Aloft Hotels, a north America-based hotel chain has recently launched world's first voice-activated rooms at their branches at Boston Seaport and Santa Clara. Apple's digital assistant will have a permanent place in special voice-activated rooms at select Aloft Hotel locations. Each room has an iPad running a custom Aloft app, which allows a guest to control lighting and room temperature and to explore local attractions through speech. The iPad will let guests browse the internet. Once the stay ends, the iPads are reset for the next guest.

You get home from the supermarket only to find that you've forgotten a vital ingredient for your dinner. But there is good news that could make sure you never forget key ingredients again. Microsoft has teamed up with refrigerator company, Liebherr, to create a new'SmartDeviceBox' which reminds people which foods they need to stock up on. We've all been there - you get home from the supermarket only to find that you've forgotten a vital ingredient (stock image left). But Microsoft has teamed up with Liebherr, to create a new'SmartDeviceBox' (pictured right) which reminds people which foods they need The SmartDeviceBox is an internet-connected device that uses cameras and object recognition technology to track what is in a refrigerator. The system uses the same machine learning technology used in Microsoft's AI assistant, Cortana.

You'd think that with dating apps like Tinder and Happn, finding a guy good enough to take home your parents wouldn't be that much of an issue. Unfortunately, that's not the case for the 27-year-old Li Chenxi, who's been feeling the pressure from her traditional Chinese parents to settle down. Afraid of being typecast as one of China's "leftover women," Li decided to rent a boyfriend from a Chinese site in Beijing, and documented her plan to fool her parents into believing that she's got a boyfriend called Sean. Li met up with her candidate and concocted a convincing story on how they met and why she kept their relationship a secret for so long. When the time came to introduce Sean to her parents, Li's mother immediately saw through her lie, insisting that her daughter's 24-year-old beau was "too young and good-looking" to be with her.

NEW YORK: Tech giant Microsoft and large equipment manufacturer Liebherr are collaborating on a new generation of smart refrigerators that would help in shopping and planning meals with intelligent food management. "As part of the Liebherr household appliances division's digital initiative, the duo would develop'SmartDeviceBox' -- a communication module which fits into refrigerators and freezers -- connecting them to the internet," T.J Hazen, Principal Data Scientist Manager at Microsoft, wrote. The system, which would utilise the same machine learning technology used in Microsoft's artificial intelligence (AI) assistant Cortana, is designed to have a long lifecycle. Microsoft gets big support in its fight for digital privacy with US Technology, media, pharmaceutical and other companies, along with major corporate lobbying groups, filed legal briefs on Friday in support of a Microsoft Corp lawsuit that aims to strike down a law preventing companies from telling customers the government is seeking their data. With this technology, modular units can be integrated and upgraded at any time in existing SmartDevice-ready appliances to create value and comfort for customers through new digital features and solutions, the post on Microsoft blog said.

Apple, Inc. has made a serious play in the artificial intelligence (AI) space by acquiring machine learning startup Turi, Inc., a company previously known as both Dato and GraphLab. The acquisition price is believed to be 200 million according to Geekwire who broke the story. Founded in 2013, Turi offers a machine learning platform that creates Big Data analytics for its users based on an open source project initially intended for applying large-scale machine learning to graph analysis. The product allows developers to build apps with both machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities, allowing enterprises both small and large make better sense of data; use cases given by the company include recommendation engines, fraud detection, predicting customer churn, sentiment analysis, and customer segmentation. Turi's customers include Zillow, ExxonMobil, StumbleUpon, Adobe, Pandora, and Bosch and its competitors include Databricks, H2O, and Neo4j among others.

Tech giant Microsoft and large equipment manufacturer Liebherr are collaborating on a new generation of smart refrigerators that would help in shopping and planning meals with intelligent food management. "As part of the Liebherr household appliances division's digital initiative, the duo would develop'SmartDeviceBox' -- a communication module which fits into refrigerators and freezers -- connecting them to the internet," T.J. Hazen, Principal Data Scientist Manager at Microsoft, wrote. The system, which would utilize the same machine learning technology used in Microsoft's artificial intelligence (AI) assistant Cortana, is designed to have a long lifecycle. With this technology, modular units can be integrated and upgraded at any time in existing SmartDevice-ready appliances to create value and comfort for customers through new digital features and solutions, the post on Microsoft blog said. With the refrigerators, stored groceries can be monitored using internal cameras and object recognition technology.

Are you putting much time and effort in your online marketing and is it just not working? This blog will first list 7 reasons why you may not succeed in online marketing. After that, this blog will present 7 developments in technologies that are worth considering when designing your plan of online marketing success. Is your online marketing just not working? Ryan Shelley says there are two main issues when it comes to succeeding in online marketing.

Once Drones Get Artificial Intelligence, They'll Rule the World Artificial Intelligence Is It Real?

At Singularity University's inaugural Global Summit, Neil Jacobstein, chair of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, provided a primer showing how artificial intelligence literally transforms everything it touches. As important as hardware is to AI, large data sets are where machine learning algorithms really learn by refining hypotheses iteratively. Here's a clip of Jacobstein highlighting the AI revolution from the recent Exponential Finance conference: Clearly, the AI revolution is already here, but we've only scratched the surface on what's to come. Before disrupt industries one by one with a difficult transition for billion people, AI should disrupt Neoliberalism first.

Braina (Brain Artificial) is another example here. Braina is an intelligent personal assistant, human language interface and automation software for Windows PC that makes it possible for users to control a computer using natural language commands. Importantly, Braina is not a Siri or Cortana clone for PC but rather a powerful personal and office productivity software. Users can either type commands or speak to it and Braina will understand what a person wants to do. Moreover, using speech recognition built in Braina for Android App, users can interact with their computers from anywhere in the house over a Wi-Fi network.