Amazon's Echo has made tangible the promise of an artificially intelligent personal assistant in every home. Those who own the voice-activated gadget (known colloquially as Alexa, after its female interlocutor) are prone to proselytizing "her" charms, applauding Alexa's ability to call an Uber, order pizza or check a 10th-grader's math homework. The company says more than 5,000 people a day profess their love for Alexa. On the other hand, Alexa devotees also know that unless you speak to her very clearly . . . I hate her, I love her," one customer wrote on Amazon's website, while still awarding Alexa five stars.

I believe it was Sartre who wisely said hell is conversational AI. Despite the best intentions of engineers, today's machine learning really is the savior and handicap of personal assistants. Berkeley-based startup Semantic Machines might suffer the same Achilles' heel, but its team of 18 artificial intelligence PhDs thinks it can get farther than the current state-of-the-art establishment. To understand what Semantic Machines is trying to build, you have to think about what existing personal assistants lack. Behind relatable names and repetitive humor, Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana and Alexa all essentially work the same way -- they recognize and parse speech, classify intent and then execute commands.

He's been the voice of God, narrated the journey of penguins, and delivered driving instructions. Now, Morgan Freeman is lending his iconic sound to Mark Zuckerberg. The Facebook CEO on Tuesday introduced Jarvis, a digital butler that can do everything from controlling living room lights to entertaining baby daughter Max. Inspired by Tony "Iron Man" Stark's fictional Jarvis AI, Zuck's personal assistant can control lights, open the front gate for family and friends, make toast, and help choose daily outfits or entertain Zuckerberg's daughter, Max. Early this year, Zuckerberg announced plans to build a robot valet using technology like voice and facial recognition, data visualization, and automated nannying.

AWS (Amazon Web Services) introduced a handful of new artificial intelligence (AI) services at its re:Invent conference last week. Among the new products are Polly, a more lifelike text-to-speech service, Rekognition, an image analysis and face recognition service that can be added to applications and Lex, a standalone version of the technology that powers the company's Alexa AI assistant. "Amazon AI services are fully managed services so there are no deep learning algorithms to build, no machine learning models to train, and no up-front commitments or infrastructure investments required," the company said in a statement. "This frees developers to focus on defining and building an entirely new generation of apps that can see, hear, speak, understand, and interact with the world around them." So far, few developers have been able to build, deploy, and broadly scale apps with AI capabilities due to the vast amount of data and specialized expertise in machine learning and neural networks required, Amazon said.

Anyone who has ever done any news video knows that much of what originally gets recorded winds up on the cutting room floor, or these days, in the digital dustbin. That's usually for the best and that was the case recently when myself and other IDG editors were asked to share our 2017 tech predictions, as seen in the embedded video here. But since I went to the effort of coming up with another prediction, beyond expecting 5G hype to crank up in 2017, and looked back to see how my 2016 predictions fared, I figured I'd lay that all out here. My other prediction, which was essentially thrust upon me every time I attended a conference in the second half of 2016, or more recently, peered into my email inbox, is that enterprise IT staffs are going to be inundated with requests by higher ups and end users to support conversational interfaces and chatbots. The demand for such support will rise as people become more and more used to communicating via real-time messaging systems (from texting to Facebook Messenger to Slack to Microsoft Team to Cisco Spark) and via conversational interfaces found in consumer products from Amazon Echo (5M sold in 2 years) to Google Home to Apple and Microsoft devices.

You ask your smartphone virtual assistant to make an appointment for you. You receive a message alert from your bank enquiring if you made a certain transaction. You receive recommendations for music or movies or online purchases based on your past behaviour. These are all examples of Artificial Intelligence (AI) entering your daily life. There is no widely accepted definition of the term or what constitutes AI. Definitions are usually based on some variation of computerized systems or computers exhibiting behaviour or thought that is normally demonstrated by humans or requires intelligence (which itself is hard to define). It could involve rationally solving complex problems or taking appropriate actions to achieve objectives in real world circumstances.

We've been hearing about AI, machine learning, natural language processing, and the like for a while now. Sometimes, even referred to as the same thing. But really, what are those things? How do they affect Google's search results? And why does any of this even matter? In this article, I've put together 5 trends that are revolutionizing search, with a detailed explanation of the mechanisms behind each one, its role in Google's ranking algorithm, and the impact it's likely to have on SEO. But before we get down to the five, here's an important notice: all these five concepts, or "trends", do not exist in isolation and are deeply interconnected in Google's algo. Often, I will be calling a trend something that is in fact only one side of a phenomenon. I'm doing this because that side has its distinct traits and impact on SEO.

Coming off the heels of yesterday's post detailing a project to build his own home AI, Mark Zuckerberg is back today with a goofy proof-of-concept video showing off an idealized version of how his Jarvis system actually works. The video showcases some of the actual tasks that Jarvis can theoretically perform, but the whole thing comes off as a fancy version of Amazon Echo, albeit with a healthy dose of Morgan Freeman (who provides Jarvis's voice). As yesterday's FastCo report shows, the system isn't quite as functional as the video portrays, but it's still an interesting look into the Zuckerberg's robot assistant, even if it's a far cry from imitating the actual Jarvis from Marvel's Iron Man movies. Zuckerberg is also no Tony Stark, at least when it comes to cinematic charisma. The video is full of Zuckerberg's awkward presentation, including dad jokes, a 2001: A Space Odyssey reference, and a Nickelback jab.

Mark Zuckerberg on Monday introduced the world to "Jarvis", an artificial intelligence system the Facebook chief created in his spare time, which can choose and play music, turn on lights, and recognize visitors, deciding whether to open the front door. Jarvis, named after the virtual assistant in the Iron Man movies, could be a step toward a new product, Zuckerberg wrote, although he cautioned that the system he had created in 100 hours over the last year was customized for his house. Zuckerberg announced results of the project, a personal challenge he set for himself this year, as digital home assistants by Google Inc and Amazon.com Inc compete for holiday sales and are expected to outsell popular emerging gadgets such as virtual reality headsets and drones. Creating Jarvis proved humanity is "both closer and farther off" from an AI breakthrough than we imagine, Zuckerberg wrote.

Zuckerberg can be seen in the videos using Jarvis to control lights, the thermostat and even make toast. It also plays music, but when asked by Zuckerberg to play some good songs by the much derided Canadian band, Nickelback, Jarvis replies: "There are no good Nickelback songs."