Errol Baran, the senior vice president for business development and innovation at BBC Global News gives The Drum a peek into Project Songbird, the publisher's AI-powered synthetic voice which'reads' articles from BBC.com. Project Songbird is BBC News' new smart text-to-speech based commercial proposition for its digital properties. The Beeb hopes will allow its audiences to listen to their favorite feature articles hands-free without the need to actively click and browse. Built with cognitive and behavioral integrated tech software, the project will capitalize on consumer demand for audio content and leverage on BBC's editorial coverage. Built with the ability to download in the background, the audio product aims to offer a dynamic advertiser experience.

Microsoft this week launched an Office app that replaces Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on Android and iOS. Merging three apps into one, while adding more features, is quite the achievement. The new Office app is not just for consuming content and maybe a little light editing on the side, but actually creating content on the go. Most interestingly, a lot of these features fundamentally require AI and machine learning to achieve this new mobile productivity paradigm. Microsoft has been adding AI-driven features to its once most profitable product line for years now -- we did a recap of just a handful last year.

Online marketing is one of the most effective tools to grow a business. However, in order to have an efficient strategy, businesses need to stay ahead of changing technology and user trends. Over the years, the way people consume online content has shifted considerably. A recent study by GlobalWebIndex shows that 28 percent of online activity happens on social media. Ad buys on popular platforms like Facebook and Instagram have grown significantly over the past few years, with Instagram outselling Facebook by 117 percent in 2018.