Don't judge a smart speaker by its sales -- at least that's the story floating around the internet today, as Ad Age has revealed a study showing that Google Home is six times likelier than Amazon Alexa to answer user requests correctly. The research, conducted by New York-based digital agency 360i, backs the search company's voice assistant, despite consumers clearly choosing Amazon's option instead. Using proprietary software to ask both Google Home and Amazon Alexa some 3,000 questions, Google's voice assistant emerged six times likelier than the competition to answer correctly. But that same command on the Amazon Echo wouldn't work, as Alexa requires different command sets that require specific trigger words.

Regular readers of Futurism probably understand, by now, what it means when the word "smart" is affixed to any common piece of technology -- it means a serious upgrade, most likely with internet connectivity, the ability to process huge amounts of data, and probably even an artificial intelligence (AI) program of some kind. The challenge of building a smart city far surpasses the "simple" engineering obstacles to creating a fully connected urban environment. Any smart city worth its salt will possess a fully integrated infrastructure, with smart transportation services (including autonomous vehicles), internet and communication systems, water services, and electrical and power grids all connected and unified. Such a massive, city-wide system will undoubtedly require significant upgrades in infrastructural computing power just to process the massive amounts of raw data.

The all-new YouTube Creator Studio -- which the company is renaming YouTube Studio -- will still feature a suite of channel management tools aimed to make creators' lives easier. Capping off the slew of updates it unveiled this year at VidCon, YouTube announced at a session on Saturday evening that it is rebuilding its Creator Studio on desktops and revamping comments with new machine learning technology. The all-new YouTube Creator Studio -- which the company is renaming YouTube Studio -- will still feature a suite of channel management tools aimed to make creators' lives easier. Capping off the slew of updates it unveiled this year at VidCon, YouTube announced at a session on Saturday evening that it is rebuilding its Creator Studio on desktops and revamping comments with new machine learning technology.

The 15-second spot consisted mostly of a line designed to wake up viewers' Google Home devices.

However, these new algorithms also made it necessary for legitimate digital marketers to dig deeper and put more effort into quality in terms of technical SEO, content development, and link building. Today, only legitimate editorial links, which take significant time and effort to earn, will produce safe, long-term results. Instead of a static formula, it utilizes user experience, big data, and machine learning to produce results that meet user needs more precisely while learning and improving on the fly. RankBrain is Google's machine-learning artificial intelligence system that helps process its search results, which uses an entirely new way of processing queries according to Greg Corrado, a senior research scientist at Google who is involved with RankBrain.

Artificial Intelligence is, locally, a computer algorithm tasked with solving input problems based on accessible data and operational parameters, with respect to the amount of computational power available to the algorithm. With the vast field of AI are specific concepts like machine learning and deep learning. A subset of AI, Machine Learning focuses on learning abilities, or how to make machines learn on their own. As a subfield of Machine Learning, and a sub-subset of AI, Deep Learning is automatic learning technology based on deep neural networks.

For example, with the help of AI and ML, Otis is developing smart elevators capable of communicating with passengers, building managers, service staff and other building systems. The elevator manufacturer is transforming its service business to incorporate smart, connected technology that delivers proactive, quick and effective diagnostics and repair. Future development in elevator technology will draw heavily on digitalisation," says Otis India president Sebi Joseph. For instance, Otis's CompassPlus Destination Management System evaluates real-time passenger traffic to improve flow and travel time in busy mid- and high-rise buildings.

While every interaction essentially comes down to a natural language conversation, different platform capabilities and usage scenarios dictate which platform makes the most sense for your brand. Voice generally works best for quick interactions, such as tracking a flight. Incorporating natural language processing (NLP) into your assistant depends on its use case. For example, we saw strong upticks in usage of Kayak's Messenger bot when we allowed people to answer questions with simple touch replies.

"I think I know -- it's in helping people do the things that people are good at, and turning more things over to machines."

Is AI a threat to human jobs? AI scores over humans not just in obviously data-based jobs, like accountancy, but also in any job that can be transformed into tasks that can then be performed handling data. The more we device ways of translating activities requiring intelligence if a human were to perform them into tasks that require no intelligence but rather the right sort of data, sophisticated algorithms and engineering artefacts like robot arms, the more such jobs will be replaced by AI solutions. The possibilities of monitoring and profiling people will increase, it is how we handle them that will make the difference.