Leading cloud and managed service company, Maintel, recently revealed a new study into the attitudes consumers and businesses share towards virtual assistants. As artificial intelligence and voice-activated bots become more commonplace, the recent research from Maintel highlights why some companies are still hesitating before rolling out this new tech. Among consumers, data protection is usually the most significant concern linked to AI, with 47% saying they're worried about being hacked. Additionally, there's a consistent sense of reluctance among consumers in the UK when it comes to engaging with smart devices. Around 59% of customers don't have an intelligent device with a virtual assistant.

It's kind of incredible that a Google-made laptop runs a hobbled version of Google Assistant. We're referring to the Pixelbook Go, which begins shipping on November 15 as a sibling to the original Pixelbook. It's a performant and sleek machine with an exceptional keyboard and all-day battery life, but there's little to recommend it on the software side. When Google Assistant came to Chrome OS alongside the circa-2017 Pixelbook, the assumption was that it would match or best the robustness of Assistant on smartphones, smart displays, and speakers. Nips and tucks continue to arrive two years later, but Google Assistant on Chrome OS is advancing at a snail's pace relative to its counterparts.

Given their inherent similarities, it's entirely logical that robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) would have crossover in a variety of different contexts. Both of these technologies are contingent upon bringing order to processes – usually workflows, in either the physical or digital realm – that might otherwise run the risk of falling into disorder for any number of reasons, most notably human error. RPA and AI are perfectly capable of operating on their own, and in fact often do. Organisations considering implementing one or the other to manage any of their operations would serve themselves well by examining how they're being used in tandem. It's also worth investigating how a versatile low-code business application development platform or dynamic case management software may be ideal for creating solutions to most successfully leverage symbiotic RPA and AI.

What would you do if you had the super-power to accurately answer, in a few milliseconds, a multiple-choice question with a billion choices? Would you design the next generation of Web search engines, which could predict which of the billions of documents might be relevant to a given query? Would you build the next generation of retail recommender systems that have things delivered to your doorstep just as you need them? Or would you try and predict the next word about to be uttered by U.S. President Donald Trump? The objective in extreme classification, a new research area in machine learning, is to develop algorithms with such capabilities.

It seems like only yesterday that artificial intelligence (AI) was the stuff of science fiction - a concept, rather than grounded in reality. Marketers in particular have waxed lyrical about the potential of AI for perhaps five years or so, but during that time much of the conversation around AI has been the manifestation of a sort of'shiny new tech syndrome'. To suggest – as many do – that AI is still a buzzword, is to vastly underestimate how it, when paired with the right data and the increase in demand for intelligent virtual assistants, is already radically altering aspects of marketing. At The Drum Arms at Advertising Week New York, The Drum co-founder and editor-in-chief, Gordon Young, took the stage with Microsoft Advertising, the American basketball league NBA and digital agency Digitas, to discuss how this combination of data and AI will define – and in some cases is already defining – the future of marketing. Jorge Urrutia del Pozo, head of fan audience strategy and engagement at the NBA, discussed how he and his team utilize the huge and various amounts of data that the NBA creates.

For online businesses, E-Commerce startups Datoin is the best AI platform. Datoin is no code AI platform for business users who understand the domain and are not from tech or data science background. Datoin is designed with a vision that the online businesses of any size need not invest in building data science expertise to begin monetizing the insights from their own data to drive more sales.

When we begin to think about the possibilities of an HR department powered by artificial intelligence, it's easy to get carried away into a robot-centred daydream. But the reality of AI's relationship with HR is much less science-fiction, and much closer to home. Today, AI is already at work in ways we don't see: things like LinkedIn's auto-responses prompting you to say'Congratulations' on a colleague's promotion announcement, Amazon's personalised shopping recommendations or Gmail's Smart Reply which uses machine learning to craft replies to your inbox. If we start to look into HR's use for AI, the focus should always be in enabling HR to refocus their time on strategy and human interaction. Too often, the burden of administration can weigh HR down.

ABSTRACT With growing consumer adoption of online grocery shopping through platforms such as Amazon Fresh, Instacart, and Walmart Grocery, there is a pressing business need to provide relevant recommendations throughout the customer journey. In this paper, we introduce a production within-basket grocery recommendation system, RTT2V ec, which generates real-time personalized product recommendations to supplement the user's current grocery basket. We conduct extensive offline evaluation of our system and demonstrate a 9.4% uplift in prediction metrics over baseline state-of-the-art within-basket recommendation models. We also propose an approximate inference technique 11.6x times faster than exact inference approaches. In production, our system has resulted in an increase in average basket size, improved product discovery, and enabled faster user checkout.

After years of pretty dull smartphone design, we're finally getting some interesting ideas, like foldable phones, that recall the weird, early days of rotating, flipping and docking devices. The new $799 Google Pixel 4 and larger $899 4 XL, however, are definitely in the "boring" category, at least on first glance. But that's because everything special about these phones lies under the hood. The Pixel 4's standout feature is its software, which closes the gap between itself and the competition, along with an improved pair of cameras that will show you everything your heart desires, even the stars in the night sky. No, really, this phone can take pictures of stars, as long as you're in the right place at the right time.

Security researchers developed skills for both Google Home and Amazon Echo devices that could eavesdrop on people. Smart speakers already face privacy concerns, but now security researchers have found that malicious apps designed to eavesdrop can sneak through Google's and Amazon's vetting processes. On Sunday, Security Research Labs disclosed its findings after developing eight voice apps that could listen in on people's conversations through Amazon's Echo and Google's Nest devices. All of the apps passed through the companies' reviews for third-party apps. The research was first reported by CNET sister site ZDNet.