If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA Today's newsroom and any business incentives. I'm calling it now folks--smart displays are the next big thing in the smart home arena of products. The Echo Show 5 for example, Amazon's latest gadget to hit the scene, combines the benefits of their voice assistant, Alexa, with on-screen visuals, which quite literally means hours of entertainment without you having to lift a finger. Amazon just knocked $25 off the price of the Echo Show 5--now available for a mere $64.99.

Amazon has its own lineup of smart home devices, including a plethora of Alexa-enabled speakers that not only bring music into your home but can easily run all of your smart gadgets, too. We took a close look at the smallest of the bunch, the budget-friendly Echo Dot, which has a lot to offer despite its petite size. The Echo Dot is small, compact, and easily fits into your decor. The Echo Dot is the smaller sibling of Amazon's popular midrange smart speaker, the Echo. This third-generation model still rocks the circa-2017 design upgrade that's slightly more rotund than the model that came before, but it still won't take up a ton of room.

Oracle's digital assistant is now available in Microsoft Teams, the cloud hosting and services provider announced today. Oracle's AI assistant got several other updates today, including the ability to interact via voice commands, enterprise-grade security for voice recordings, and the ability to respond to more complex voice commands. The news was announced today at Oracle's OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. As part of the Microsoft Teams integration, Microsoft Teams and Office 365 users will be able to access Oracle enterprise bots from the Microsoft Teams App Store. "For enterprise customers, what we're enabling to do now is [that] they can easily try to use Microsoft Teams to collaborate with their employees and colleagues and so forth with Microsoft Teams," Oracle VP of AI and digital assistant Suhas Uliyar told VentureBeat in a phone interview.

How might you characterize the conversational style of a digital assistant like Siri? No matter your impression, it stands to reason that striking the wrong tone could dissuade users from engaging with it in the future. Perhaps that's why in a paper ("Mirroring to Build Trust in Digital Assistants") accepted to the Interspeech 2019 conference in Graz, Austria, researchers at Apple investigated a conversational assistant that considered users' preferred tones and mannerisms in its responses. They found that people's opinions of the assistant's likability and trustworthiness improved when it mirrored their degree of chattiness, and that the features necessary to perform the mirroring could be extracted from those people's speech patterns. "Long-term reliance on digital assistants requires a sense of trust in the assistant and its abilities. Therefore, strategies for building and maintaining this trust are required, especially as digital assistants become more advanced and operate in more aspects of people's lives," wrote the paper's coauthors.

Emotional intelligence is an essential skill in the customer service functions with the productivity and efficiency of the role is directly tied to the quality of conversations. The personal dynamics of emotionally cognisant customer service agents play an important role in empathetically resolving any queries or concerns, impacting customer churn and increasing brand loyalty by leaving customers with a positive impression of an organisation. However, rapid adoption of automation technology within customer-facing roles presents new challenges to organisations that want to harness its benefits, without impacting the service that it delivers to its customers. Already helping many companies increase customer service availability, reduce wait times and improve resolution rates, Gartner has predicted that a quarter of all customer service operations will use artificial intelligence (AI)-powered virtual assistants by 2020. In many organisations, this has resulted in the creation of a hybrid workforce of human and digital agents.

Emotional intelligence is an essential skill in the customer service functions with the productivity and efficiency of the role is directly tied to the quality of conversations. The personal dynamics of emotionally cognisant customer service agents play an important role in empathetically resolving any queries or concerns, impacting customer churn and increasing brand loyalty by leaving customers with a positive impression of an organisation. However, rapid adoption of automation technology within customer-facing roles presents new challenges to organisations that want to harness its benefits, without impacting the service that it delivers to its customers. Already helping many companies increase customer service availability, reduce wait times and improve resolution rates, Gartner has predicted that a quarter of all customer service operations will use artificial intelligence (AI)-powered virtual assistants by 2020. In many organisations, this has resulted in the creation of a hybrid workforce of human and digital agents.

With Siri set to see significant improvements once iOS 13 ships, Apple is appearing at a key voice AI tradeshow and has published a study explaining some of the details of a first-of-its-kind machine learning (ML) tech it calls "Overton." This week, Apple is sponsoring the world's largest spoken language processing conference, Interspeech 2019. As part of its work at the event, it has submitted multiple research papers – and members of its growing machine learning teams will meet attendees there. Among other topics (see them all here), Apple will present papers on detecting expression/intent through voice, improving voice recognition, developing more accurate tools to understand speech nuances, using mirroring to build relationships between human users and speech assistants and using tech to optimize speech enhancement. We may learn a little more about what the company is up to in ML at the all-new Interspeech Youtube portal, though we don't know if any Apple video will appear there.

FaceCake is the only Augmented Reality and Artificial Intelligence full shopping platform. At its core, FaceCake offers the most immersive online to offline technology-driven consumer shopping experience available, seamlessly enabling consumers to virtually Try-On products instantly with aesthetically stunning AR Try-On as if looking in a mirror, and delivering highly personalized recommendations while concurrently building the most in-depth shopper-initiated data profiles in the industry. Consumers can shop, try, share and buy seamlessly through FaceCake's "mass boutique" AR/AI platform in any category (apparel, beauty, eyewear, jewellery, accessories, home, and more) via mobile, web, In-Store, or even in personalized advertising. Use of FaceCake's platform leads to an increase in conversions, basket size, and reduced returns. FaceCake was built with a simple principle in mind – to make shopping easier, more personalized and accessible.

FaceCake is the only Augmented Reality and Artificial Intelligence full shopping platform. At its core, FaceCake offers the most immersive online to offline technology-driven consumer shopping experience available, seamlessly enabling consumers to virtually Try-On products instantly with aesthetically stunning AR Try-On as if looking in a mirror, and delivering highly personalized recommendations while concurrently building the most in-depth shopper-initiated data profiles in the industry. Consumers can shop, try, share and buy seamlessly through FaceCake's "mass boutique" AR/AI platform in any category (apparel, beauty, eyewear, jewellery, accessories, home, and more) via mobile, web, In-Store, or even in personalized advertising. Use of FaceCake's platform leads to an increase in conversions, basket size, and reduced returns. FaceCake was built with a simple principle in mind – to make shopping easier, more personalized and accessible.

AI is set to be a game-changer for businesses across every industry. Artificial intelligence is undoubtedly changing the way companies address and interact with their customers. Pluq, the increasing adoption of digital language assistants such as Alexa and Co., Siri and Amazon Echo, in private households is leading-edge. A new study by Bitkom and Deloitte on the future of consumer technology showed that, in addition to 13%, who already had an intelligent virtual assistantin 2018, 4% of those surveyed are planning a purchase a voice assistant in 2019 and 27% can imagine controlling devices by voice in the future. The fact that, according to Gartner, 30% of companies will use AI for at least one key sales process in 2020, which encourages AI adaptation.