Artificial intelligence, especially machine learning, is an integral part of marketing nowadays. Estimating the price to sales ratio, or price elasticity, is hard with many products and factors that impact sales. Dynamic price optimisation using machine learning can help. It can correlate pricing trends with sales trends by using an algorithm. It can then align other factors such as category management and inventory levels.

According to Pew Research Center's analysis of comScore data, at the start of 2015, 39 of the top 50 digital news websites have more traffic to their sites and associated applications coming from mobile devices than from desktop computers. This fact is self -explanatory why service providers are moving towards news app. More and more apps are being launched worldwide each one claiming to be exclusive and original. But the truth is they are not, especially news apps. With the abundance of data being generated every second, there has been an excess of information.

Advances in technology are setting the stage for financial institutions to explore use cases that take advantage of a consumer's most natural communication method ... the voice. It wasn't so long ago that we were amazed that we interact with an IVR to solve basic customer service issues or that we could type on a piece of glass to communicate with our mobile device. The problem was that most IVR systems didn't learn about our needs over time and typing and gesturing is really not the most efficient way to interact with a computer or device for the vastly most common uses most people have. Even for the most basic routines require far more physical and mental effort than what should be required in today's digital age. What if each time you needed to reach out to your bank (or any other business) the organization remembered your entire history of interactions (needs, behaviors, preferences, transaction patterns and timing, etc.), allowing it to have an intelligent'conversation' without going over often repeated steps?

You may not know it, but machine learning is all around you. When you type a query into a search engine, it's how the engine figures out which results to show you–and which ads. When you read your email, you don't see most of the spam because machine learning has filtered it out. Go to Amazon to buy a book or Netflix to watch a video, and a machine-learning system helpfully recommends some others you might like. Facebook uses machine learning to decide which updates to show you, and Twitter does the same for tweets.

Siri may be the first mainstream digital assistant, but it's still the butt of many jokes now that it's been bested by just about all of Apple's biggest competitors. Siri's intelligence and responsiveness often lags behind Amazon's Alexa or Google Now. And the competition shows no sign of giving up its lead. Google made a bunch of splashy AI-related announcements at its I/O conference last month. And Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos said at the Recode conference this week that there are more than 1,000 employees working on Alexa and the Echo speaker.

How much time do you waste looking for that one file, email or attachment? Maybe you remember when you last opened it, who you were with or where you worked on it, but not much else? Ask for what you want – by typing or speaking out loud – using natural language. REACHit for Cortana will find your photos, documents, and emails faster than you can, and with a lot less stress. We'd like to thank our Beta testers for helping make our app great!

Where else but the Code Conference can you expect to hear from the Tech industry's biggest players like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Google CEO Sundar Pichai? Corrections & Clarifications: An earlier version gave the wrong year Amazon won Emmys for Transparent. Speaking to the Code conference here, Bezos, whose company has a hit on its hand with the Echo connected speaker, said, "it's hard to overstate how big of an impact this will have on society over the next 20 years. It doesn't mean phones are going to go away or that voice actions will replace screens. As long as people have eyes, they have screens."

On slide 133 of her much-anticipated annual Internet Trends report, venture capitalist Mary Meeker made a curious comparison. She put a graph of iPhone sales side-by-side with a sales estimate for the Echo, the newish wireless speaker and voice-activated personal assistant from Amazon. That juxtaposition might seem strange, but Meeker was making a point. Sales of the iPhone have been slowing, and according to Meeker's projections, they'll go into decline by the end of 2016. Right as this is happening, sales of the Amazon Echo are starting to take off. It's a sign that using voice as a way to command your tech is steadily gaining traction.

The technology behind Alexa, the voice inside Amazon's Echo speaker, could become Amazon's fourth business pillar, alongside retail marketplace, Amazon Prime, and Amazon Web Services. Amazon has more than 1,000 people working on artificial intelligence and third-party apps that people have built using the company's SDK, Bezos, the founder and CEO of the company, said at Recode's Code Conference Tuesday. During an interview with Walt Mossberg, he said the company licenses the technology to others so they can embed it in an app or device. There's also a program that allows companies to build apps that teaches Alexa new skills. Bezos called artificial intelligence, natural language processing and machine learning intelligence "gigantic" and says it's probably difficult to "overstate the impact it will have on society over the next 20 years."

Artificial intelligence (AI) makes difficult tasks possible, such as sorting and recognising patterns in incredibly large data sets. The most challenging problems often have unexpected input and are often referred to as AI-compete or AI-difficult, implying the need for human-like computation. While some might think of AI as technology mostly used for complex visual tasks – or even as a far-fetched concept only found in science fiction – it's used in more ways than most people realise. That raises the question: could modern society get by without this fast-growing technology? Depending on the source, some claim AI has been around since ancient times, when the Greeks had myths about robots, and engineers from Egypt and China built automatons.