Spending on robotic process automation (RPA) software is estimated to reach $680 million in 2018, according to tech analyst Gartner as companies look for ways to automate basic business tasks. The Internet of Things is the new frontier. However, generations of ERP systems were not designed to handle global networks of sensors and devices. This is an increase of 57 percent year over year; according to Gartner, RPA software spending is on pace to total $2.4 billion in 2022. RPA uses software to understand how people process transactions in an attempt to then use those rules to build an automated systems that can perform those roles instead.

Transcription services can save you time, effort, and if you're anything like me, allows you to avoid having to listen to your own voice -- a concept many of us find cringeworthy. While there are many manual services out there in which you outsource transcription tasks and have someone else manually type out conversations or interviews, in recent times, automatic transcription services have begun to appear online. Automatic services often promise results in a fraction of the time that uploading, sending, and waiting for manual transcriptions require, but are all created equal? In order to find out, ZDNet tested a total of six auto-transcription offers online. For each test, the same audio file was used, a 15-minute recording of an interview I had undertaken with a researcher concerning cybersecurity, ransomware, and botnets.

Getting your AI deployment right takes five steps: assessing your data strategy, aligning stakeholders, assessing tech feasibility, and a coordinated approach to ethics. To learn more about the five fundamentals of AI readiness, and ensure you get it right at every step, catch up on this VB Live event. AI is a roughly $8 billion market today, but expected to exceed $106 billion within just a couple of years, says Jessica Groopman, industry analyst and founding partner of Kaleido Insights. And with so many products on the market, it's incredibly difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff, and make sense of what's worth pursuing and what's just another bright, shiny hyped-up object rolling by. AI is driving commercial applications and igniting tremendous change around traditional customer experience, as well change in how marketers, sales agents, and business analysts are using data.

Efforts to develop artificial intelligence (AI) are increasingly being seen as a global race, even a new Great Game. Apart from the race between countries to become more competent and establish a competitive advantage in AI, enterprises are also in a contest to acquire AI talent, leverage data advantages, and offer unique services. In both cases, success would depend on whether AI solutions can be democratized and distributed across sectors. The global AI race is unlike any other global competition, as the extent to which innovation is being driven by governments, the corporate sector or academia differs substantially from country to country. On average, though, the majority of innovations so far have emerged from academia, with governments contributing through procurement, rather than internal research and development.

It learn from interaction with environment to achieve a goal or simply learns from reward and punishments. This learning is inspired by behaviourist phycology. From the best research I got the answer as it got termed in 1980's while some research study was conducted on animals behaviour. Especially how some new born baby animals learns to stand, run, and survive in the given environment. Rewards is a survival from learning and punishment can be compared with being eaten by others.

Microsoft has been all in on AI this year, and in the build versus buy equation, the company has been leaning heavily toward buying. This morning, the company announced its intent to acquire Xoxco, an Austin-based software developer with a focus on bot design, making it the fourth AI-related company Microsoft has purchased this year. "Today, we are announcing we have signed an agreement to acquire Xoxco, a software product design and development studio known for its conversational AI and bot development capabilities," Lili Cheng, corporate VP for conversational AI at Microsoft wrote in a blog post announcing the acquisition. Xoxco, which was founded in 2009 -- long before most of us were thinking about conversational bots -- has raised $1.5 million. It began working on bots in 2013, and is credited with developing the first bot for Slack to help schedule meetings.

Artificial intelligence could help in our hunt for extraterrestrial intelligence. The moons of Jupiter and Saturn are two of our most promising leads in the hunt for alien life, but they're hundreds of millions of miles from Earth. Given the high cost of transporting payloads in space, NASA is currently in search of anything that could help decrease the weight of exploratory landers -- and AI is proving it might be up to the task. On Tuesday, engineers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and software company Autodesk unveiled a lander designed to explore environments like those of Jupiter and Saturn's moons. The team developed the lander, which looks a bit like a spider that's missing half its legs, using a technique known as generative design.

To the general public, today's "AI" technologies are nothing short of magic. Algorithms that can eerily understand video, images, speech, and text, translate between languages with uncanny accuracy, drive cars, play video games, find cancer and even best humans at complex strategy games by developing novel moves that no human had ever devised. Groundbreaking new milestones are crossed almost daily. Computer science programs are flooded with students eager to become AI experts and companies can't hire enough AI programmers. It would seem the era of AI has truly arrived.

Is there a'New Normal' looming on the horizon for how food and beverage decisions are made? Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to SteadyServ Technologies? A: The mission of SteadyServ is to provide a clear understanding of the best decision options available for retailers and suppliers to grow beverage sales and profitability. Today's retail environment is a chaotic and rapidly changing environment in which competition and costs are increasing at an astounding rate. Consumers and what they expect shifting faster than retailers are used to. Because of this some are beginning to use smarter digital tools to capture the maximum share of wallet of a consumer.

Diversity and inclusion are intrinsically linked to a company's business strategy. As more companies set audacious goals for the diversification of their workforce, talent analytics can support subjectivity with objective data-driven decisions that will make diversity goals a reality. There is no doubt that more diverse and inclusive workforces have a competitive advantage over those that do not. In fact, diversity and inclusion are intrinsically linked to a company's innovative strategy, enabling a more creative and agile organization. It is no wonder that one of Gartner's top 10 predictions for IT organizations in 2019 is that more than three-quarters of larger enterprises will set their diversity and inclusion goals toward a 2020-2022 timeline by the end of this year.