In the competition among voice-assistant devices, Amazon's Echo gadgets are taking the lead. Amazon is set to control 70 percent of the voice-enabled speaker device market this year, a forecast from eMarketer released Monday predicted. Amazon's Echo devices forecast leaves other voice-assistant devices behind, including Google Home. Google Home is expected to control 23.8 percent of the market while the remaining amount will divided among smaller players, including Lenovo, LG, Harmon Kardon and Mattel. Read: Google Home vs. Amazon Echo: Which Device Has More Answers?

HSBC has revealed how the success of five machine learning-related pilot projects is set to pave the way for deeper and faster adoption of cloud technologies across its business. A well-implemented cloud management strategy allows users to maintain control over public, private and hybrid clouds. This email address is already registered. By submitting my Email address I confirm that I have read and accepted the Terms of Use and Declaration of Consent. By submitting your personal information, you agree that TechTarget and its partners may contact you regarding relevant content, products and special offers.

Given the ubiquity of fakes among re-sellers, buyers often examine pre-owned fashion to deduce authenticity, often analyzing the stitching, font size and interior labels. But sometimes, a copy is just so well-made that the human eye can't tell it from the original. Entrupy is a portable scanning device that instantly detects imitation designer bags by taking microscopic pictures that take into account details of the material, processing, workmanship, serial number, and wear/tear. It then employs the technique of deep learning to compare the images against a vast database that includes top luxury brands and if the bag is deemed authentic, users immediately get a Certificate of Authenticity. After launching as a paid service in September 2016, the New York-based venture now has over 130 paid customers, almost all of whom are American businesses drawn to the 97.1 percent accuracy rate, explained Entrupy CEO Vidyuth Srinivasan.

EVEN robots want to talk politics these days. Chatbots could soon be reading news articles and then discussing them with us. Voice-activated assistants such as Amazon's Alexa or Apple's Siri can check the weather but are left stumped by more complicated conversations, says Alan Black at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania. Now Black and a team of computer speech researchers have launched a competition to create a chatbot that can understand a news or Wikipedia article and then talk about it with a human. "I'd like to have a system that reads the news in the morning, and I'd like to be able to talk about the news without having to go read it myself," Black says.

Diagnosing disease is one of the more labor-intensive aspects of the healthcare system. It also happens to be one that is particularly well-suited to being performed by machine learning algorithms. While work in this area is in its early stages, the technology is evolving rapidly and appears poised to transform diagnostic medicine. Thanks largely to the huge volumes of data collected from patients, medical diagnostics is an ideal domain for machine learning. Much of the diagnostic data is image-based, such as X-rays, MRI scans, and ultrasound imagery, but can also include things like genomic profiles, epidemiological data, blood tests, biopsy results, and even medical research papers.

The emerging regulatory technology or regtech market, driven by artificial intelligence, is helping to reduce fraud in the financial services sector, but how is the so-called future of compliance computing progressing? There can, it seems, be little doubt that big financial institutions are throwing what Mr Sulistyo calls "an insane amount of people" at the regulatory compliance problem. "An informed estimate for financial institutions is now around 10 to 15 per cent of total workforce dedicated to governance, risk management and compliance," he says. Unsurprisingly, he adds that the best risk professionals are in such high demand they are "as rare as unicorns and more expensive than their weight in gold". Mr Sulistyo says if you talk to London bankers, they are already hailing AI-driven regtech as a kind of magic silver bullet and saviour of the financial industry.

Amazon wants you to have long, real conversations with Alexa, its popular personal digital assistant. The e-tail giant recently released new tools to app developers that allow Alexa to whisper, show emotion and pause naturally, like we humans do. And that's just the start, says Rohit Prasad, Amazon's head scientist for Alexa, who is playing a key role in the retailer's efforts in artificial intelligence for Alexa--using computers to converse with us. "I truly believe that for AI to be useful in our daily lives, it has to be something you can connect with," Prasad said in an interview here. "Conversation is the next step, to be more human-like."

Samsung was granted permission by South Korea's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport to test run self-driving cars, Yonhap News reported. Samsung's autonomous vehicle is apparently under development and based on deep-learning technology, the report said. The approval Monday by officials will allow the company to test the self-driving vehicle on the roads. Samsung wants to develop top-of-the-line sensors and computer modules backed by artificial intelligence and deep-learning technologies. That technology would improve vehicles' self-driving capabilities, even in bad weather conditions, the report said.

Electric bus maker Proterra is moving into the autonomous driving field, with a pilot program starting in Nevada. In an announcement Tuesday, the Burlingame, California, company said it was launching the "industry's first autonomous bus program" in partnership with the University of Nevada, Reno, and its Living Lab Coalition partners. As its basis, the program assumes the dawn of "eventual autonomous mass transit" and is therefore aimed at solutions that will build an image of safety about the future of mass transit. Toward that end, the "autonomous vehicle pilot will deal with real road conditions from the perspective of public transit systems, and emphasize the most challenging aspects related to mass transportation, which include dense and dynamic environments, degraded conditions, and a need for swift emergency response," according to a statement sent to International Business Times. In the first of the pilot's three phases, a Proterra bus operated by the Regional Transportation Commission of Washoe Country in Nevada (one of the Living Lab partners) will run on specific routes to sense and collect data.

Here at The Human OS, we are slightly obsessed with matchups between artificial intelligence and doctors. In many experiments (though not yet in many clinics), AI systems are showing great promise in diagnosing diseases, analyzing medical images, and predicting health outcomes. They've even performed better than human doctors in certain tasks like surgical stitching and diagnosing autism in infants. Now, in the latest win for AI medicine, researchers at the University of Nottingham in the UK created a system that scanned patients' routine medical data and predicted which of them would have heart attacks or strokes within 10 years. When compared to the standard method of prediction, the AI system correctly predicted the fates of 355 more patients.