We like to drink here at Geek.com. It's not quantity that matters, but quality, and as such, we've held several fine whisky tastings in the lab over the years. And the world-renowned scotch distillery tried to get artificial intelligence in on the sophisticated fun by putting out a whisky tasting skill for Amazon Alexa. Yes, if you really want to enjoy your scotch with the power of technology, you can simply install the skill on your Amazon Echo and say, "Alexa, open Johnnie Walker." And the voice app will open and walk you through a primer to savoring fine whisky.

You've probably heard politicians make more than a few outlandish claims, and not just in the run-up to the US presidential election. Do you really want to swing by a fact-checking website every time a candidate stretches credibility? As of now, you don't have to lift a finger. Duke Reporters' Lab has introduced an Amazon Echo skill that lets you fact-check any politician scrutinized by PolitFact, FactCheck.org If you want to know if Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump is telling it straight, you just have to ask your wireless speaker whether or not a claim is true.

A friend of mine has spent more than the value of his San Antonio home on Amazon Prime in the last five years. That is precisely why the next big battlefield for marketing and advertising lies with artificially intelligent digital agents like Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, Facebook M, and Cortana. And it's why the company that cracks AI-powered agents will be the next trillion-dollar corporation. Every communications technology that has ever been invented has been seized by brands as a new way to connect with customers. A marketing manager sent the first spam email in 1978.

Artificial Intelligence or AI is promising to be the successor or the biggest paradigm shift post the Mobile/Apps Era.. Yes your smart phones are not going anywhere for the time being, it just that the way you interact with it all set to change. The Mobile era which had fueled Internet 2.0 primarily the rise of Social and Apps is now making way for the AI era. And its probably AI which would eventually lead us to the post mobile world where you could talk to your devices be it a watch, speaker or any device to achieve everyday tasks. And needless to say the biggest names in tech – Google, Apple, Amazon, FB & Microsoft are all bracing up for the next game changing opportunity. The AI Wars are currently being fought on two fronts: One is at the Voice Assistant Level which is frankly a three way face off between Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant.

I say: Connecting with your audience and improving brand awareness. I say: Revolutionizing B2B sales and lead generation. Siri and Cortana, meet Kylie. Like the virtual assistants that can remind you of your upcoming appointments or give you the score of the game, a company aiming to help automate the mundane parts of the sales process has created an autonomous, machine learning-powered sales rep named Kylie. She can reportedly understand the meaning of sales conversations, performing many of the same functions as an entry-level sales person--except she's not a person.

Quora Questions are part of a partnership between Newsweek and Quora, through which we'll be posting relevant and interesting answers from Quora contributors throughout the week. The one way Amazon can win over Google in the long run given Google's AI superiority in this space is by partnering better with device manufacturers. To start off, I don't think the battle between Amazon Echo and Google Home is as important as the one between Amazon Alexa, which is their voice assistance service, and the Google (Voice) Assistant. Both Amazon Echo and Google Home are speakers with voice assistance built into them. The speakers are fairly standard, as speakers go. The real magic happens in the voice assistants that sit in the cloud and do the heavy lifting on behalf of these devices.

Apple war has reached a turning point with the inclusion of the Google's new Pixel phone. The Silicon Valley giant is making waves in the mobile industry with its patented smartphone that blows artificial intelligence assistant Siri out of the water. In a showdown of giants, it seems Google is chalking up this round under their bedpost, as Apple scrambles to get the iPhone 7 back into the mainstream's top of mind. Pixel's main champion in the ring is not the hardware or the design, which by today's standards is nothing new or innovative. Anyone with the right tools can make a new phone, but the playing field evens out with the software add-ons they include in the package.

"Machine learning is the field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed" Arthur Smauel. We can think of machine learning as approach to automate tasks like predictions or modelling. For example, consider an email spam filter system, instead of having programmers manually looking at the emails and coming up with spam rules. We can use a machine learning algorithm and feed it input data (emails) and it will automatically discover rules that are powerful enough to distinguish spam emails. Machine learning is used in many application nowadays like spam detection in emails or movie recommendation systems that tells you movies that you might like based on your viewing history.

Data Scientists across Skyscanner have started meeting every fortnight to discuss research papers that tackle similar problems to those that we face within Skyscanner. The 2nd paper we read was: "Mining Large Streams of User Data for Personalized Recommendations" (hi Xavier!). Just like the last post, we're we're also writing up a brief, non-technical overview the problems/opportunities we discussed. Netflix famously announced a 1M prize in 2006, calling on researchers across the world to improve their movie recommender system by 10%. To create this competition, they had to make a critical decision: how could Netflix measure a 10% improvement in their system?

Robots aren't taking our jobs, but artificial intelligence is making it easier than ever to do them. "Amy" saves entrepreneur Gillian Morris about 43 productive hours a year. Morris, the founder of Hitlist, a travel app that alerts users to cheap flights, has been using Amy, a virtual assistant from x.ai for about two years, to schedule meetings. To ask for Amy's help, Morris sends an email to the person or people she wants to meet with and copies Amy. From there, Amy takes Morris out of the email chain and handles the back and forth about dates and times.