Amazon's cloud services platform Amazon Web Services recently announced three AI services it said will make it easy for developers to build apps that can understand natural language, turn text into speech, have conversations using voice or text, analyze images and recognize faces, objects and scenes. This, in turn, underscores the increasing importance of AI to consumers, brands and marketers, but also raises some questions about how it will – and should – be developed. Building apps with AI capabilities has been challenging to date because doing so requires access to vast amounts of data and specialized expertise in machine learning and neural networks, Amazon said in a press release. "The combination of better algorithms and broad access to massive amounts of data and cost-effective computing power provided by the cloud is making AI a reality for application developers," added Raju Gulabani, vice president of databases, analytics and AI at AWS, in a statement. "Thousands of machine learning and deep learning experts across Amazon have been developing AI technologies for years to predict what customers might like to read, to drive efficiencies in our fulfillment centers through robotics and computer vision technologies and to give customers our AI-powered virtual assistant, Alexa. Now, we are making the technology underlying these innovations available to any developer…we are excited to see how customers use Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly and Amazon Rekognition to build a new generation of apps that have human-like intelligence and can see, hear, speak and interact with people and their environments."

Machine learning is a cool topic nowadays, people are excited about Google Assistant, Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana, Amazon Alexa, self-driving cars, robots, even apps like Allo, Uber, Snapchat are using Machine Learning to enhance the experience and of course for smart pieces of stuff. If you are interested in building kick ass apps with intelligence that includes features such as speech recognition, face detection, natural language processing, prediction or anything like that, it's not always an easy option to develop a machine learning system from the ground for any indie developers or small to medium or even for a large team because of it's cost, time (coffee) consumption. But now there are many open source machine learning platforms like Tensorflow, services like Wit.ai, Google Cloud Machine Learning APIs, Microsoft Cognitive Services, IBM Watson are available to the developers to get things done in a very convenient way. Here we will explore various machine learning libraries, APIs, and services. You can build intelligent apps using Tensorflow and even it will work on offline. Here's an Android demo built with inception model for image identification.

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He passed me over to his assistant, Amy Ingram, by CCing her into an email. Amy and I exchanged eight emails fixing up a date and then another five when Blomfield had to rearrange.

Today we Google for information, but in the future, we might not need to. Instead we may rely on our butler, namely the intelligent, voice-activated digital assistant on our smart phones, smart watches, or devices like Amazon's Echo and Alphabet's Home. Rather than searching the web, we'll be able to ask our digital assistant how to remove the stain from our shirt. It'll perform other perfunctory tasks, like adding groceries to our shopping list, checking the weather, sending a text, or ordering an Uber. Maurice E. Stucke (@MauriceStucke) is a co-founder of the Konkurrenz Group and a law professor at the University of Tennessee.

In the Game of Thrones-like artificial intelligence competition between Houses Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, the company most reticent to speak about its technology has usually been the one that ships planeloads full of stuff to consumers, hosts thousands of companies in its data centers, greenlit Catastrophe, and has a breakaway hit product that answers questions, plays music, and 4,998 or so other things. Yes, for some time, Amazon has been even more shrouded than the famously secret Apple, which opened up about its machine learning programs earlier this year. Lately, however, Amazon's head scientist and vice president of Alexa, Rohit Prasad, has been speaking up in public, making the case for his company's prowess in voice recognition and natural language understanding. Alexa, of course, is the conversational platform that supports that aforementioned hit product, Echo. On Wednesday Prasad gave an Alexa "State of the Union" address at the Amazon Web Services conference in Las Vegas, announcing an improved version of the Alexa Skills Kit, which helps developers create the equivalent of apps for the platform; a beefed-up Alexa Voice Service, which will make it easier to transform third-party devices like refrigerators and cars into Alexa bots; a partnership with Intel; and the Alexa Accelerator that, with the startup incubator Techstars, will run a 13-week program to help newcomers build Alexa skills.

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.

How can big banks keep up with nimble fintech startups trying to eat their lunch? One strategy is to act like them -- if you can't beat'em, join'em. "What we tried to do with SmartWealth is to be like a fintech, to go at that pace but within a large organisation," UBS' Shane Williams told Business Insider during a recent interview. "It's trying to get the best of both worlds." Williams is the co-head of UBS' recently launched online wealth manager, SmartWealth, which lets people gain access to the Swiss bank's investment expertise with as little as £15,000 ($18,915) to invest.

The Vinci is the world's first AI-powered, voice controlled pair of headphones. Starting as a Kickstarter program, Vinci has already received more than five times the required funding, and this kind of support is proof that AI is making waves in the consumer market. Thanks to the company Inspero Inc., consumers worldwide will have a hot new product to marvel over: a pair of AI headphones that can act as a personal assistant or intuitive media player, and all with smart noise canceling and 3d sound quality. The Vinci means to make other headphones obsolete. To do that, it's dipping into the power of AI and deep learning neural networks.