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.

Enfield Council in north London is trialling a virtual assistant called Amelia to improve the online digital service experience for users and also to reduce the workload of staff within the organisation. The council's head of digital delivery, Tim Kidd, believes this kind of AI-led approach will, in time, be rolled out for services in local government across the country. Speaking with Computerworld UK, Kidd says he "absolutely" expects AI to take off in the public sector and local government. "How quickly is a separate matter, but absolutely in the long run these sorts of technologies will become mainstream in our services," he asserts. The council worked closely with Amelia's engineers at IPSoft so that the organisation can feed information about its processes directly into the AI.

Over the last few years the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how it is shaping the marketing landscape has started to fascinate me. Most of us will remember Schwarzenegger in the world famous science fiction film, Terminator, as the cyborg assassin sent back in time to kill a woman whose son would one day become the saviour against these futuristic robotic machines. In fact, for some, when they think of Artificial Intelligence it probably begins by conjuring up images of robots taking over from humans in a post–apocalyptic future. The actual concept of Artificial Intelligence (AI) was in fact born in the 50s when computer scientist John McCarthy introduced the term Artificial Intelligence as'the science and engineering of making intelligent things'. It's definitely not a new concept and it wasn't just created for the box office, it is in fact already playing a pivotal role under our very own eyes across multiple industries, and starting to even shape the landscape for future marketers.

Student developers at the Apple Worldwide Developer's conference say they're ready to bring Siri to the masses, and make the personal digital assistant more useful. SAN FRANCISCO - What are the greatest, state-of-the-art apps for Apple iPhones, iPads, TVs and the Watch? Apple this week handed out awards to 12 app makers who are stretching the boundaries in what the company calls its Design Awards. The nods are given to put a spotlight on the best and brightest in app world. We sat down with most of the winners for an extended podcast at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) here to talk about their apps, the state of the app world and their take on new app features that Apple introduced at WWDC.

Apple built its success on devices. Devices are what it does, and what it's done forever. Everything the company makes is expensive, immaculately designed, and completely finished inside and out. You don't buy an Apple product to tinker with it, you use it until Apple releases something better. This strategy has made Apple the most valuable company in the world. But even Apple must change, a point CEO Tim Cook made during the Worldwide Developers Conference this week.

Microsoft seems to be on an acquiring spree as the company on Friday said that it had acquired messaging app developer Wand Labs. "This acquisition accelerates our vision and strategy for'Conversation as a Platform', which Satya Nadella introduced at our Build 2016 conference in March," David Ku, corporate vice president at Information platform group divison at Mircosoft, said. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, who was on a India visit recently, had said his company was trying to teach computers the human language to make computing faster by using artificial intelligence assistants such as Cortana, a programme that runs on most Windows devices and gets tasks done by speech recognition. "We are going to bring in bots which will result in democratisation for developers who would look at reinventing apps for speech recognition via a virtual assistant that would make human lives easier," he had added. Ku further justified the acquisition and said: "Wand Labs' technology and talent will strengthen our position in the emerging era of conversational intelligence, where we bring together the power of human language with advanced machine intelligence -- connecting people to knowledge, information, services and other people in more relevant and natural ways. It builds on and extends the power of the Bing, Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and Windows platforms to empower developers everywhere."

Logitech is inquiring if customers are interested in registering to participate in a special beta test to see how the company's Harmony remote pairs with Alexa to provide important feedback. Harmony users can start and stop activities via Alexa voice commands with the new integration plans and provide Logitech with feedback on how well it works together. Combining the functionality of the Harmony remote and Alexa's voice commands could soon mean you won't even have to lift a hand to complete various Activities, and that sounds like a pretty convenient future for all.

We propose a method for building an interpretable recommender system for personalizing online content and promotions. Historical data available for the system consists of customer features, provided content (promotions), and user responses. Unlike in a standard multi-class classification setting, misclassification costs depend on both recommended actions and customers. Our method transforms such a data set to a new set which can be used with standard interpretable multi-class classification algorithms. The transformation has the desirable property that minimizing the standard misclassification penalty in this new space is equivalent to minimizing the custom cost function.