Artificial intelligence is helping us explore the universe, diagnose diseases, and program autonomous cars, among thousands of other use cases across dozens of industries, including, especially, marketing. Even amidst its tangible applications, AI is still in its infancy – through marketers believe that it's a significant game-changer… and many are doing something about it. A new decade is upon us – as the AI hype begins to dissipate and the proverbial clouds start to clear, which trends do retail marketers need to watch for in 2020? Whether you're looking to get started with AI, expand your results from it, or fine-tune existing use cases, we scoured the net, talked to experts, and did our own research to give you the top AI trends to keep in mind over the next year. Our 2017 research showed that 26% of marketers planned to implement RTM more than 12 months ahead – so, around now.

The core technologies that have enabled the rapid progress and swift adoption of smart virtual assistants include NLP text mining, Voice Analytics and Machine Learning. NLP text mining analyzes and derives insights from the written word, enabling virtual assistants to understand whether the customer's feedback is positive, negative or neutral. Voice Analytics utilizes speech recognition software to extract useful data or detect stress in a customer's voice, enabling the virtual assistant to engage proactively and appropriately. Machine Learning, meanwhile, enables the virtual assistant to perform the cognitive functions typically associated with the human mind, such as understanding, reasoning, problem solving, learning, and even interacting with the surrounding environment.

Facebook Research and MIT researchers are using the popular video game'Minecraft' to build a new AI assistant that can juggle multiple tasks at once. Facebook is using the popular video game Minecraft to help train a new artificially intelligent assistant that, in the future, could help humans perform a wide range of tasks with a broad range of spoken commands. Facebook Research and MIT researchers quietly published a paper in July outlining how they intend to use Minecraft to train an AI assistant that can multitask rather than perform one task at superhuman levels. "In this work, we have argued for building a virtual assistant situated in the game of Minecraft, in order to study learning from interaction, and especially learning from language interaction," the researchers explain in the published paper. According to the researcher team, Minecraft is the perfect environment to train artificial intelligence because it's what is known as a "sandbox" game, which allows players to roam freely, fight, craft, explore and build objects in an online world.

The HomePod didn't get much (read: any) airtime at Apple's iPhone 11 event earlier this week, but that's not to say Apple has forgotten about it entirely. In fact, the HomePod is set to get a raft of new features before the year is out – even if some of them should have been present in the first place. Kicking off the feature-add this month is the introduction of radio station playback. From September 30, you'll be able to ask Siri to play one of around 100,000 global radio stations, and the smart helper will track it down using TuneIn, iHeartRadio and Radio.com. A little later in the year, a few more extras will be coming to the HomePod.

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.