You can credit IBM's Watson for creating a platform for artificial intelligence integration into a multitude of business and customer-facing applications. You can thank Facebook for all the buzz about chatbots and the gold rush of developers and venture capital creating an onslaught of bot companies. The truth is though that we are just starting to realize the potential of AI. One of the most promising applications for AI to make a very welcome impact is in customer experience. It can be debated that for all of the good technology has offered businesses over the last several decades, it has also comprised key elements of the customer experience.

It is turning into a monumental battle between tech giants. The race to create a smart home assistant has already seen a plethora of virtual assistants, from Apple's Siri to Amazon's Alexa and Facebook's chatbots. Now, Google has joined the fray with Home, a $130 smart speaker that can do everything from play music to control your lights - and has the vast knowledge of Google's search engine as its'brain'. We pitted it against Amazon's Echo Dot and Apple's Siri in a series of tests to reveal the personality (or lack of) in each of them. We pitted Google, Home,Amazon's Echo Dot and Apple's Siri against each other in a series of tests, from singing to telling jokes. Google's Home is the firm's latest AI move, after introducing its smart assistant in the new Pixel handsets last month.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has always been the subject of dreams and visions about the distant future of humankind. Even though we are nowhere near a conscious robotic system, nowadays, AI systems are ubiquitous and showing tremendous successes in various fields of our everyday life. We are using these on a daily basis, often without even noticing. Whether it is the Virtual Personal Assistants on our mobile phones (such as Siri, Google Now, and Cortana), self-driving cars, the ranking of the web pages given your search query, or the classical textbook examples such as spam filtering and recommendation systems of online media providers and marketplaces like Amazon. Various fields of AI have made a major leap forward in the recent years. As most AI systems are too complex to be defined manually, we have to resort to automatically learning rules and patterns from data using sophisticated Machine Learning (ML) techniques.

The Note 7 is still a mystery to us. We still don't know what caused those explosions but we have some possible explanations. We won't add to the pain the South Korea tech giant is experiencing so let's just focus on the upcoming Galaxy S8. The company is believed to be launching only one premium flagship starting next year so if that's the case, the Galaxy S8 should be really special. We've heard a lot about it although nothing has been confirmed yet.

It is turning into a monumental battle between tech giants. The race to create a smart home assistant has already seen a plethora of virtual assistants, from Apple's Siri to Amazon's Alexa and Facebook's chatbots. Now, Google has joined the fray with Home, a $130 smart speaker that can do everything from play music to control your lights - and has the vast knowledge of Google's search engine as its'brain'. We pitted it against Amazon's Echo Dot and Apple's Siri in a series of tests to reveal the personality (or lack of) in each of them. We pitted Google, Home,Amazon's Echo Dot and Apple's Siri against each other in a series of tests, from singing to telling jokes. Google's Home is the firm's latest AI move, after introducing its smart assistant in the new Pixel handsets last month.

Amazon and Google's virtual, voice-only assistants both allow you to carry out simple tasks. Asking questions like "who is Barack Obama?" or "how many cups are in a quart?" will offer up variations of the same answer. You can ask it to provide all sorts of information – the results of mathematic equations, the weather, or the latest headlines informed by your personal news settings. Every question you've asked can be revisited in the Google Home or Amazon Alexa app, even allowing you to play audio of your query so you can hear how the device hears you. These responses are stored in the cloud, which, depending on how paranoid you are, is unnerving.

Google just launched Google Home, a voice-activated speaker, powered by the tech giant's virtual Google Assistant that's also featured in their new Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones. The speaker aims to bring the power of Google's numerous services--like offering weather updates and converting measurements, among other tasks--into a stylish and easy-to-use package. At a quick glance, Google Home is a direct rival to the popular, Alexa-powered Amazon Echo speaker. Google has priced the newcomer attractively at $130, revealing that it has serious intentions about this rapidly growing product category. Google Home features a high-quality speaker with three audio drivers, sophisticated far-field microphones, and intuitive touch controls.

Google has a winner with Google Home, for those who want a hands-free assistant that can answer a broad range of questions that come up during day-to-day activities in the house. It easily beats what Amazon Echo can do. Google Home -- which ships to consumers this week -- is Google's answer to the Amazon Echo, which came out two years ago. Both are hands-free, voice-activated devices designed to be placed in a home and able to play music, provide news, control devices and generally serve as an all-around assistant. Part of that assistance is answering questions people might have. Here, Google Home outshines Amazon Echo because its built-in "Google Assistant" is smarter than the Echo's "Alexa" assistant.

If you need to hail an Uber, Amazon's wildly popular virtual assistant Alexa is your go-to connection. But if you're looking for an artificially intelligent conversation partner, Google Home seems like the better fit. Reviews are in for the Home device which Google releases Friday. The product is Google's answer to Amazon Echo, a cylindrical microphone that runs Alexa. The consensus: This new thing from Google is very smart.

Reviewing a product designed to learn over time is like reviewing a newborn baby. So much functionality is dependent on artificial intelligence and machine learning, the only certainty is that it'll get smarter over time. Who knows what it'll end up being: A jack-of-all-trades? Or maybe just a creeper that records everything you say? At birth, it didn't have the ability to order you Domino's, play Spotify playlists, or get things from Amazon Prime.