If voice assistants really are the next big user interface, then Amazon is off to fantastic start -- by the numbers, at least. As this chart from Statista shows, Amazon's Alexa assistant now has more than 10,000 "skills" (i.e., third-party voice-enabled applications). That's double the amount that was available just last quarter. To be clear: That developers are interested in Alexa is good news for Amazon, and Alexa itself seems to be well ahead in the home compared to rivals like Google Assistant, the AI found in the Google Home speaker that competes directly with the Alexa-centric Amazon Echo. Calling up an Uber or ordering a pizza just by yelling across the room is convenient enough, but for every useful skill, there are 500 CorkOrnaments.com

Motorola might have lured people to its MWC press conference with the promise of new phones, but the real talking point came toward the end of the event. After hyping a pair of mid-range devices and some fun Moto Mod concepts, the company confirmed that it's working with Amazon to bring Alexa to Moto phones. While the first steps of Motorola's Alexa partnership are now well known, it's the stuff that Motorola later told Engadget about its plans that seems most exciting. Let's start from the beginning. Our first taste of this Amazon/Motorola mash-up will come in the form of an Alexa-powered Moto Mod.

Picture a future where a robot suggests where to go for dinner, which meetings to take or which hotel you should stay at during an important client event. That's just an example of the impact artificial intelligence (AI) can have on the ways we work and interact with one another. When Apple first introduced Siri in 2011, it had just scratched the surface in terms of what was possible with AI, voice recognition and digital assistance. But as technology leaps forward, experts predict AI is now poised to transform business and our personal lives in more ways than we can imagine. Why this sudden barrage of predictions about AI and its potential to change the world? Taken together, these three developments created the ideal conditions for AI to evolve.

This is my first guide posted on GitHub, bear with me. You can submit a pull request with anything else you think should be added here. It will come as no surprise to those of you reading this (thanks!), that the interest and applications of'Voice-Assistants' is growing rapidly. Amazon Alexa recently hit 10,000 skills and there is talk around what will drive adoption for the next 10,000. I wont be diving into specifics and discussing issues like retention.

The Amazon Echo can seem like your best friend--until it betrays you. That's because this device is different from anything else in your house. Alexa, the voice assistant that powers Echo and more, is always listening, sending what you say after using a "wake" word to Amazon's servers. Of course, Echo isn't the only voice-assistant speaker on the market, but it sits in millions of homes, and Alexa is headed to devices from companies like Ford, Dish, Samsung, and Whirlpool. Veteran civil trial attorney Gerald Sauer is a founding partner at Sauer & Wagner LLP of Los Angeles.

Machine learning has long powered many products we interact with daily - from "intelligent" assistants like Apple's Siri and Google Now, to recommendation engines like Amazon's that suggest new products to buy, to the ad ranking systems used by Google and Facebook. More recently, machine learning has entered the public consciousness because of advances in "deep learning" - these include AlphaGo's defeat of Go grandmaster Lee Sedol and impressive new products around image recognition and machine translation. In this series, we give an introduction to some powerful but generally applicable techniques in machine learning. These include deep learning but also more traditional methods that are often all the modern business needs. After reading the articles in the series, you should have the knowledge necessary to embark on concrete machine learning experiments in a variety of areas on your own.

Elliptic Labs says it can use the speakers and mics on smart home assistants to detect a person's presence.

One of the great horrors of Windows 10 is that Microsoft forces you to use Bing and Microsoft Edge with Cortana. When you search with Cortana, any web searches are automatically sent to Bing and displayed in the Edge browser, no matter what your default browser is. Before April 2016 you could use any browser you wanted, although Cortana still insisted on Bing for search. But then Microsoft put a stop to browser choice, and Cortana-loving Edge haters have been recoiling ever since, until now. Norway-based developer Daniel Aleksandersen recently created a program called EdgeDeflector that puts a stop to Cortana's shenanigans.

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.