When it comes to running a small or mid-sized business, answering the phone is an essential part of the day-to-day. And even though a ringing telephone may distract from urgent tasks, it might not make financial sense to hire a full-time receptionist. Of course, letting the phone just ring or go to voice mail isn't a viable long-term solution, so what do you do? When it comes to running a small or mid-sized business, answering the phone is an essential part of the day-to-day. Interactive voice response (IVR) can be a lifesaver in such cases. Hosted IVR, which is IVR delivered via the cloud, by subscription, now makes a lot more sense for SMBs from a cost perspective.

A year and a half ago, Amazon opened up its Alexa voice assistant to developers. With the Alexa Skills Kit, Alexa and its hardware hosts--the Echo, Dot, Tap, and now dozens more from third parties--became more than just speakers and digital weathermen. It became a platform, capable of supporting a full ecosystem of skills, which are essentially apps that you talk to instead of touch. Today, there are 10,000 skills available on Alexa. It's an exponential increase since last summer, a rise that presents a host of new opportunities--and new challenges.

An Amazon Echo device is displayed at the Ford booth at CES 2017 at the Las Vegas Convention Center on January 5, 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Amazon is sticking to its guns in the fight to protect customer data. The tech titan has filed a motion to quash the search warrant for recordings from an Amazon Echo in the trial of James Andrew Bates, accused of murdering friend Victor Collins in Bentonville, Arkansas in November 2015. And it's arguing that the responses of Alexa, the voice of the Echo, has First Amendment rights as part of that motion. The case first came to light in December, when it emerged Amazon was contesting an order to provide audio from the Echo device, during the 48-hour period from November 21 through 22 2015, alongside subscriber and account information.

Amazon has argued that the voice of Alexa, the artificial intelligence assistant used in its range of Echo speakers, has First Amendment rights. The company is fighting an order to hand over recordings from an Amazon Echo used by James Andrew Bates, who is on trial for allegedly murdering his friend Victor Collins in Arkansas in November 2015. Amazon has filed a 90-page document, which is available to read on Forbes, contesting the warrant demanding the audio covering the 48-hour period from 21-22 November 2015. 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 ...

Only Homo sapiens, of all the descendants of Homo erectus, survived on earth whereas other species such as homo soloensis, homo denisova, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo floresiensis faded away more than 40,000 years ago. What advantages did Homo sapiens possess that helped them to flourish while other species are extinct? Apparently a cognitive revolution (according to Prof. Yuval Harari in his famous book Sapiens) triggered by some kind of genetic mutation provided Homo Species with more cerebral power and thus they acquired an ability not possessed by any other species – ability to imagine things that did not exist. This ability helped them to invent things including powerful communicative languages, religion, tools and more. Does current cognitive revolution ushered under various nomenclatures such as artificial intelligence, cognitive computing etc provide more powers, this time to machines and bring in unprecedented progress to human life?

As new technologies emerge, they tend to enhance the existing ecosystem by converging with other technologies, eventually transforming various industries. Within the realm of Fintech, the two technologies that are on the verge of transforming it are Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Blockchain: Blockchain is a distributed database or a digital ledger that maintains a continuously growing list of data records that are hardened against tampering and revision. It is the foundation on which the popular cryptocurrency'Bitcoin' is built upon. Like every other technology, it has its own set of pros and cons.

Siri on the iPhone, Cortana on Windows, Alexa, self-driving cars, and face recognition on Facebook photos, these are all examples of how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already having a profound impact on human lives. This trend is also impacting manufacturing, albeit on a smaller scale now, with robots being increasingly used to replace humans in factories across the globe, from the US, Europe, Japan, China and Taiwan. Foxconn has already replaced 60,000 humans with robots in its factories, after developing artificial intelligence solutions for its manufacturing processes. Such a strategy they insist shall help them offset increasing labour costs in labour-intensive countries such as China. Also, with AI technologies finding their way into manufacturing, leading economists from MIT are worried that technology is replacing jobs at a faster pace than creating new ones, which could lead to higher unemployment over a short-term period.

These days, even when I read news about India's state owned air carrier, as "New AI connectivity between cities X & Y", the first connection my (poor human) brain makes is to'Artificial Intelligence'. Only then it connects to Air India. This is because everyone (in my extended professional circle) is talking of Artificial Intelligence. Though I had done a short elective on AI in my computer engineering days (16 years back), done some basic LISP programming as part of it, had presented a paper on'Genetic Algorithms' in a seminar (again that long ago), and am an avid watcher of Sci-Fi movies around AI (and claim to have understood Matrix the first time I watched it -- with subtitles though, ha!), I realize that my knowledge of what AI is, is no better than a layperson (or worse, since half knowledge is more dangerous). This article is an endeavor to sort of unpack AI (and the associated words like ML -- machine learning, DL -- deep learning) for myself. And publishing it around to benefit others that are in a similar boat. And also to get feedback from others to correct my understanding. Without much dumbing down (or may be with), Artificial Intelligence is fundamentally anything that a computing machine does. Even the basic accountant calculator that does 2 2 4 is'artificial intelligence'. However, we do not consider them as'AI' because of what is called'AI effect' -- When we know'how' a machine does something'intelligent,' it ceases to be regarded as intelligent. Tools we take for granted (pick any of your favorite app) are all'AI'. Anything that is'eaten by software' can be considered as Artificial Intelligence. And why is everyone talking about it?

When I was a young boy I saw the classic movie "2001 A Space Odyssey" with HAL, the voice interactive computer system that bordered on AI, and that sparked in me, a lifelong interest and career in IT. Today we are seeing devices that are starting to provide the beginnings of that same functionality like the Amazon Echo, Dot, or Google Home. It's one thing to sit in your living room and call out to the air "Alexa, how old is Matt Damon" or "Alexa, play'The Logical Song' by Supertramp", it's another when your 6 year old is having a conversation with Alexa and orders a bunch of things from Amazon and it is quite another when you are trying to find ways to use it in the office to make your company more productive. The difference between Alexa and HAL is pretty dramatic, but at the core of them both, and AI in general, is Machine Learning. As Guy Levy-Yurista, Sisense Head of Product, described in this recent blog post: "Sisense employs machine learning as a core element of its In-Chip data processing algorithms….We call it query recycling – breaking queries into smaller blocks that are later reassembled to answer future queries: if user A asks a completely new question such as'what was our average deal size last year?' and user B later asks'what is our year-over-year growth in sales?', This isn't OLAP, it is a learning algorithm that grows smarter and more efficient over time and as more unique queries accumulate. It learns to identify the reusable chunks within each query, and to use these as a knowledge base for future reference".

The concept of artificial intelligence (AI) has always fascinated humans. The ancient Greek myths of Hephaestus and Pygmalion incorporated the idea of intelligent robots and artificial beings. In the 1950s, British scientist Alan Turing proposed the now-famous Turing Test as a measure of machine intelligence, and Isaac Asimov published his Three Laws of Robotics. The Turing Test has been long passed, and AI is an everyday occurrence with Siri and Google Now. At the same time SMS messaging has become the most popular method of written communication in history, with an estimated 6 billion humans now using mobile messaging to talk to each other around the world.