NEW YORK, April 13 (Reuters) - Face it, we could all use a little help with our money. So who better to ask for personal finance advice than a couple of the most powerful chatbots on the planet? Both OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard are dominating headlines recently, for their generative capabilities and vast storehouses of information. Each has far more processing power than, say, any individual personal finance writer (ahem). What is one great business idea?

Promising more timely deliveries for consumers around the globe, NVIDIA's cuOpt real-time route optimization software has set records on a key route optimization benchmark. NVIDIA cuOpt set three new records on the widely followed Li & Lim pickup and delivery benchmark. Last-mile delivery is the most expensive part of the logistics industry, representing over 40% of overall supply chain cost and carbon footprint, according to Gartner. Nearly 150 billion parcels are shipped every year, according to Pitney Bowes. AT&T is using cuOpt to optimize routes for 30,000 technicians.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs gave the world its first look at the iPhone -- as well as a glimpse into a radically different future of personal computing and communications -- on this day in history, Jan. 9, 2007. "It's not just the bestselling gadget ever created: It's probably the most influential one, too," Wired wrote in a 2018 retrospective of the first decade of the iPhone. "Its influence goes far beyond other phones -- the infrastructure that made the iPhone also enabled drones, smart-home gadgets, wearables and self-driving cars." The iPhone offered a fingertip touch screen, a powerful camera and easy access to the internet, among many other features, providing huge advances over existing smartphones such as the Blackberry, Moto Q and Palm Treo. "Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything," Jobs, dressed in his signature black mock turtleneck, boasted at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco.

Malav Shah is a Data Scientist II at DIRECTV. He joins DIRECTV from AT&T, where he worked on multiple consumer businesses – including broadband, wireless, and video – and deployed machine learning (ML) models across a wide array of use cases spanning the full customer lifecycle from acquisition to retention. Malav holds a Master's Degree in Computer Science with a specialization in Machine Learning from Georgia Tech, a degree he puts to good use every day at DIRECTV by applying modern ML techniques to help the company deliver innovative entertainment experiences. Can you outline your career journey and why you first got into machine learning? It has been an interesting journey.

Imagine the benefits to communities and organizations that have access to improved bandwidth, reliability, and reduced latency, while leveraging the rich capabilities of cloud-to-edge technology without compromise to security, critical services, or key workloads. With the most complete offerings for the telecommunications industry, Microsoft is the ideal cloud provider to help operators with their digital transformation journey and enable them to deliver these innovative services to their consumer, enterprise, and public sector customers. Today, we’re announcing the next wave of Azure for Operators solutions and services.

Look out Nuance Communications(s nuan), there's a new speech recognition player in town. Nuance can't simply buy up this potential competitor as it has in the past since this company happens to be AT&T(s t). Ma Bell has taken the locks off of its Watson speech application programming interfaces (APIs), allowing any developer to access them. AT&T promised in April to open Watson up to general development, but on Monday AT&T SVP for technology and network operations John Donovan made the launch official in a blog post, revealing seven different "contexts," or language libraries, that app builders can access to speechify their products. Like Nuance, AT&T has developed specific taxonomies for specific use cases, allowing its servers to anticipate the words and phrasing consumers are likely to speak in a particular context.

While AT&T does not share specific details about how the CCAT may have already resulted in changes to repair and maintenance costs or informed its short-term network and equipment uptime strategies, it does disclose that the company "has spent about $1 billion recovering from climate-related severe weather events since 2016." By implementing and expanding the CCAT, AT&T claims, the company "can better ensure the resilience of its infrastructure."

Dentsu Group Inc. announced that it has entered an agreement to acquire LiveArea, a global customer experience and commerce agency, subject to customary closing conditions. LiveArea is a division of PFSweb Inc (NASDAQ: PFSW). LiveArea will join Merkle, a leading technology-enabled, data-driven customer experience management (CXM) company within Dentsu Group's international business, Dentsu International. Infineon Technologies and Amber Solutions announced an alliance on a range of silicon opportunities anchored around Amber's breakthrough digital control of electricity with embedded intelligence. Today, AT&T and Google Cloud are announcing new solutions across AT&T's 5G and Google Cloud's edge computing portfolio, including AT&T's on-premises Multi-access Edge Compute (MEC) solution, as well as AT&T Network Edge capabilities through LTE, 5G, and wireline.

The internet is now our nervous system. We are constantly streaming and buying and watching and liking, our brains locked into the global information matrix as one universal and coruscating emanation of thought and emotion. What happens when the machine stops though? It's a question that E.M. Forster was intensely focused on more than a century ago in a short story called, rightly enough, "The Machine Stops," about a human civilization connected entirely through machines that one day just turn off. Those fears of downtime are not just science fiction anymore.

"We just know it's the right thing to do for our customers and--I say this from years of doing risk management-- it's good, basic risk management," says Shannon Carroll, director of global environmental sustainability at AT&T. "If all indications are that something is going to happen in the future, it's our responsibility to be prepared for that." Globally, leaders from government, business, and academia see the urgency. When citing risks with the highest impact, those surveyed listed climate action failure and other environmental risks second only to infectious diseases. AT&T is taking action with its Climate Resilience Project, using spatial data analysis and location information to tackle the complex problem of how increasingly powerful storms could affect infrastructure such as cell towers and the telecom's ability to deliver service to its customers. "Spatial analysis is this way of going beyond what we visually see," explains Lauren Bennett, head of spatial analysis and data science at Esri, a geographic information systems (GIS) company.