A robotic employee will be deployed instead of human council workers to answer customer queries. IPsoft said Amelia, its technology platform, will be deployed to work for Enfield Council in North London. Capable of analyzing natural language, she understands context, applies logic, learns, resolves problems and even senses emotions. IPsoft said Amelia will be deployed to work for Enfield Council in North London. Capable of analyzing natural language, she understands context and even senses emotions.

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.

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.

Many real-world relations can be represented by signed networks with positive and negative links, as a result of which signed network analysis has attracted increasing attention from multiple disciplines. With the increasing prevalence of social media networks, signed network analysis has evolved from developing and measuring theories to mining tasks. In this article, we present a review of mining signed networks in the context of social media and discuss some promising research directions and new frontiers. We begin by giving basic concepts and unique properties and principles of signed networks. Then we classify and review tasks of signed network mining with representative algorithms. We also delineate some tasks that have not been extensively studied with formal definitions and also propose research directions to expand the field of signed network mining.

In an effort to take a lead in artificial intelligence, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) has established a new AI research group in Europe. Based in Zurich, Switzerland, the group will mainly focus on making machines learn and understand the way humans do. Google, in one of its official blogs, mentions that the largest Google research facility outside the US is already in Zurich. It is the same research facility that came up with the conversation engine for Allo, Google's smart chat software. Adding a separate artificial intelligence division to it means Google has something cooking. According to Google's announcement, the research will follow three aspects: Machine intelligence, Natural Language Processing and Understanding, and Machine Perception.

When you think of leaders in artificial intelligence, Netflix doesn't usually jump to the top of the list. But the streaming video service's VP of Product Innovation Carlos Uribe-Gomez and Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt published a paper that says some of its AI algorithms save Netflix 1 billion each year. In their paper, the two Netflix execs detail how the company's recommendation engine impacts its churn rate. Netflix no longer reports its churn rate, but the paper notes that Netflix's "retention rates are already high enough that it takes a very meaningful improvement to make a retention difference of even 0.1%." Let's dive into how the recommendation engine saves Netflix money -- and what the return on investment looks like.

Leading global IT services company HCL Technologies has been named winner of the'Best Innovation in Natural Language Processing (NLP)' award at the AIconics Awards during the "AI Summit" in London recently. AIconics are the world's only independently judged awards celebrating the drive, innovation and hard work in the international Artificial Intelligence (AI) community. "This award gives testimony to the innovation and pragmatic implementation of'Natural Language Processing' in the 21st century enterprise," Kalyan Kumar, executive vice president at HCL Technologies, said in a statement. HCL was also named as a finalist in the "Best Intelligent Assistant" category which showcases companies making ground-breaking advancements in virtual assistants and advanced voice/text recognition capabilities. The driving force behind HCL's success at the AIconics Awards is "HCL DryICE" -- the company's innovative autonomics and orchestration framework.

Rupa Chaturvedi is the head of design of visual intelligence at Sentient Technologies. AI assistants are having their moment. Just a week ago, Google announced the aptly named Assistant, an AI capable of carrying on an "ongoing two-way dialog." It joins a field crowded with Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana, Facebook's M, the unreleased Viv and a whole host of others. But right now, while these assistants can book a meeting, tell you the weather or give you directions to a coffee shop, they still feel a bit cold.

The hype around artificial intelligence (AI) has reached a fever pitch in the past few months, as tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Apple have unveiled new AI technology that could bring it out of the realm of science fiction and into the mainstream. Google recently unveiled its Google Home platform as a competitor to Amazon's Echo AI, and blogged how its chip technology has pushed machine learning and intelligence "seven years into the future." Amazon's dedicated staff of 1,000 Alexa developers is fending off the big G by reportedly teaching its software to recognize your emotional state as it sells you stuff. And Facebook, IBM, and other tech giants are using AI to study your social media presence and search history to sell you goods and advertise products. Meanwhile, Apple announced at this week's WWDC that it's placing a smarter Siri on not just every iOS 10 device, but also macOS and allowing third-party developers access to the Siri SDK.

Setting up the Echo Dot is only slightly more involved than with its larger sibling, mainly because you have to plug in an auxiliary cable, in addition to a power cord. You'll have to use Amazon's Alexa iOS or Android app to get the Echo Dot connected to WiFi, which typically only takes a few minutes. The Alexa app is also where you can manage the Echo Dot's settings, as well as its "skills," or connections to third-party services. You can also go through voice training with the app to help your Echo Dot understand you better. The Dot feels like a large hockey puck: It's basically the top part of the original Echo sitting on its own.