No, the robots are not coming for your job as they ready to take over the world ... yet. But the future of the world's workforce will mark a significant shift and work will be heavily reliant on the teamwork of human and machine, noted the just-released IDC white paper, Content Intelligence for the Future of Work. And we're not quite in sci-fi film territory either, said Holly Muscolino, research vice president of content and process strategies and the future of work at IDC. "A software robot (or'digital worker') is essentially a software program that automates a task that has previously been accomplished by a human worker," Muscolino explained. "The term'robot' is used to signify the role that these software solutions play in automation, however, beyond that, there is no relationship between a software robot and the physical robots that we may see on the manufacturing line, patrolling supermarket aisles on starring in'Star Wars'' movies." Muscolino added, "A variety of software technologies are classified as'digital workers.' The technology gaining the most airtime today is robotic process automation (RPA), but other automation technologies, and AI-enabled technologies, like digital assistants and chatbots, are also classified as'digital workers'."

In the epoch of cutting edge technologies, several devices and technological tools are available in the market. Smartphones namely, Google's Android and Apple's iPhone are the most widely used smartphones and are profoundly popular nowadays. With a combined mobile app development market share close to 99%, both Google and Apple work to bring more innovations and new features into their smartphones as billions of people all over the globe are utilizing them daily. In the limelight comes the significance and role of Artificial Intelligence in mobile application development, which gives more fuel to Google & Apple to bring advanced changes to their respective platforms. AI is beneficial for developers and even for the general users.

In her popular book, Weapons of Math Destruction, data scientist Cathy O'Neil elegantly describes to the general population the danger of the data science revolution in decision making. She describes how the US News ranking of universities, which orders universities based on 15 measured properties, created new dynamics in university behavior, as they adapted to these measures, ultimately resulting in decreased social welfare. Unfortunately, the idea that data science-related algorithms, such as ranking, cause changes in behavior, and that this dynamic may lead to socially inferior outcomes, is dominant in our new online economy. Ranking also plays a crucial role in search engines and recommendation systems--two prominent data science applications that we focus on in this article. Recommendation systems endorse items by ranking them using information induced from some context--for example, the Web page a user is currently browsing, a specific application the user is running on her mobile phone, or the time of day.

The last half decade has ushered in the era of humans interacting with technology through speech, with Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, and Google's AI rapidly becoming ubiquitous elements of the human experience. But, while the migration from typing to voice has brought great convenience for some folks (and improved safety, in the case of people utilizing technology while driving), it has not delivered on its potential for the people who might otherwise stand to benefit the most from it: those of us with disabilities. For people with Down Syndrome, for example, voice-based control of technology offers the promise of increased independence – and even of some new, potentially life-saving products. Yet, for this particular group of people, today's voice-recognizing AIs pose serious problems, as a result of a combination of 3 factors: To address this issue, and as a step forward towards ensuring that people with health conditions that cause AIs to be unable to understand them are able to utilize modern technology, Google is partnering with the Canadian Down Syndrome Society; via an effort called Project Understood, Google hopes to obtain recordings of people with Down Syndrome reading simple phrases, and to use those recordings to help train its AI to understand the speech patterns common to those with Down Syndrome. This effort is an extension of Google's own Project Euphonia, which seeks to improve computers' abilities to understand diverse speech patterns including impaired speech, and, which, earlier this year, began an effort to train AIs to recognize communication from people with the neuro-degenerative condition ALS, commonly known as Lou Gehrig's Disease. So far, 300 people have contributed recordings to Project Understood – and, of course, the more people who do "lend their voices" to the effort, the better the AI will likely become at understanding people with Down Syndrome.

Cyber Monday was the biggest shopping day in Amazon's history. Turns out it was also a day for Amazon to promote its own brands over all others. On Monday, asking an Amazon Echo for the "best Cyber Monday deals" returned five straight responses from smart assistant Alexa that promoted products owned by Amazon: Amazon acquired Blink, a maker of security cameras, in 2017; it purchased Ring, the maker of video doorbells, in 2018. An Amazon spokesperson told Recode that after those first five deals, Amazon did promote items made by other companies, and that Alexa-enabled non-Echo devices returned deals in their first five responses that included non-Amazon-owned items. But the initial Alexa responses are just another sign of Amazon's aggressiveness in promoting its own brands, whether they are gadgets like the Echo family of smart speaker products and Ring doorbells or apparel lines like Goodthreads.

Match Group, the largest dating app conglomerate in the US, doesn't perform background checks on any of its apps' free users. A ProPublica report today highlights a few incidents in which registered sex offenders went on dates with women who had no idea they were talking to a convicted criminal. These men then raped the women on their dates, leaving the women to report them to the police and to the apps' moderators. These women expected their dating apps to protect them, or at least vet users, only to discover that Match has little to no insight on who's using their apps. The piece walks through individual attacks and argues that the apps have no real case for not vetting their users.

Disclaimer: There are statements about potential uses of AI within this post that some people may find disturbing. When the formal study of AI was conceived back in the post-WW2 era it's potential was heralded as a boon for mankind and viewed in a almost exclusively positive light. What could be bad about that? Well, beyond science fiction's killer robots and ghosts in the machine stories, AI still has much of that positivity surrounding it as we enter into the era of autonomous vehicles, functional digital assistants, and recommendation engines that actually make good recommendations. But is the rise of functional AI actually hiding another more sinister development, one which has the potential to do serious harm to those who are on the wrong side of the algorithm?

When Google introduced the Home Mini two years ago, it was playing catch-up to Amazon's Echo lineup. The Echo Dot, a tiny and affordable version of the larger Echo smart speaker, had been on sale for more than a year and a half, and Google was clearly responding to the Dot's popularity. The Home Mini bested the Dot in several ways, though, including a better speaker and more attractive design. Naturally, Amazon responded a year later with the third-generation Dot. It ditched the glossy black plastic and took inspiration from the Home Mini's fabric-covered exterior.

Fusion Informatics builds a team of eCommerce virtual assistants to our clients that are exclusive to their company. We also hired and trained 1 x customer support representatives to help answer hundreds of emails that our clients receive per day in his ecommerce business. We provided with all support and training documents for their company, we then trained their staff members and within a few weeks, the staff had answered the message without the support of the client or Fusion Informatics. Finally, we successfully plant a Virtual Assistant and provided solutions for our customers who benefit from an increase in sales of 30% in the first month itself.