The world famous Deep Learning Summit is returning to London for the 5th year, this time joined by the AI Assistant Summit and the AI in Retail and Advertising Summit. One pass provides access to all three events, plus the Deep Dive track. Confirmed speakers from Google, ASOS, DeepMind, Facebook AI Research, NASA, Amazon and more will come together to share the most cutting edge work in their space, bridging the gap between the latest technological research advancements and real world applications in business and society. Across the two day event, 90 speakers and 600 attendees will explore topics such as neural networks, machine learning, deep learning algorithms, speech recognition, robotics, personalised recommendation systems, image retrieval, reinforcement learning and more. Presentations from across the board touch on business case studies and research progressions, and the majority of attendees will spend time in all session rooms to expand their knowledge and find out how to apply AI in novel ways.

Whilst Siri was the first mainstream voice assistant many of us became familiar with, there are many personal AI's coming onto the market to make our lives that little bit easier. Google Assistant which was initially released in 2016 is'your own personal google' - you can ask it questions, tell it to do things, and now it can even identify what song you're listening to on the radio similar to Shazam. The AI, which can be found on Google's Android phones and Google Home, is also one of the only voice assistants that hasn't been given a female name or exclusively a female voice, breaking the gender stereotypes of digital assistants being female helpers. Voice assistants historically have problems understanding users for a variety of reasons including accent, context, background noise and sentence structure, and Yariv Adan, Product Leader at Google Assistant is currently leading a team that's responsible for key pieces of the intelligence of the product, including the ability to understand context, to act proactively, to understand and respond to complex statements in natural language, to "see" using a camera, etc. There is of course an ideal intelligent assistant that everyone has in mind, and Google Assistant are trying to imagine the characteristics of this perfect AI and'come up with the baby steps we can build to get there.'

A generation of today's children will live in the world of AI. They will have Personal AIs just like we had personal computers, and AI assistants will be their main interface to tech. A child talks with the playful robot to make calls, send messages, follow a schedule, watch videos & more.

With the success of Amazon's Echo and it's voice-controlled assistant Alexa, the smart speaker war is heating up to battle for the hub of home automation. Traditionally, these devices needed to be operated with buttons, a remote, or other physical controls, limiting their capabilities. As AI becomes more mainstream and customers demand more from their devices, the need to become more user-friendly grows. Consumers want instantaneous responses without having to hunt down a remote, or get up to approach their device - the demand for far-field voice activation is just around the corner. Far-field voice technology is involved in Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Apple HomePod amongst others, but how? Far-field speech recognition is far more complicated than we might have initially though, and Tao Ma, Principal Architect, AI Platform & Research at JD.com has shared with us some of his work in the area including the background, system design and architecture of these systems.