The folks at Amazon are clearly attempting to entice you into the dangerous world of shopping with voice commands. They're doing Alexa-exclusive deals for customers who shop through the company's Echo, Echo Dot and Tap speakers, starting today until July 12th. The team is also adding more items to the list (including gadgets and smart home products) on the 12th, which the company has designated as "Prime Day." You simply have to ask your faithful voice assistant: "Alexa, what are your Prime Day deals?"

Machine learning enhances Oracle's enterprise offerings. At a recent meeting of the Oracle Product Architects Community, Stephen Green, head of the Information Retrieval and Machine Learning Group within Oracle Labs, was prepared to give a general overview of his organization's activities. He got through only his first three slides, and then spent the rest of the hour answering a barrage of questions about machine learning and how this specialized programming technique might be applied to the product areas for which attendees were responsible. The interest reflects an extraordinary surge in experimentation and investment in the technology category known as artificial intelligence (AI), of which machine learning is a building block. AI in the form of self-driving cars, game-show-playing computers, and smartphone personal assistants may have grabbed the public's attention.

Artificial Intelligence is a fascinating topic for many people nowadays, no matter if they are a consumer or an influencer. Today, I'm happy to be joined by Ilya Gelfenbeyn, CEO and co-founder of Api.ai, a conversational UX platform used to embed natural language understanding capabilities into connected devices, apps and services. Regular readers of SitePoint may recognize the service, as we have covered Api.ai in the past with a series earlier this year on getting started with the platform. Ilya has a background in machine learning, natural language processing and conversational interfaces. Elio: We have covered Api.ai in the past, but could you briefly explain the concept behind it?

At the International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging in Prague this past April, a Harvard-based artificial intelligence system won the Camelyon16 challenge, a competition comprised of participants introducing their individual AI system and its ability to facilitate automated lymph node metastasis diagnosis. Referred to as PathAl, the computing system identifies cancerous cells through deep learning--an algorithmic technique that accumulates copious amounts of unstructured data and organizes it into clusters before analyzing it for patterns. Deep learning is predominately used in speech recognition systems like Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana. According to one of the challenge's organizers, Jeroen van der Laak of Radboud University Medical Center in Netherlands, the technology featured in the competition went "way beyond" his expectations, as the AI's accuracy proved strikingly close to that of human beings. In addition, van der Laak said AI technology has the propensity to intrinsically redefine the way histopathological images are handled in the medical community.

S. Somasegar is a venture partner at Madrona Venture Group and the former head of Microsoft's Developer Division. Daniel Li is an investor with Madrona Venture Group. You can hardly talk to a technology executive or developer today without talking about artificial intelligence, machine learning or bots. While everyone agrees on the importance of machine learning to their company and industry, few companies have adequate expertise to do what they wanted the technology to do. Here are some insights into what we can expect in the coming years around ML and AI.

George Burgess, the founder of Gojimo, a revision app, explores how artificial intelligence can be used within education. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has dominated tech news in 2016, from Google's ground breaking AlphaGo to Microsoft's racist Tay and Amazon's Echo. This has led to a heated debate on what it means for the human race, from socioeconomic concerns about loss of jobs in the fourth industrial revolution to moral, philosophical and even religious questions about our understanding of human consciousness. Rather than stray into these murky waters, I think it is best to concentrate on the sectors where AI can make a quantifiable and significant difference without threatening livelihoods or invoking metaphysics. One such area is education.

Posted by Lance Olson, Partner Director of Program Management in the Data Group at Microsoft. Cortana Intelligence with Bing Predicts preview is an end-to-end consulting program that brings the power of Microsoft's unique corpus of social, search and web data to let customers enrich and augment their Cortana Intelligence Suite solutions resulting in more accurate outcomes across a wide variety of business problems. The program springs from the highly successful and well-regarded Bing Predicts consumer experience, where Bing correctly predicted every knockout game of the 2014 soccer World Cup and 95% of the 2014 US mid-term elections. This program was born when we saw the opportunity to take the unique data assets that we have from our consumer businesses and help our commercial customers. Our team interprets these datasets to help you gain unique insights such as localized consumer preferences, user sentiment, customer demographics, macroeconomic indicators predictions and industry trends.

Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) is reportedly developing two Android Wear watches that will focus heavily on the Google Assistant, the company's artificial intelligence offering. Citing an unnamed "reliable source," Android Police said the watches, codenamed Angelfish and Swordfish, will be released after the launch of the next Nexus phones, likely in the next several months. One model is said to be larger and support LTE, GPS and heart-rate monitoring, while the other will offer fewer features and lack mobile data. It's unclear whether the gadgets will feature Google's Nexus brand. While the report is unconfirmed, Google is clearly showing a renewed interest in developing its own mobile devices.

Apple has released the first public test version of iOS 10 and Sierra, its new MacOS software. The iOS update brings a new look complete with a radical overhaul of the messages app offering new animations and emoji, while Sierra brings Siri to the Mac for the first time. The products, available as free updates, were announced at Apple's WWDC event in September. The iOS update brings a new look complete with a radical overhaul of the messages app offering new animations and emoji, while Sierra brings Siri to the Mac for the first time. To sign up for Apple's beta program, simply visit the beta site.

The popular app is looking to launch a special feature called BumbleBuzz that will aim to match those looking to connect in a professional capacity, a la LinkedIn. You'll be allowed to create a profile for those encounters alone, which will be kept completely separate from your dating profile, which will offer information such as the type of industry you're in, your education level and other tidbits that can be used to help find you a match. A special algorithm will be utilized for these purposes, which will not include gender. This means there may often be same-sex matches in addition to those of the opposite sex. Keeping true to Bumble's origins, however, women are expected to initiate a conversation after a match is made even in this professional mode.