The BBC is preparing to launch a rival to Amazon's Alexa called Beeb, with a pledge that it will understand British accents. The voice assistant, which has been created by an in-house BBC team, will be launched next year, with a focus on enabling people to find their favourite programmes and interact with online services. While some US-developed products have struggled to understand strong regional accents, the BBC will this week ask staff in offices around the UK to record their voices and make sure the software understands them. The BBC currently has no plans to launch a standalone physical product such as Amazon's Echo speaker or a Google Home device. Instead, the Beeb software will be built into the BBC's website, its iPlayer app on smart TVs, and made available to manufacturers who want to incorporate the public broadcaster's software.

Hope is at hand for millions of frustrated smart assistant users across the UK as the BBC announces plans for'Beeb', an AI that will recognise all British regional accents. Videos of Glaswegians, Liverpudlians, Mancunians and others have spread online in recent years, showing their struggles with products like Amazon's Alexa. Many have been forced to adopt a'received pronunciation' way of speaking to be understood. Ironically, this formal accent was once seen as a bastion of style within the BBC's own cadre of presenters. Developers claim the smart assistant will be available next year on the BBC's website, iPlayer and as a software plugin for hardware like Amazon's Echo speaker range.

August 26, 2019 -- Conversica, Inc., the leader in Intelligent Virtual Assistants for business, announced today that is has been named to the Constellation ShortList for Sales Productivity Solutions in Q3 2019. This is the second consecutive time Conversica has appeared on the Constellation ShortList in this category. This award recognizes software and applications that allow sales professionals to maximize their performance and productivity. Constellation Research, a respected technology research and advisory firm based in Silicon Valley, determines its list by inquiries and interviews with the nominees' clients and partners; while also factoring in market share and internal research. "We are honored to be named to Constellation's ShortList for Sales Productivity Solutions for the second time in a row," said Alex Terry, CEO of Conversica.

AI has the potential to influence many industries, besides delivering exceptionally well in customer services. Deloitte's Global Contact Center survey 2017 says, 33% of call centers agree to invest in Artificial intelligence in the next two years. Artificial Intelligence is using machine learning to automate decision-making and interact like humans. Here are the ways Machine Learning helps call centers • Task Automation - Classification of incoming calls and intelligent routing to the agents • Guidance - Suggesting the agent with the next best step • Customer Effort Reduction - Auto detection of customer intent and proactive notification to the agents • Case Deflection - Guiding the customers with self-help steps 9. A virtual assistant is a computer program having capabilities to interact with customers.

Savant has enhanced their remote-control experience, enabling users to personalize each Pro Remote by room or by user. In addition to touchscreen personalization, the Pro Remote's native voice button can also be configured for Siri voice activation. With the latest release from the company, users can now select from all available Savant Scenes, Services, and Favorite Channels and add the ones they use the most frequently to the home screen for effortless access. Users can set up a home screen that is particular to the functionality of each room or create a home screen that is specific to each user. Having already delivered native integrations with Google Home and Amazon Alexa voice assistants to the Savant platform, users will now have access to Siri-based voice control of Apple TV using the Savant Pro Remote.

Warren, Mercer consulting's AI digital assistant, is a sophisticated AI platform designed to leverage real-time data with learned patterns to enhance workforce productivity. It works 24/7 to ensure your personal and professional obligations are well organized and your career trajectory is moving forward. It does this by contextualizing data from your past, present and future and streamlining your responsibilities and schedule in ways that encourage better decision making. In other words, Warren is your dedicated personal coach, confidant and teammate – the ultimate convergence of people and technology. Every day, people struggle to maximize the value of their time.

Humans can communicate a range of nonverbal emotions, from terrified shrieks to exasperated groans. Voice inflections and cues can communicate subtle feelings, from ecstasy to agony, arousal and disgust. Even when simply speaking, the human voice is stuffed with meaning, and a lot of potential value if you're a company collecting personal data. Now, researchers at the Imperial College London have used AI to mask the emotional cues in users' voices when they're speaking to internet-connected voice assistants. The idea is to put a "layer" between the user and the cloud their data is uploaded to by automatically converting emotional speech into "normal" speech.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is coming to a workplace near you -- in fact, maybe it's already arrived. From AI-powered virtual assistants to predictive features in everyday software, it's projected that one in five workers will experience the benefits of working with AI by 2022. Information technology is one segment of the workforce that understands AI's big-picture potential. IT leaders, product engineers and other forward-thinkers can easily envision how AI improves and augments the entire employee experience. Though there are still misconceptions and misleading hype surrounding AI, organizational leaders are already realizing the many benefits of the technology in business operations.

If you stumble over your grammar, take comfort in this: Tech companies are supercharging their digital grammar editors with artificial intelligence and machine learning in an attempt to make clear, persuasive writing easier than ever. Google became the latest to enter the game last week, when the tech giant announced it would be adding an artificial intelligence-powered tool that offers automatic detection of grammar mistakes while composing messages in Gmail, as well as auto-correction of some common spelling mistakes. The company introduced a similar AI-driven function to documents in G Suite earlier this year. While some education experts applaud the advancement of high-tech grammar tools as a way to help people more clearly express their thoughts, others aren't so sure. Artificial intelligence, according to the contrarians, is only as smart as the humans who program it, and often just as biased.

Ever wonder why Alexa is not Alex, which could actually be a nickname for either gender? It's actually ironic that a company with a name derived from a fierce warrior race of women just fell into the standard practice of casting the helper who takes orders from the user as female. In fact, the AI agent's name is derived from Alexandria, a city whose claim to fame in the ancient world was its library, according to Daniel Rausch, the head of Amazon's "Smart Home" division. He told Business Insider that it is to capture the idea of the original collection of volumes that housed "all the collective knowledge of the world at that time." But they could have just as easily considered the fact that the city was named for Alexander the Great, and gone with the name Alex, a nickname adopted by men and women.