Amazon's strategy to make Alexa available absolutely everywhere on every device ever created will give it the advantage it needs in the upcoming AI wars. The news that Amazon is making its AI technology available in the UK to third party developers (it's been available to US devs since 2015) is another nail in the coffin for rivals. Amazon has already deeply embedded its AI into the UK's national psyche with round-the-clock adverts over the Christmas period. And it worked, sales look good and even my non-techy older family members are riveted by the assistant. Now, it's delving further into our lives by latching on to other devices we use regularly like a virtual barnacle.

I've checked out a lot of smart light switches since I built my own smart home in 2007, but Brilliant's Brilliant Control is the most exciting lighting control I've seen since I've been able to control my lights with Amazon's Alexa. This one works with Alexa, of course--in fact, Alexa Voice Service is built in--but it also has a touchscreen; Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios; a motion sensor; an integrated camera and microphone; and it can control much more than just lights. Brilliant co-founder and CEO Aaron Emigh said he was in the midst of renovating his own home in the pre-Amazon Echo days when the inspiration for Brilliant Control struck. "I was looking at various smart home options. I wanted an a la carte option, because it suits my hackerish background. Systems like Crestron involved putting holes in your walls and depended on professional installers, and the next tier down was centered around security, which wasn't the lens I was looking through for a smart home. I was going to end up in a weird situation where I was dependent on my smartphone to control anything. So I thought to myself'why not put a screen and a microphone where the light switches are, so there's one in every room?' I was shocked to discover this didn't already exist."

Starbucks is putting its own spin on the virtual assistant. The popular coffee franchise has rolled out a Siri-like assistant app for mobile that lets you skip baristas and place orders by chatting or speaking directly to your phone. The feature essentially works as an extension of the Mobile and Pay functionality Starbucks launched back in 2015, which allowed customers to avoid annoying queues by ordering in advance online. Last year, Facebook's VP of Design thought the TNW Conference main stage was the best she'd ever been on. Much like Google Assistant and Apple's Siri, My Starbucks Barista has the capacity to function both as a voice-enabled assistant and a chatbot – and also maintains the ability to customize your orders according to your personal preference.

The chart below especially stood out for me. It shows our growing level of comfort with AI for customer service requests. It touches on each of the three perspectives above, and asserts that openness to AI increases for easy service questions and plummets for complex questions. Most people experience AI in the same way they experience an unengaged call center agent. In both instances, customer service fails to understand the broader context and is unable to apply the pattern recognition necessary to handle subtle or esoteric requests. The incredible pace of technology innovation has led many of us to think that technology is on the cusp of being able to do almost anything.

New details about Bixby, the Samsung Galaxy S8's AI assistant, have emerged ahead of the phone's unveiling next month. The virtual helper will support up to eight languages at launch, including English, Korean and Chinese, according to SamMobile. That pushes it out in front of Google Assistant, which supports English and German on the Pixel phone, as well as Hindi, Japanese and Portuguese through the controversial Allo messaging app. However, both trail some way behind Apple's Siri, which supports over 20 different languages. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

Microsoft's new Artificial Intelligence and Research Group announced that its Microsoft Cognitive Services includes now 25 tools forming the backbone for Cortana digital assistant and the Skype Translator. According to Hot Hardware, two of the new APIs created by the company's new Artificial Intelligence and Research Group are the Content Moderator and Bing Speech. Bing Speech is capable of both converting text to speech and translating speech into text. Microsoft's speech recognition technology uses language and acoustic models to in order to distinguish between similar-sounding words and to customize its services for a specific language. In order to narrow the focus of the recognition engine, a Custom Speech Service lets developers supply their own data.

Artificial intelligence is all around us, from searching on Google to what news you see on social media to using Siri. And with the momentum around AI growing every day, it's not surprising that some of the most innovative retail sites have recently been experimenting with the use of AI, as well. Businesses that ignore this growing trend will find themselves playing catch-up for years. The big question is how exactly is this new technology going to change retail. E-commerce is a space with a lot of potential, in part because it's such a data-rich industry, and, there's some momentum around AI gathering already. What's more, a lot of the AI techniques that are enjoying success in other applications are well-positioned to make serious impact on the space, streamlining retail processes and transforming the online experience into something more like talking to an experienced salesperson at a brick-and-mortar location.

Up until very recently, computers needed a complicated and extremely precise set of instructions in order to accomplish even the simplest of tasks. Who among us remembers programming via punch cards? Computer programming languages have evolved over the years, but the biggest step has been moving towards the elimination of complicated programming. In other words, teaching computers to learn for themselves, dubbed machine learning. Because machine learning is such a promising leap forward in technological ability, it has the very real potential to affect every person in every field of business in the near future.

What if you could hire Google as an employee--or even your Chief Marketing Officer (CMO)? Though artificial intelligence (AI) is in its early phases, the real allure is not that it could, someday, be just like a human being, but that it could be more than a human. After all, even the smartest person in your company doesn't have the wealth of information that Google does, all available in a microsecond. While humankind will likely never reach the speed or accuracy of AI in performing certain tasks, employees of the future will need to function in similar ways. They will need to pull from a broad range of knowledge to find the right answers, deliver results quickly, offer a variety of solutions to a single problem, be adaptable, consider the whole market or subject before offering a suggestion, and be consistent in their performance.

What do you look for in a partner? If you go weak at the knees for a blue-eyed brunette, you could be headed for danger as experts have revealed these are some of the most common traits found in romance scammers. With almost 8 million people using online dating in the UK, fraudsters know exactly how to get people clicking on their profiles and they'll make sure they use the right photographs to lure their victims in. Now, a study has revealed just what a typical scammer looks like - from their eye colour to their posture and even their political stance. Experts at Scamalytics, who provide anti-scammer software to dating sites, sift through millions of fake profiles every year.