There's no question about it: LAI is the new hotness in personal computers. An intriguing new report claims Microsoft will push the pedal to the metal even harder with a revolutionary new version of Windows 11 (or 12?) in 2024, which is designed to make AI helpful at deeply practical levels. Microsoft just put AI front-and-center with Windows 11's massive 2023 Update, which added the Windows Copilot AI assistant and awesome AI "Cocreator" features to Paint. Copilot is coming to Windows 10, too. And Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm have been busy integrating AI-boosting "NPUs" (neural processing units) to the PC chips destined to hit the streets next year, aiming to enhance tasks with local AI that runs on your computer's hardware rather than hitting up servers in the cloud.

I start my day by asking ChatGPT questions about an upcoming trip I am planning, including where I am heading, with whom I am traveling, and the expected weather. ChatGPT provides an itinerary of where to visit, places to eat, and what to bring on my trip. Five minutes later, I visit several ecommerce websites to find and buy the recommended items. The search box barely fits two keywords, and after several tries, I give up and visit a second site and then a third. I run out of time and VPN into my client's network to begin my work.

In this special guest feature, Ryan Welsh, Co-founder and CEO of Kyndi, discusses how organizations are leveraging the latest natural language processing techniques to enable sophisticated natural language understanding. Ryan started Kyndi in 2014 with a vision of creating a world where AI would empower humans to do their most meaningful work. Under his leadership, Kyndi has created the natural language enablement category, offering a powerful Natural Language Enablement Platform and natural language-enabled solutions. Ryan received his B.A. in Anthropology from The Catholic University of America, his M.S. in Applied Math/Economics from Rutgers University, and an M.B.A. from the University of Notre Dame. According to Deloitte, as much as 80% of all information is hidden in unstructured, text-based data living in various systems inside and outside of the companies.

If you've ever used the Internet to transfer money between accounts or apply for a bank loan or trade, you're probably aware of how deeply rooted fintech has become in our day-to-day lives. In 2018, about 61% of Americans used digital banking services and this number is set to exceed 65% in 2022. One of the newly-emerged traits of the 4th Industrial Era, fintech is an application of fast-evolving digital technologies to improve and facilitate financial services. Companies are rapidly adopting fintech to keep abreast of the competition. The investments into this industry are also impressive: in 2018, it attracted over $16 billion investment in the UK alone, according to KMPG.

As human beings, we use our voices for conversation. When we interact with voice interfaces, therefore, our natural instinct is to apply the same rules that we would to a human conversation. We expect to be understood, but more than this, we expect the entity we're conversing with to remember the history of our conversation and understand the context of any following remarks. For some time, major search companies like Google and Bing have worked to teach their search engines to understand queries in natural language. Natural language search queries are queries that sound natural spoken aloud, such as, "How high is the Empire State building?" They often begin with question words ("When…?" "How…?" "Why…?"), contain stop words ("a", "the", "of", "for") and full sentences.

For the past few years, the travel industry has been exploring innovative ways to utilize artificial intelligence (AI), in an effort to unlock the promise of more efficient communications and greater customer service between travelers and service provides. So far, most of that potential has remained largely untapped, despite significant advances in both travel and AI sectors. WayBlazer however, is building an extremely powerful travel recommendation engine, and it's doing it with a little help from AI. WayBlazer's Travel Graph uses artificial intelligence to learn about tens of millions of travel products and thousands of global destinations. It ingests and extracts useful from descriptions, reviews, blogs, images, and videos to develop a frame of travel intelligence that's used to power the most relevant recommendations for today's travelers. By using machine learning models, their travel graph gets smarter with every user search. The result is a recommendation engine that understands travel like an expert, factoring both context and search intent.

Some Web searches are easy to think of and describe, but complicated to conduct. If, for instance, you want to find "a nonstop flight from Las Vegas to San Diego next week on JetBlue," you have to fill out a bevy of fields on a travel site. SkyPhrase, a startup created by Nick Cassimatis, an associate professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, will soon offer software that lets companies turn natural language questions like the one above into a format that their databases can handle. Facebook's new search tool, Graph Search, highlights both the progress that's being made in natural language processing and the difficulties that remain. Unlike the old search bar, Graph Search lets users enter queries as they might speak them.