Hotmail.com, then it should be accessible with no problem, however, according to the FAQ, corporate Exchange accounts are probably a no-go. Alexa already supports Google Calendar, but that's it. There's no iCloud access either, however, Geekwire points out a Redditor's project on Github that might help.

Artificial intelligence is undoubtedly one of the hottest topics these days. We often find ourselves interacting with AI without even knowing it. Various tech giants such as Facebook, IBM, Google, and Microsoft are all engaging in different AI-initiatives. They are competing on building digital personal assistants such as Facebook's M, Apple's Siri and Cortana from Microsoft. Mark Zuckerberg even plans to build his own model of Iron Man's Jarvis to run his home.

Asian fintech company 8 Securities has launched Chloe, a robo-advisor that constructs portfolios with exchange traded funds (ETFs) listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE). To begin, customers must answer a short survey which will help Chloe set goals and target dates to achieve those goals. Each yen deposited is invested into a diversified global portfolio of TSE-listed ETFs that are monitored and optimised on a daily basis. These portfolios are diversified across 50 countries, 37 industries, and 4,324 stocks and bonds. The robo-advisor uses machine learning and hence, is expected to become more intelligent over time.

In terms of sales, the iPhone is clearly Apple's most important product. But a relatively unsung hero for the company is Siri, its voice-activated digital assistant. While Siri is primarily available on iPhones, it has also made its way to Macs, the Apple TV and automobiles via Apple's CarPlay platform. Taken together, these steps all mean that if you're a heavy Apple user, Siri is probably always at your beck and call. That's important for Apple as Silicon Valley's battle over voice-activated artificial intelligence apps continues heating up: Microsoft has Cortana, Google has Google Now, and Amazon has Alexa.

A Recommender System predicts the likelihood that a user would prefer an item. Based on previous user interaction with the data source that the system takes the information from (besides the data from other users, or historical trends), the system is capable of recommending an item to a user. Think about the fact that Amazon recommends you books that they think you could like; Amazon might be making effective use of a Recommender System behind the curtains. This simple definition, allows us to think in a diverse set of applications where Recommender Systems might be useful. Applications such as documents, movies, music, romantic partners, or who to follow on Twitter, are pervasive and widely known in the world of Information Retrieval.

Increasingly, the world is becoming an intelligent, digitally enabled mesh of people, things and services. Technology will be embedded in everything in the digital business of the future, and ordinary people will experience a digitally-enabled world where the lines between what is real and what is digital blur. Rich digital services will be delivered to everything, and intelligence will be embedded in everything behind the scenes. We call this mesh of people, devices, content and services the intelligent digital mesh, and this forms the basis for our Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2017. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning have reached a critical tipping point and will increasingly augment and extend virtually every technology enabled service, thing or application.

Artificial intelligence, popularly referred to as AI, is no longer seen only in movies and TV series. Many of us are already taking advantage of it through mobile apps and smartphones. AI specifically refers to the enhanced ability that a piece of software may have, where it can understand specific information, add contextual knowledge to it and suggest responses based on that. For example, the suggestion about which content to view on YouTube has an element of AI working in the background. Available by default in many Android smartphones, Google Photos uses AI and machine learning to identify objects or human faces in a photo and club ones with common elements and the same faces into specific folders without the user's intervention.