ShipHero, a shipping and logistics platform for more than 5,000 eCommerce brands and third-party logistics (3PL) providers, announced that it would implement inVia Robotics' robotic system at two more fulfillment centers. The company has been using inVia's automated picking and replenishment robots at its Jacksonville, Florida location, and its now adding that technology to its Allentown, Pennsylvania and Las Vegas warehouses. ShipHero and inVia have already built a native integration between inVia's warehouse execution system (WES) and ShipHero's warehouse management system (WMS) software, ensuring rapid and seamless deployments in the new facilities. "Over the last two years we've seen demand for 3PL services grow dramatically, which has led to a greater need for technology that can help keep products moving quickly through the order process," Lior Elazary, CEO and co-founder of inVia Robotics, said. "The native integration between our WES and ShipHero's WMS will allow us to very rapidly expand both of our technologies into additional warehouses, bypassing the need for time-consuming custom systems integration. We're excited to expand our AI and automation services across ShipHero's strategic distribution network."

During IBM's virtual AI Summit this week, the company announced updates across its Watson family of products in the areas of language, explainability, and workplace automation. A new feature called Reading Comprehension surfaces answers from databases of enterprise documents in response to natural language questions, assigning a confidence score to each response. A novel module in Watson Assistant called FAQ Extraction automatically generates question-and-answer documents. And AI Factsheets automatically captures key facts on a machine learning model's performance and generates reports to "foster transparency and ensure compliance." According to IBM, Reading Comprehension, which was built atop a top-performing question-answering system from IBM Research, is intended to help identify more precise answers in response to queries referring to business documents.

With the abundance of IT-based systems and applications embedded in the enterprise, organizations need a better way to scale their business processes to drive efficiency and achieve mission success. In order to be successful, organizations need an approach that empowers employees to accomplish more tasks while being able to focus on work that matters. Robotic process automation (RPA) is the automation of repeatable, redundant, and rule-based human actions using software bots. RPA is low cost, quick to implement, and allows people to focus on intellectually stimulating tasks while leaving rote, boring work for machines. Once organizations successfully implement RPA, they'll continue to gain efficiencies through using cognitive process automation (CPA), or the ability for bots to replicate decisions requiring human judgment.

Neato Robotics has doubled the storage in its latest robot vacuum cleaner, the Botvac D7 Connected, and given owners new ways to interact with it. It doesn't hold any more dust than its predecessors, the D3 and D5, but it does have twice the memory capacity. With 256MB of RAM and 4GB of flash storage, according to CEO Giacomo Marini, it can use its laser sensor to map its surroundings in greater detail than before. The upgrade has allowed Neato to update its smartphone app with some new mapping functions, including the ability to set virtual no-go areas where the robot should not clean. Previous models had to be physically kept away from litter trays or Lego works-in-progress by magnetic strips placed on the floor.