If it seems like Amazon is listening in, it's because they are. Here's how to stop it. Every few months, I take a hard look at Amazon Echo and catch up on the latest skills. If you're not familiar with skills, these programs give Alexa new tricks. What's interesting is that individuals produce many Alexa skills, and Amazon shares skill revenues with developers.

Clearsurance, the insurance industry's first unbiased peer review marketplace for insurance consumers, today announced its Recommendation Engine, a new solution driven by consumer data to help consumers view personalized, conflict-free insurance recommendations for the first time. By filtering and sorting based on their unique risk profile, consumers shopping for homeowners, rental or auto insurance can now view the top insurance policies for them without having to worry about financial conflicts of interest or their data surreptitiously being sold to third parties. "Many insurance consumers are eligible for discounts as a result of an affinity to specific groups and unique personal attributes that qualify them to save money on their personal insurance policies," said Michael Crowe, CEO and founder at Clearsurance. "Clearsurance's recommendation engine enables the consumer to identify discount attributes and get recommendations from insurance companies that offer such discounts." In addition to providing an easy-to-use interface designed to simplify an ordinarily complex process, the recommendation engine addresses critical data privacy concerns.

In a world-first, Amazon has partnered with the UK's health service, the NHS. From this week, its voice-controlled device, Alexa, will give out health advice, and answer common questions such as'Alexa, how do I treat a migraine?' and'Alexa, what are the symptoms of chickenpox?' In response to health-related queries, Alexa will now search the NHS Choices website for health information (and there you were thinking Amazon was all about Prime Day deals). The aim is to ease pressure on the NHS and help those who can't easily access information on the internet – such as the elderly or blind people. Will this partnership with Amazon really end up easing pressure on the health service, or will it lead to data protection issues and misdiagnoses? As we've previously explored, the use of voice interfaces is one of the fastest growing web design trends in recent years, but so far the news has been met with concerns over the appropriateness of using Alexa to deliver this kind of important and sensitive information.

Until a decade or so ago, artificial intelligence was -- for most Americans -- something that existed only in the movies. Now, Alexa and Google Home have moved into numerous households and live only to please. According to many reports, 2019 will be the year of AI. A recent McKinsey Global survey found that 47 percent of companies have implemented at least one AI capability into their business processes, more than doubling the 20 percent that reported using AI the previous year. Artificial intelligence can be the difference maker in an entrepreneur's business, providing everything from customer support to automated supervision of assembly lines.

Alphabet's (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) Google gets lots of attention for its artificial intelligence (AI) pursuits, mainly because the company is so good at applying AI to a variety of businesses. Consider that Google's core advertising business uses AI to determine which ads to serve online users, and the company's AI assistant, Google Assistant, is one of the best voice-search services available. Or that Waymo, formerly Google's self-driving car project, has driven 11 billion autonomous miles on public roads and even has its own commercial autonomous-vehicle ride-hailing service. But aside from Google's impressive AI moves, plenty of other players are applying AI to key parts of their businesses, and should benefit from what is projected to be a $15.7 trillion market by 2030. The tech giant is one of the biggest cloud computing companies in the world right now, but it also has its sights set on AI.

Virtual agents: You might be familier with the word Siri, Cortana and Google. These are the intelligent virtual agents of IOS, Windows and Android respectively. Almost every phone or laptop user has known its significance and uses it on daily basis. They assist you to find useful informations when you ask them through your voice. For example, "Where's the nearest Mobile Store?" or "Call David".

Not all voice assistants can handle the same requests. We put Siri, Alexa and Google to the test. LONDON -- Alexa will see you now. Britain's health care service is teaming up with Amazon's digital voice assistant to help answer medical queries with advice from the service's official website. Critics, however, warn about risks to data privacy.

Voice-powered virtual assistants have huge potential for improving and expanding clinical trials, and tech companies are moving quickly to develop artificial intelligence-based software that can support and also protect the most private conversations between patients and clinicians. Katherine Vandebelt has already started scribbling down ideas about how voice assistants could work in a clinical trial environment. As Oracle's global head of clinical innovation, and former clinical innovation leader at Eli Lilly and Company, Vandebelt believes that the clinical trial experience can change with the introduction of virtual assistants into the drug research ecosystem. In April, Amazon's Alexa app became compliant with the US government's Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and similar virtual assistants are likely to follow. Here are five changes she sees coming.

Everybody knows they need to invest in pilots and initial projects. Yet getting those projects into production is hard, and most companies still aren't in with both feet. If you aren't hands on with the projects yourself, you may have heard a lot of different terminology. You may be wondering what it all means. Is AI the same as machine learning?

Using the CB Insights platform, we track where AI is heating up, from health to entertainment. Since 2013, over 3.6K AI startups have raised equity funding globally. The majority of these companies -- like unicorns UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Face -- sell AI software-as-a-service. Others use AI to develop their core products, including Indigo Agriculture, which leverages machine learning to develop microbial seed treatments. Some other startups -- such as Graphcore, Habana, and Cerebras -- focus on hardware to support AI workloads.