But the job recruitment process can be taxing for both applicants and companies, which spend long hours flipping through troves of résumés to determine the best candidates. In an attempt to streamline hiring, FirstJob, a millennial-focused HR company, has launched a recruiting assistant named Mya that they say can automate up to 75 percent of the recruitment process. The system uses machine learning and natural language processing to perform an initial screen, answer applicants' questions, give feedback, and provide suggestions on how an applicant should proceed. Meanwhile, the system gives businesses much-needed breathing room when attempting to qualify large groups of potential candidates. Related: Look out, Google Assistant!

Everywhere you turn today, someone is making a wild claim about artificial intelligence. If you aren't deeply technical, you may struggle to separate fact from fiction. Is AI going to make us all more productive, or will it take all our jobs? In what areas will AI most affect human resources in the near term and in the long term? My goal in the next few paragraphs is to provide you with a high-level overview based on my own personal experience with building a digital assistant that uses artificial intelligence and the trends I've seen firsthand.

Amazon.com has unveiled another new feature for its second iteration of Prime Day, and customer voices will be heard. The e-tail giant is offering exclusive Prime Day deals for Amazon Prime members who use its Alexa voice-activated artificial intelligence platform through July 12. These offers will be good for eligible shoppers who order products using their voice on Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, or Amazon Tap devices. Also through July 12, Prime members will receive 10 off their first purchase on any eligible order of more than 20 when they shop using Alexa. To find more exclusive deals on the actual date of Prime Day, July 12, Prime members can ask, "Alexa, what are your Prime Day deals?" or visit the special Alexa Deals page.

Siri, Cortana, Google and Alexa go about their business differently in responding to Ed Baig's questions. NEW YORK-- You may already be on a first-name basis with Siri, Cortana, Google or Alexa, the Fab Four of voice-activated digital assistants. Now that relationship is expanding from one device (typically a smartphone) to many. The major tech companies are putting these digital assistants, powered by artificial intelligence algorithms and activated by voice, into multiple products. And the field is about to get a new name, with the founders of Siri introducing an AI-driven virtual assistant called Viv at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York Monday.

Nearly every big tech company now offers a digital assistant powered by artificial intelligence. Apple has Siri, Facebook has M, Microsoft has Cortana, Amazon has Alexa, and Google has, well, Google. The success of these services is heavily dependent on the mountains of data they have at their disposal -- along with massive amounts of computing power to crunch that data, understand user queries, and respond in real time. This reality raises an obvious question: how can startups without their own server farms and massive customer bases hope to compete? Companies like Hound and Viv want to build standalone apps that consumers will use in place of the assistants built into their smartphones.

Key players in machine learning include big cloud players like Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), and IBM. A recent study by AI language company Narrative Science found that 80% of executives believed that AI solutions boosted worker performance and created new jobs. Nuance developed the technology that powers Apple's (NASDAQ:AAPL) Siri, which preceded other voice assistants like Alphabet's (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google Now, Microsoft's Cortana, and Amazon's Alexa. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Alphabet (A shares), Alphabet (C shares), Amazon.com, The Motley Fool owns shares of Microsoft and has the following options: long January 2018 90 calls on Apple and short January 2018 95 calls on Apple.

Unless you've been hiding under a rock, you've no doubt heard about chatbots. However, what's not commonly known is that chatbots have been around for years. What differentiates today's bots is the integration of back-end artificial intelligence, which enables them to do more than simply respond with the basic logic of yesterday. I find that it's important to make distinctions between a bot and today's A.I.-powered intelligent assistants. Chatbots just happen to be conversational.

Last week was IoT week on SitePoint which saw us publish a plethora of articles focused on the intersection of the internet and the physical world. We covered some seriously great stuff! Among my favorites was this article by Christopher Pitt on combining an Arduino, Minecraft and PHP (yup, PHP) and this article by SitePoint's Alex Walker and Jude Aakjaer on creating a motion-sensing, meeting-room-reserving Arduino platform. As I've written in the past, it worries me that in the rush to get the latest, greatest IoT products out of the door, security is often an afterthought. I also have zero confidence in those large data-thirsty corporations who, given half a chance, would use my IoT devices to gather as much personal data as they possibly can. Oh wait, they're doing that already, you say?

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) co-founder Bill Gates recently called artificial intelligence "the holy grail that anyone in computer science has been thinking about" during Vox Media's Code Conference. Gates discussed the rapid progress of speech recognition and computer vision technologies over the past five years, and noted that "the dream is finally arriving." If that dream arrives, tech investors should recognize the major trends and players in this market. To get started, let's examine 10 fascinating facts about the AI industry. Research firm Markets and Markets estimates that the AI market will grow from 420 million in 2014 to 5.05 billion by 2020, thanks to the rising adoption of machine learning and natural language processing technologies in the media, advertising, retail, finance, and healthcare industries.

Cisco announced a partnership Monday with bot-building platforms Gupshup and API.ai that allows thousands of bots to quickly join Cisco Spark and Cisco Tropo platforms. It also turns up the intensity in competition between enterprise team communication chat apps like Skype and Slack. The announcement was made during Cisco Live, a four-day Cisco event taking place in Las Vegas this week. Gupshup built an SMS social network of more than 50 million users, mainly in India, before becoming an enterprise messaging service company in 2010. Today, it processes four billion messages a month.