Text, sentiment, and social analytics help you tune in, at scale, to the voice of the customer, patient, public, and market. The technologies are currently being applied in an array of industries ranging from healthcare to finance, media, and consumer markets. It's useful stuff, insight extracted from text, audio, images, and connections. The state of analytics is pretty good at the moment, although uptake in certain areas -- digital analytics and market research, for example -- has lagged behind. This is true for both technical innovation and for more-of-the-same uptake.

Better Automation through computers has been an ongoing pursuit for decades as we seek to reduce the number of mundane and repetitive tasks humans must perform. Today we have virtual digital assistants, such as Apple's Siri or Amazon's Alexa, that are designed to learn our personal preferences in order to serve up increasingly accurate information. They "get to know us," so to speak, "learning" our likes and dislikes. This capability is known as machine learning. Incorporating machine learning into an organization's systems has not been something most companies have been able to accomplish due to steep human, technological, and infrastructural requirements.

It can make the interaction mit machines more human and integrate it flawlessly in our daily lives. But is there a flip side, will AI be the end of the design and designer as we know them? Tech giants such as Google, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft and Amazon not only proclaimed artificial intelligence as the strategic priority that will determine the future of their organizations, but have successively announced the achievement of new milestones. What has made these milestones exceptional is that instead allowing these new advancements to influence only their own products, these companies have made their successful developments available to all other organizations for use and integration into their respective products. And as AI is being integrated into more and more products, it will also influence the way we think about customer experience and user interfaces.

When Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) released Siri on the iPhone 4S back in 2011, the personal digital assistant managed to earn mixed reviews from users. On one side, Siri was seen as a revolutionary feature, as a personal digital assistant that had the potential to change the way we use devices. However, numerous users felt as if Apple had blown the hype surrounding its digital personal assistant out of proportion, as Siri regularly failed to function the way it was meant to. The worst part about Siri was that it actually managed to regress under Apple, as the software that was released by its original developers was more capable then the one released by the Cupertino based tech giant. Moreover, it was apparent that one of Apple's biggest rivals Google managed to design a superior AI system as compared to what Siri had to offer.

From personalised recommendations to fraud protection, the data-crunching powers of artificial intelligence are changing the face of financial services, writes Alexey Utkin. The past few years have seen a number of exciting advances in artificial intelligence (AI) which could change the way customers interact with financial services. Examples are the evolution of predictive analytics, recommender systems, anomaly detection, decision trees, computer vision and voice recognition. These have enabled delivery of an industrial-scale personalisation and automation of various processes in the financial services industry. The majority of financial services are still aimed at specific financial products, meaning it falls to customers to analyse their own situation and then research which products they should be using.

When Siri was originally released on the iPhone 4S back in 2011, the reviews were somewhat lukewarm. On the positive side, having an intelligent assistant baked into a massively popular smartphone was a huge leap forward. On the other hand, Siri didn't always perform as advertised. Even more problematic was that Siri's feature set was purposefully stunted by Apple. In fact, the Siri Apple released in 2011 wasn't even as capable as the Siri app that Siri's original developers had previously released on the App Store.

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MetaMind joins PredicitonIO, an open source machine learning server and developer community, which was acquired by Salesforce in February, and the machine learning powered analytics startup BeyondCore in August. This follows the acquisition of MinHash - the company behind the AI virtual assistant AILA - in December 2015, and smart calendar app Tempo.ai in June last year, an acquisition which almost certainly led to the recent Salesforce Inbox Calendar product. Speaking to Computerworld UK earlier this year, CTO Adam Evans said: "AI is technology that Salesforce is incredibly interested in. At Salesforce we have moved from systems of record to systems of engagement and now we are moving towards systems of intelligence."

Samsung is joining the growing market of voice-assisted speakers that is currently being dominated by Amazon Echo. For its entry to this market, the South Korea company is designing a Bluetooth-connected speaker that has its own microphone for quick and easy detection of voice commands. The Galaxy Note 7 maker has already submitted documents about its upcoming speaker to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, so it won't come as a surprise when the electronics giant announces the device and its release date soon. According to VentureBeat, included in the documents Samsung sent to the independent government agency on Monday are a manual and photos of the speaker that is dubbed as "Scoop." In addition, the site noted that Samsung's speaker is designed to be mobile and easy to carry around, since it comes with a strap -- a portability feature that is not that different from Amazon's Tap.

Every once in a while, a product comes along that changes everyone's expectations of what's possible in user interfaces. Alexa belongs in that elite group of game changers. Siri didn't make it over the hump, despite the buzz it created. Neither did Google Now or Cortana, despite their amazing capabilities and their progress in adoption. But Alexa has done so many things right that everyone else has missed that it is, to my mind, the first winning product of the conversational era.