In the demo video below that simple command actually meant, "Help me buy new soccer cleats for my son." Powered by USAA's Savings Booster, a feature that the company has offered to its banking customers since mid-2015, Alexa quickly responded with a suggested action. Next thing you know, the happy Mom watches her child head out the door wearing the new shoes. According to Darrius Jones, AVP of Enterprise Innovation at USAA, the company built a crack team to rise to the Alexa Challenge, a contest conducted by PYMNTS.com, To build its demo, USAA's developers were able to create the Alexa-based conversational interface to Savings Booster, an existing feature for banking customers, in a matter of 10 hours. It then took 22 days to implement and be up-and-running on the Alexa platform.

Peter Clark is a senior research manager at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, overseeing Project Aristo, an effort to build an AI system with the ability to answer questions from standardized exams, starting on 4th grade science tests, with the goal of advancing to higher grades in the future. Clark was the featured speaker this week for the 2016 corporate kickoff event for Geeks Give Back, an annual philanthropic campaign presented by Bank of America in partnership with GeekWire, benefitting the Washington State Opportunity Scholarship program. Clark gave an overview of the state of artificial intelligence, and his work at AI2, before fielding questions from me and members of the audience. Continue reading for highlights from the discussion, and stay tuned this fall for more information on how participating in this year's Geeks Give Back campaign. Todd Bishop: People look at artificial intelligence, and traditionally they think of a robot or a machine, but the internet is essentially the world brain.

The first generation of robo-advisors use a method known as "passive portfolio management" to buy and hold a fixed balance of exchange-traded funds. This method relies on price averages in order to match market returns. Vancouver-based online investment service Responsive aims to outperform this first generation of robo-advisors using a data-rich Artificial Intelligence approach. "Passive investing is a good start, but it ignores the data", Responsive CEO Davyde Wachell explains. Google's AlphaGo AI has been racking up wins against humanity's best Go players.

NEW YORK--Siri evaded my question for what took Apple's voice assistant so long to get onto the Mac.

The magic and frustration of voice assistants and artificial intelligence when it comes to accessibility. A lot has been said recently about Apple's prospects in artificial intelligence and machine learning. One aspect of the discussion that I haven't seen considered is the accessibility ramifications of artificial intelligence in assistants like Siri. I've long been a proponent of voice-driven interfaces as assistive technology, which makes Siri's slow development all the more frustrating. This is particularly true when it comes to Siri understanding you if you have trouble speaking.

Customer behaviour and the development of new technology are inextricably linked, and no technology is poised to impact our daily lives more than artificial intelligence (AI). AI is not a single technology but a convergence of statistical models, algorithms and approaches that make software'smart', whereby it starts to mimic human thinking processes. AI is already present in our digital lives, powering everything from dynamic product pricing on Amazon to song recommendations on Spotify – but we are still only at the dawn of witnessing its power. Perhaps the most impactful uses of AI will be in eCommerce – an area of immense growth in its own right. We are starting to see applications of AI via cognitive technology, a simulation of human thought processes, to respond to natural human language.

As an AI, Scarlet works on observing patterns, connecting the dots and inferring new insights. So yes, over time, she will build up a context of your behaviors and, we're working towards this, she will suggest things she could do for you. That will take us a moment. We're finding an interesting challenge there in that most content providers have created material that is designed to be seen on a screen with accompanying pictures. We need them to write the words that evoke the visual so she can describe it to you.

After great promise in the 1960s that machines would soon think like humans, progress stalled for decades. Only in the past 10 years or so has research picked up, and now there are several popular products on the market that do a decent job of at least recognizing spoken speech. For Björn Schuller, full professor and head of the chair of Complex and Intelligent Systems at the University of Passau, Germany, who grew up watching Knight Rider--a television show about a car that could talk--this is the fulfillment of a childhood fantasy. Schuller is a World Economic Forum Young Scientist who will speak at the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Tianjin, China, from June 26 to 28.He recently spoke about the possibility of machines soon tuning in to human language quirks, behavior and emotion. How did you get interested in machine intelligence and speech recognition?

The Amazon Echo is an unlikely hit. After all, the world's largest online retailer hasn't always won its bets on hardware. And a gadget that relies solely on voice? Yet Amazon has by one estimate sold some 3 million of the squat cylinders since the Echo launched in November, 2014. The company doesn't share sales data, but it did say Alexa, the voice-activated software that powers Echo, is active in millions of places, including smartphone apps and other Amazon gadgets.

They can still have trouble understanding simple commands to play music or look up directions, though, especially in noisy places. Rather than focusing on cleaning up the audio signal that captures your voice, Israeli startup VocalZoom thinks it might be possible to make all kinds of speech-recognition applications work a lot better by using a tiny, low-power laser that measures the itty-bitty vibrations of your skin when you speak. The company, which has raised about 12.5 million in venture funding thus far, is building a sensor with a small laser that it says will initially be built into headsets and helmets; there, it will be used alongside existing speech-recognition technologies that rely on microphones in order to reduce overall misunderstandings. VocalZoom founder and CEO Tal Bakish thinks it will first be used for things like motorcycle helmets or headsets worn by warehouse workers--you might use it to ask for directions while riding your Harley, for instance. A Chinese speech-recognition company called iFlytek plans to have a prototype headset ready at the end of August.