This story was delivered to BI Intelligence Apps and Platforms Briefing subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here. A team of Microsoft researchers has achieved the lowest error rate for speech recognition on record at 6.3%, overtaking prior record holder IBM Watson's 6.9%. The news brings the company one step closer to getting computers to understand speech as well as a person, and helps in its efforts to provide conversation as a service through tech like Cortana, Skype Translator, and other language-related cognitive services. Voice is going to emerge as a dominant computing interface.

When I moved from New York to Los Angeles recently I hoped to turn that luck around in a city that is teeming with beautiful, intelligent, available women. I decided to give Tinder a try. After messages sent to aspiring models, actresses and comedians, agents' assistants and non-industry normals, I managed to land a first date. Most of our initial conversation was done over text. Talking and banter was easy, so we set a date for dinner in West Hollywood.

Earlier this month Microsoft shared news of new bots in the Skype Bot Shop, including new ones from StubHub, Hipmunk, and IFTTT. Also released that day but not publicized was Your Face, a bot created by Microsoft that combines computer vision, emotion recognition, and facial recognition APIs from Microsoft Cognitive Services. Your Face doesn't have a name like Siri or Cortana but he has the face of an old man and is a pretty salty curmudgeon. Upload any photo or GIF and the bot will guess the age, analyze expression, and share a few opinions about the face sprinkled with salty curmudgeonness. Upload a photo or GIF of your own face and it will probably insult you.

The uses of artificial intelligence (AI) that get the most press are usually the big, splashy ones. Whether it's IBM's Watson beating Ken Jennings at Jeopardy, DeepMind besting Lee Sedol at Go, the massive influx of news about self-driving cars, the growing personal marketplace, or Elon Musk's increasingly public trepidation, these kinds of AI stories have a way of capturing public attention. But quietly, AI powers search and recommendation engines at places like Google and Netflix, filters out obscene images on your favorite social networks, and proves complex mathematical theorems. You probably hear far less about AI applications in retail. However, AI in retail is something that will affect everyone who shops online in the coming years.

These high-end home automation service providers may not sound familiar, but they're the names that typically dominate the headlines coming out of the Custom Electronic Design & Installation Association's yearly tech expo for luxury AV gear and the dealers who provide it. "What are we doing here?" "We want to partner with all of you." Kindel is one of the minds behind Amazon Alexa, its cloud-based, voice-activated computing service. Kindel put it another way, though, describing how developers at Amazon often start by writing a press release for the product they want to develop, complete with a crisp vision statement at the top.

Dave Egts is chief technologist, North America public sector at Red Hat. Artificial intelligence showed a lot of promise decades ago when many thought expert systems and fuzzy logic would be used everywhere. Unfortunately, that didn't quite come to fruition, largely because the concepts were ahead of their time. Today, AI is a reality. We use it at home (the aforementioned Alexa, or Apple's Siri) and at work (so-called smart machines that do everything from monitoring social media traffic to providing second opinions for cancer treatments).

If you think using your smartphone to turn on your lights is cool, you'll flip when you can do that (and more) with just your voice. In fact, when I reviewed the Amazon Echo last year, I predicted a lot of people would buy more than one Echo so they could put them in multiple rooms. Amazon was smarter than that. As soon as the company realized it had a hit product, it came up with less-expensive versions: the Tap, the Echo Dot, and most recently, a revamped Echo Dot. The Tap has a less-expensive speaker, and the Dot isn't designed to play music at all, but both can summon Alexa, Amazon's cloud-based virtual assistant.

This is not the first time Forrester has made an attention-grabbing prediction about technology leading to the disappearance of jobs. It also said that the same would happen in the business-to-business sales arena, and that current virtual assistant technology spelled the beginning of the end of those jobs as well. How should the retail industry feel about all this? Retail has been pretty progressive thus far in testing artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies in both virtual assistant form and physical robot form. While there may be some concern about what happens as these technologies are perfected and become affordable enough to be deployed throughout the retail ecosystem, the retail industry for now seems fairly enthused about the ways in which these technologies can help to better serve customers and make stores and operations more efficient.

What's all the fuss about the voice-activated home speaker that Amazon is due to release in the UK and Germany in late September? This gadget has been available in the US for over a year and has proven a minor hit, with sales estimates between 1.6m and 3m. But these figures belie the potential impact this kind of artificial intelligence device could have on our lives in the near future. Echo doesn't just let you switch on your music by voice command. It's the first of what will be several types of smart home appliances that work beyond simple tasks like playing music or turning on a light.

Pepper the robot seems friendly now, but it may secretly be gunning for Neil deGrasse Tyson's job. Robots, self-driving cars and virtual assistants will eliminate 6 percent of all jobs in the US by 2021, according to a new report from Forrester Research. Customer service representatives will be the first positions affected, then truck and taxi drivers. But, employees working in any easy-to-automate job may be at threat, as businesses look to cut costs with these robots and intelligent assistants. "By 2021 a disruptive tidal wave will begin," the report stated. "Solutions powered by AI/cognitive technology will displace jobs, with the biggest impact felt in transportation, logistics and consumer services."