Deloitte Global predicts that the industry for smart speakers--internet-connected speakers with integrated digital voice assistants--will be worth US$7 billion in 2019, selling 164 million units at an average selling price of US$43.1 We expect 2018 sales of 98 million units at an average of US$44 each, for a total industry revenue of US$4.3 billion. This 63 percent growth rate would make smart speakers the fastest-growing connected device category worldwide in 2019, and lead to an installed base of more than 250 million units by year-end.2 Robust sales performance in 2019, although high, will represent a deceleration from the prior year: In Q2 of 2018, smart speaker sales were up 187 percent year over year.3 Smart speakers have, literally, a world of opportunity for growth. Much of that opportunity comes from expansion into non-English-speaking countries.

With the overwhelming online products available in recent years, there is an increasing need to filter and deliver relevant personalized advice for users. Recommender systems solve this problem by modeling and predicting individual preferences for a great variety of items such as movies, books or research articles. In this chapter, we explore rigorous network-based models that outperform leading approaches for recommendation. The network models we consider are based on the explicit assumption that there are groups of individuals and of items, and that the preferences of an individual for an item are determined only by their group memberships. The accurate prediction of individual user preferences over items can be accomplished by different methodologies, such as Monte Carlo sampling or Expectation-Maximization methods, the latter resulting in a scalable algorithm which is suitable for large datasets.

Dmitry Kochin (left) and Alexander Neymak are the brains behind FuturologyAI, a largely self-funded ... [ ] startup that creates bots for sales teams. Russian bots are not just for election meddling anymore. Bots, whether Russian or American made, can also pose as virtual assistants ready to help an existing sales team, or build one where there wasn't one before. Dmitry Kochin is a Russian'Botman', taught the tools of the trade at the Moscow Institute for Physics and Technology, where he earned his PhD in computer science in 2006. His three-year old company, FuturologyAI, has a team of five developers, all of them sitting in an office in Moscow, building what he calls a "virtual sales force" and training bots to better understand human conversation.

Mumbai: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and emerging technologies such as virtual personal assistants and chatbots will replace almost 69 per cent of the manager's workload by 2024, according to a prediction by research and advisory firm Gartner on Thursday. "The role of manager will see a complete overhaul in the next four years," Helen Poitevin, Research Vice-President at Gartner, said in a statement. "Currently, managers often need to spend time filling in forms, updating information and approving workflows. By using AI to automate these tasks, they can spend less time managing transactions and can invest more time on learning, performance management and goal setting," Poitevin said. AI and emerging technologies will undeniably change the role of the manager and will allow employees to extend their degree of responsibility and influence, without taking on management tasks.

Do you find Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) too overwhelming? Think AI and ML applications are limited to the technological domain? If yes, then let us enlighten you with the fact that both these technologies have more ordinary use cases than you can imagine. In fact, we all are already using AI and ML in our day-to-day lives – right from using real-time navigation to surfing the web. AI and ML are simplifying our routine operations in more ways than one.

Artificial intelligence (AI) applications -- as an example, virtual personal assistants and chatbots -- are being adopted rapidly within the global workplace. By 2024, Gartner predicts that these technologies will replace almost 69 percent of the typical manager's workload.

If you ask Siri to show you the weirdest people in the world, what images might you see? Siri showed me different links to the same scientific paper, published a decade ago, with the questioning title, "The weirdest people in the world?" By some stroke of luck, or a divine favor from the science-communication gods, "weird" turns out to be an acronym for capturing the weirdness of people raised in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies. WEIRD people, like myself and many of you reading this, are, unfortunately, part of a problem that still faces psychology, a discipline largely dedicated to parsing what all humans share in common: The field's research subjects are too damn weird. For too long, psychologists have focused their research on "one particular culture," Michael Muthukrishna, an assistant professor of economic psychology at the London School of Economics, told me. "To be honest, it's worse than that, because scientists were actually looking at a subset of that population, undergraduates, who aren't representative of less educated populations within the country."

Seed Round Co-Led by Glasswing Ventures and Google's AI-focused Fund, Gradient Ventures, Will Be Used To Supercharge R&D and Support Customer Success Plannuh, a startup transforming the way marketers plan and budget, announced a $4 million seed round co-led by Glasswing Ventures and Gradient Ventures, Google's AI-focused venture fund. The new funding will be used to accelerate Plannuh's R&D initiatives and support teams as the company continues to expand its customer base. Peter Mahoney, founder and CEO of Plannuh, was troubled by the consistent mismanagement of budgets and poor execution of plans resulting in wasted spend. Leveraging over 30 years of marketing experience, Mahoney identified that the primary causes of budgetary waste stemmed from too many marketing plans, budgets and metrics spread across various slide presentations, spreadsheets, documents, and disparate systems. This resulted in a lack of visibility into plan execution, time and marketing spend, as well as budget forecast accuracy.

MELVILLE, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Verint Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: VRNT), The Customer Engagement Company, today announced it has been named a leader by industry analyst firm Ovum in Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA) solutions in a comparison report, Ovum Decision Matrix: Selecting an Intelligent Virtual Assistant Solution, 2020-21*. Reviewing IVAs that leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to provide natural, human-like interactions with consumers, the report concludes the new tools "make a massive difference to customer engagements" compared with legacy, non-intelligent IVAs. Verint Intelligent Virtual AssistantTM--part of Verint Customer Engagement Cloud portfolio--is among the best, according to the report. "The strides that leading vendors have made in IVAs in recent years are impressive," says Ovum Distinguished Analyst, Michael Azoff, author of the report. "In the vendors' customer use cases we studied, for example, it was typical to hear of million-dollar range cost savings by introducing IVAs (calculated as cost per call), bringing ROI within the first year."

The Gartner report, 'Predicts 2020: AI and the Future of Work', predicted that 69% of routine work by managers will be replaced by AI and emerging automation technologies by 2024. That proportion of managerial admin is expected to be offloaded to technologies such as chatbots and virtual personal assistants. This shift in reliance on technology is expected to empower employees more, giving them more responsibility and scope for influence without needing to take on management tasks. Matt Weston, Managing Director of Robert Half UK, examines the future of the workplace as automation and artificial intelligence shift the landscape. "The role of manager will see a complete overhaul in the next four years," said Helen Poitevin, research vice president at Gartner.