MANILA, Philippines – This is not a phone conversation or a chat session with a customer service representative. Alexa is the digital voice assistant residing inside Amazon's wifi-enabled, voice-controlled smart speakers Amazon Echo and Amazon Echo Dot. Her capabilities go beyond rattling off the day's news or the weather, or playing music. She can order pizza, shoes, jewellery or even an Uber ride (at least in the US). You can ask her to turn on or off your TV, the lights or adjust the temperature in your room (provided you have a connected home).

There have been several discussions lately around machine intelligence that are started to converge in how they may change competition and regulation in all markets but is likely to become a bigger issue in 2017. This is a bubble waiting to burst. The recent letter for Apple to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration regarding policy changes to help promote automated self-driving vehicles stressed not just a level playing field to promote new technology and data sharing but also the impact of automated vehicles on the public good, including their consequences for employment and public spaces. Other issues around consumer product automation in the home with Amazon Echo Alexa and Google Home have raised the bar in interactive systems and questions over the type of privacy and data use issues these may bring. Other issues have been raised over the use by Facebook of algorithms for "editing" the social media sites for certain political issues or in the case of their entry to the Chinese market and creating a censoring app to comply with regulations.

This means the intersection of IoT, point of sale, payments, analytics and loyalty, among others. In this article, you will hear a broad spectrum of my own interests and some predictions and insights on the future or retail, technology in 2017 and beyond. Since Star Cloud itself is in the business of IoT, and connecting the cloud, devices in the store (such as printers) with mobile and the consumers themselves, while empowering small businesses in the process, we realize that now more than ever, everything is connected. Amazon Go is remarkable as an example of the confluence of sensor data that will be possible in the future store. We believe analytics are a bit part of how retailers of the future will be able to leverage data in the brick-and-mortar shopping locations of the next decade.

Disruption ahead: Deloitte's point of view on IBM Watson8 9. What makes Watson unique In technical terms, IBM Watson is an advanced open-domain question answering (QA) system with deep natural language processing (NLP) capabilities. At this point, the Watson Software as a Service (SaaS) platform is most effectively used to sift through massive amounts of text--documents, emails, social posts, and more--to answer questions in real time. Watson accepts questions posed by the user in natural language and provides the user with a response (or a set of responses) by generating and evaluating various hypotheses around different interpretations of the question and possible answers to it. Unlike keyword-based search engines, which simply retrieve relevant documents, Watson gleans context from the question to provide the user with precise and relevant answers, along with confidence ratings and supporting evidence. Its learning capabilities allow Watson to adapt and improve hypothesis generation and evaluation processes over time through interactions with users. Developers and other users can improve the accuracy of responses by "training" Watson. IBM is also continuing to expand Watson's capabilities to incorporate visualization, reasoning, ability to relate to users, and deeper exploration to gain a broader understanding of the information content. Watson recently launched a new platform service that has the ability to ingest and interpret still and video images, which is another significant type of unstructured data.

An internet mastermind decided to have some fun with his Google Home and Amazon Echo and locked them into a loop. Obviously we don't have the type of artificial intelligence that appears in Westworld today, but we do interact with some form of A.I. everyday. Whether it's Pandora predicting what kind of music you might like or a smart car A.I. is all around us. One particular piece of A.I. continues to get more and more prevalent, virtual assistants. It started with Siri on your phone, but has now moved into the home with Google Home and Amazon Echo.

Earlier this month, the internet got in a froth about Apple's decision to drop the 3.5mm analogue audio jack from the new iPhone. Users took to Twitter to vent their outrage, while tech analysts, such as Paul Erickson at IHS Technology, suggested that the removal was money-driven: "It should be noted that wireless models are the highest revenue-generating products within the headphone market," he told the Financial Times. Further disapproval was directed at Apple's replacement for wired earphones, the AirPod, essentially a wireless earphone and microphone – "like a tampon without a string" according to the Guardian – while the writers of US late-night talkshow Conan created a satirical Apple ad featuring the devices plopping from users' ears to floor and being eaten by their pet dogs. Yet, as Chris Saad, head of product at Uber, has pointed out in a post on Medium, Apple did more than launch some earbuds: "They launched a wireless microphone as well." By which he means the day when we converse all day long with a virtual assistant similar to the one voiced by Scarlett Johansson in Her is drawing closer.

An artificial intelligence program has written a Christmas carol. Researchers at the University of Toronto used their "" program to write a Christmas carol based off of a "Christmassy photograph," The Guardian reports. The scientists simply uploaded the photograph into a computer hosting the program and then "let it do its thing." The artificial intelligence program then wrote several lines of lyrics and sang them to music it Read More ... Tags: Computer systems Computer Software Artificial intelligence Google's DeepMind'Lab' opens up source code, joins race to develop artificial general intelligence Following right on its heels came Google's that, its machine learning platform, has created a "lab." The DeepMind Lab offers a 3D training environment, and its entire code library is now available on the open source hosting service GitHub. With Universe, OpenAI aimed to address a primary challenge for AI research, which is a lack of "a large variety of realistic environments [for AI agents to] learn progressively more Read More ... Tags: Computer systems Artificial intelligence Artificial general intelligence Places: Americas North America United States Microsoft's digital assistant, Cortana, could be getting an upgrade--and Intel may be helping.

A year ago I wrote that I had seen the future. I had attended the IBM Insights conference in Las Vegas, an entire conference devoted to the Internet of Things, analytics, cognitive marketing and related topics. And if the concept of Moore's Law (that technology doubles every year – or every 18 months or two years, depending on what you read) holds true, then a lot has happened since then. While last year's future is now a history lesson, what is currently happening in the World of Watson is moving at warp speed! This past week more than 17,000 people attended IBM's World of Watson, the new name of the conference devoted to cognitive technology.

Many Google users believe the company records audio through phones and computers, then applies those recordings to the AutoComplete options in Google Search. I asked followers on Google about this and one wrote: "If me and my wife are talking about some random subject like how long turtles live, I'll type'how' and it will fill in'long do turtles live' like it was listening. And I'm terrified and impressed." The anecdotal evidence is convincing. Some say AutoComplete is more than just specifically accurate, it's personal.

As the AI era continues to unfold, the idea of a future driven by artificial intelligence can evoke mixed emotions.Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) co-founder and Chairman Bill Gates referred to AI as the "holy grail" in computer science. On the other hand, and taking a far more apocalyptic perspective, Tesla CEO Elon Musk likened the development of artificial intelligence technologies to "summoning the demon." Regardless of our feelings on the matter, artificial intelligence is set to play an increasingly prominent role in our day-to-day lives. Let's examine 9 statistics that speak to how artificial intelligence is set to become one of the most important technology trends of our lifetimes. Forget GE! Heres how to play the largest growth opportunity in history Forget GE! Heres how to play the largest growth opportunity in history In a survey of corporate executives, 32% of respondents said voice recognition software like Apple'sSiri, Alphabet's (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) Google Assistant, and Amazon.com's