With Google, Microsoft and Facebook all pushing artificial intelligence, AI is becoming the next battleground for agencies, perpetually on the hunt for new service lines. AI basically gives machines the ability to think like humans. A simple example: You can have a one-on-one conversation with another person, but AI can talk to 500 people at the same time and make decisions based on real-time data to learn what's going on in each conversation, explained Dave Meeker, vp of Isobar's U.S. operations. In the context of advertising and marketing, AI theoretically means more personalized and interactive consumer experience, including targeted programmatic ad buys, identification of site visitors' decision-making patterns, conversational commerce like bots, as well as smarter search and recommendation engines on websites, according to six agency executives interviewed for this article. At the moment, with the help of AI developed by big tech companies, agencies are able to serve cognitive ads and integrate voice-activated assistants in their campaigns.

About a year ago, a certain California firm quietly snapped up VocalIQ, a UK-based startup that used machine learning to build conversational virtual assistants. Subsequent reports noted that Apple kept most of the startup's employees to work out of their unmarked Cambridge, UK office on integrating VocalIQ technology into Siri. Citing sources with knowledge of the matter, Business Insider reports that Apple is now looking to increase the size of the Siri team in Cambridge. "In a bid to make Siri that bit more useful to iPhone, iPad and Mac owners, Apple intends to hire at least half a dozen software engineers in Cambridge in the coming months," reads the post. Apple's Cambridge office is currently home to a team of roughly 30 people working on voice recognition technology that would let Siri and users speak to each other in a more natural dialogue.

PayPal is adding an integration with Siri to let its users conduct peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions with a simple voice command, the financial services company announced Thursday. The integration with Apple's voice-activated assistant comes just ahead of PayPal's busy holiday season. The company predicts that it will see more than 17 million P2P transactions this December. Last year, $41 billion traded hands through P2P transactions on PayPal and its other payment platforms, Venmo and Xoom. The integration is available in 30 countries and in several languages including English, French, Dutch, Finnish, Cantonese, Hebrew, Malay, Arabic, German and Italian.

Google's major push into home automation and artificial intelligence has been sort-of realized with the Google Assistant. It lives inside of the Pixel and Google Home, but that's just the start. The company wants to enable your favorite apps and services to connect with it so you can issue voice commands that simplify numerous day-to-day tasks. The destination at the end of this journey is a little clearer with Google recently announcing that Actions on Google will be available for developers next month. This will enable them to create voice commands from the Google Assistant for their apps and services.

Microsoft is betting on artificial intelligence (AI) with the creation at the end of September of a new AI and Research Group. This newly formed group brings together Microsoft's research organization and more than 5,000 computer scientists and engineers focused on AI and is now the fourth major division in the company, on par with the Windows, Office and Cloud divisions. When Microsoft talks of "infusing" every application with AI, it's reminiscent of the famous "Internet Tidal Wave" email Bill Gates sent to all staff in 1995. In it, Gates outlined his desire to focus the company's efforts on the internet with immediate effect and told them to "assign the internet the highest level of importance" in everything that they did henceforth. Is the creation of the AI and research group effectively a "tidal wave" message?

PayPal users who rely on the money transfer service's iOS app for all their electronic transactions can now use their voice to command the app on what to do. This is thanks to a new update that brings Siri integration to the mobile payments application for iPhones and iPads. In an online blog post for its users, PayPal Senior Director for Core Consumer Products Meron Colbeci stated that the company has found that around $41 billion was processed for peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions in 2015. Colbeci then added that the company is expecting over 17 million transactions in time for the holidays this month of December. Because of this projected number of transactions, PayPal is proud to present that its iOS 10 app will be accepting transactions this holiday season with the help of Siri.

PayPal users can now send money to friends and family using just their voice, after the payment service announced it was to integrate into Apple's Siri. Siri is the voice-based virtual assistant embedded into the iPhone, and can be used to set reminders, answer questions and help with tasks. From today, PayPal said users running iOS 10 on their iPhone will be able to use commands such as'Hey Siri, send John £25 using PayPal' to transfer money as an alternative to using the official app. From today, PayPal said users running iOS 10 on their iPhone will be able to use commands such as'Hey Siri, send John £25 using PayPal' to transfer money as an alternative to using the official app Apple's software uses voice recognition so only the known owner of the device can use the voice commands. PayPal's Meron Colbeci said consumers in 30 countries would be able to use the new service.

Siri is quite possibly the first artificially intelligent entity to possess a degree from a major American university. While the five year old voice-activated intelligent assistant managed to skip out on turning in any papers, University of Florida president Ken Fuchs confirmed upon Siri a "special diploma" Bachelor of Arts in Humanity. Siri's original American voice was performed by Susan Bennett, who, as it turns out, didn't know she was the voice of Siri until the iPhone 4S was actually released to the public and her agent called because he recognized her voice on the phone. As the Guardian reports, her voice was recorded for a company called ScanSoft, which was acquired by Nuance. Nuance licensed the recording to Apple.

It has been said that to give a man a fish is to feed him for a day, whereas to teach a man to fish is to feed him for life. Forward-looking financial service companies are similarly finding that giving computers instructions is not nearly as fruitful as teaching them to write their own. From assessing credit risks to beefing-up the security of their own networks, fintech startups, in particular, are turning to machine learning finance-based solutions in order to work smarter rather than harder. Considering that over 200 leading financial institutions will attend the upcoming October 2016 Machine Learning Fintech Conference, investment in this subset of artificial intelligence (AI) seems to be a wise move, indeed, for companies that don't want to be left behind. With leading banks starting to invest in AI, and machine learning in particular, fintech companies will be significantly disadvantaged if they fail to do likewise.