Apple is the most successful company in the world. But future success for Apple depends to a surprising degree on artificial intelligence. When you think of Silicon Valley's AI leaders, Apple may not immediately come to mind. But the company's initiatives around AI are "amazing." At least that's what the company's newest senior employee said.

Siri continues to receive criticism over at times unreliable performance although Apple's been advancing its personal digital assistant by leaps and bounds since its debut in October 2011. Google, on the other hand, is regularly praised for its powerful knowledge graph and accuracy. You probably know that the search company's exciting new feature, Assistant, recently made its debut on the new Pixel smartphones. With that in mind, YouTuber Marques Brownlee took it upon himself to pit the Pixel's Assistant against the iPhone's Siri in a cool side-by-side video comparison. Let the battle of the smartphone voice assistants begin!

Chatbots can already order read you the news, order you a takeaway, or hail you a cab. Now they're heading for your kitchen, with the launch of Jamie Oliver Skills, a virtual sous-chef developed by digital agency AKQA and the Jamie Oliver Group for the Amazon Echo. The Echo is a voice-controlled wireless speaker that is Amazon's answer to Apple's Siri, Google's Now and Microsoft's Cortana. Microphones on the device transmit your voice then a virtual assistant called Alexa--now equipped with a British accent for the UK market--responds automatically using artificial intelligence tech to create a simulated conversation. Jamie Oliver Skills is one of the early additions to Alexa's array of capabilities.

An IPO legitimize TPaaS (Telco Platform as a Service.) Huge firms seek to corner "Big Data in the Cloud." Start-ups take command of "The Internet of Things." These highly-ambiguous terms have replaced "Mobile", "Social" and "Collaboration" in the word clouds of the Digital Age. They are shiny objects with great growth potential and transformative power.

Google's new Pixel phone launched to positive reviews, largely because of the phone's new digital helper called Google Assistant. As I wrote in my review of the new Google Pixel, it's relatively easy to make a high-end smartphone these days. The real challenge is lighting it up with unique software that helps you do more. And the new Google Assistant accomplishes just that. Right out of the gate, Assistant is noticeably smarter and more capable than Siri, a stark embarrassment for Apple, which had a five-year head start on Google.

Major technology firms are racing to infuse smartphones and other internet-linked devices with software smarts that help them think like people. The effort is seen as an evolution in computing that allows users to interact with machines in natural conversation style, telling devices to tend to tasks such as ordering goods, checking traffic, making restaurant reservations or searching for information. Google is making a high-profile push into AI, with the internet titan's chief referring to it as a force for change as powerful as powerful as smartphones. Google Assistant software is being built into new Pixel handsets - aiming to outdo Apple's Siri - enabling users to organize and use information on the devices and in the cloud - to check emails, stay up to date on calendar appointments, news or ask for traffic and weather data. Google also offers AI through its Allo messaging application which can be installed on smartphones, and its Google Home hub, a stand-alone device similar to Amazon's Echo which responds to voice commands to manage tasks and fetch information where people live.

After Microsoft announced Microsoft Bot Framework at BUILD and Facebook announced Bots for Messenger, Google is turning Google Now into a chatbot with Google Assistant. Unlike Cortana, Google Assistant suggests topics for users to interact with suggests follow-up topics to continue the conversation. It also keeps a running tally of the conversation, allowing a user to scroll back and continue it from an earlier point in the conversation. Expectedly, Google Assistant will replace Google Now for Android. According to Harry Shum, the Executive Vice President at Microsoft in charge of the new AI and Research Group, Cortana was originally designed to quickly interact with the user, then get out of the way.

In this video, we build our own recommendation system that suggests movies a user would like in 40 lines of Python using the LightFM recommendation library. I start off by talking about why we need recommendation systems, then we dive straight into installing our dependencies and writing our script. Please share this video, like, comment and subscribe! That's what keeps me going.

Siri is about to get a lot smarter thank to Carnegie Mellon researcher Russ Salakhutdinov, who announced today that he is joining Apple to lead the company's artificial intelligence efforts. Excited about joining Apple as a director of AI research in addition to my work at CMU. Apply to work with my teamhttps://t.co/U2hQl2GdhA Although he's not a household name, Russ Salakhutdinov is one of the biggest deep learning figures in academia. His hiring by Apple comes after the company has been criticized for Siri's weak performance compared to rival digital assistants from Google, Amazon and Microsoft. Before working at CMU, Salakhutdinov worked at Toronto University and MIT.

Today, the biggest technology players are in a mad dash to develop the smartest conversational interface. These personal assistants are helpful, entertaining and already a powerful connector between people and their digital lives. While they function a little differently, they all source every bit of data they can find to engage in unique, valuable conversations with their owners. The astounding pace of technology guarantees that there will always be a new connector, a new privileged broker that draws humans and the digital realm ever closer together. But this shouldn't be a threat to marketers.