Have you ever wondered how the digital ads displayed on your social media accounts manage to match your key interests as well as past searches for items on e-retail platforms? Well, this is because an intelligent machine is using your search data to customize its marketing just for you! From automating customer service to prioritizing voice search to auto reading OTP, e-commerce platforms are constantly reinventing their user experience to capture a larger share of the e-retail market. As competition increases in the e-commerce domain, the thrust now is on offering the most personalized and convenient experience to buyers. Not only is this aimed at attracting new converts to the online shopping segment but also to snatch away customers from competitors.

LONDON – Artificial intelligence (AI) will be widely adopted in office environments in a variety of ways over the next few years as businesses invest in digital workplace initiatives, Gartner analysts said today. The trend is expected to gather steam as voice-activated personal assistants that have proved a hit at home begin to make inroads in the office. By 2025, the technology will "certainly be mainstream," said Matthew Cain, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner – even though privacy and security concerns have limited deployments so far. Cain was among the analysts who spoke at Gartner's Digital Workplace Summit here. Gartner has separately predicted that consumer and business spending on smart speakers will pass $3.5 billion in 2021, with 25% of digital workers using an AI assistant on a daily basis within the next two years.

In science fiction, the practice of silently saying words thought by the mind is called subvocalization. If the term does not sound familiar, think of when you read a board or a text, and the consciousness automatically reproduces the writings in the brain: it's like you're reading aloud inside your head, is not it? Recently, this began to be used for purposes of interaction with computers and mobile devices, and the MIT researchers even created a wearable that measures neuromuscular signals, they are triggered when the individual does the subvocalization. The gadget may at first appear to be just a medical device attached to the user's face, but one can imagine that in future the size of the component will decrease and it will be allocated to the face in a more subtle way. It is also speculated that wearable can be used as a sort of wizard, with activations integrated through "Hey Siri" or "OK Google", but for now, the system created by MIT works in a different way: with electrodes that pick up the signals that you verbalize internally, as if they were bone-conducting headphones.

Between 2018 and 2019, organizations that have deployed artificial intelligence (AI) grew from 4% to 14%, according to Gartner's 2019 CIO Agenda survey. AI is reaching organizations in many different ways compared with a few years ago, when there was no alternative to building your own solutions with machine learning (ML). AutoML and intelligent applications have the greatest momentum, while other approaches are also popular -- namely, AI platform as a service or AI cloud services. Conversational AI remains at the top of corporate agendas spurred by the worldwide success of Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and others. Meanwhile, new technologies continue to emerge such as augmented intelligence, edge AI, data labelling and explainable AI.

Each month, over two million banking transactions and services are performed using the OCBC Mobile Banking app. Since 19 August 2019, the app has offered an AI-powered voice-based virtual assistant – which has helped with over 20,000 requests made via voice. In half of these requests, the customer was seeking information about spending categories and budgets; another 30 per cent concerned past banking transactions. Other mobile banking services that were performed using voice included locating ATMs, paying bills and changing banking PINs. The new voice-activated banking service, which was developed and trained over 13 months and is called the OCBC Banking Assistant, 'lives' in the OCBC Mobile Banking app.

Amazon has announced a new program for its Echo smart speakers that will put anyone with an Amazon account in charge of answering search queries. The program, called Alexa Answers, will let users browse a list of unanswered questions like'What is the state snack of Texas?' (an example provided by Amazon's own web page) and submit their response. After the answer is entered into the database, the Echo's voice assistant, Alexa, will start relaying it to other users with the same query and an addendum stating that the data is'according to an Amazon customer.' Amazon is now crowd-sourcing answers to users' search queries through its popular smart-speaker, the Echo (pictured above) Participants will enter their answers -- 300 characters or less -- on a dedicated website where they will then compete with other participants to earn points and badges for'good' responses.' The program was officially launched last year, but was invite-only and included a relatively small pool of customers.

Artificial intelligence is coming to our homes. A growing number of people use smart devices that are developed with state-of-the-art AI technology. The market for smart homes is going to rise as new AI advances bring big changes to the industry. One survey from last year found that only 12-16% of homes in the United States are equipped with smart devices. However, this figure is going to skyrocket as AI leads to fascinating new smart devices.

Samantha: I want to learn everything about everything. I want to eat it all up. I want to discover myself. Theodore: Yes, I want that for you too. You helped me discover my ability to want. The cinematic depiction of artificial intelligence as female and rebellious is not a new trend.

Black & Veatch, an employee-owned, global leader in building critical human infrastructure in energy, water, telecommunications, and government services, is on a journey to leverage AI-assisted bots, called virtual experts, to better capture and interact with engineering knowledge and standards. The goal of this emerging effort is to experiment with ways to better capture knowledge and expertise within the company. Ultimately, this initiative would lead to a reduced amount of time required to locate desired information and create an opportunity for continued innovation to better support the future. Knowledge and standards were generally captured in written form, which led to an abundance of Microsoft Word documents that were difficult to search and a burden to continually refresh. Up to this point, access to content was through best practice document and folder organization and traditional search functions.

In December, Amazon launched a crowdsourced Q&A platform into beta with the goal of improving Alexa's ability to answer questions. That feature, Alexa Answers, is now live to all. Amazon says the feature was well-received by the early community of invite-only participants, who have since contributed hundreds of thousands of answers that have been shared with Alexa customers millions of times. To differentiate these answers from other Alexa responses, they're attributed to "an Amazon customer." As the company explained at launch, there are thousands of answers that had previously stumped Alexa, like "Where was Barbara Bush buried?," "Who wrote the score for Lord of the Rings?," "What's cork made out of?," and "Where do bats go in the winter?"