AI & Robotics

It’s Black Friday, and throngs of people are shopping for deals on virtual assistant-powered smart home devices from the likes of Amazon and Google. The initial appeal of smart speakers, smart displays, voice-controlled lights is obvious, and according to Strategy Analytics, growth in the smart speaker segment alone is expected to grow 57% by the end of 2019. But as we consider whether these…

“We’re interested in using AI to understand what’s happening in customer conversations at a high level,” says Chris Hausler, Senior Data Science Manager, Zendesk. “The AI understands the patterns that emerge, and does it in a way that’s a lot more scalable than what an individual human could gain by reading through all of them.” Reviews, support ticketing, and chat are great ways of…

After first teasing it in September, Google has detailed exactly how its new Assistant ambient mode will work on smartphones. The idea is to make your phone more useful by while it’s charging by letting you see Google photo images, play music, control your smart home devices and more. The feature started rolling out to Nokia and Xiaomi devices last week, and will come to Sony and an OEM…

Improving the quality of voice assistants’ responses to questions is of interest to tech giants like Google, Apple, and Microsoft, who seek to address shortfalls in their respective natural language processing (NLP) technologies. They’ve plenty in the way of motivation — more than 50% of U.S. smart speaker owners say they ask questions of their devices, according to a survey conducted last…