Remember when consumers first embraced the smartphone and then as demand increased, consumers pushed that technology into the enterprise? Well, the same thing is happening with a home digital product, Echo, as it begins to see software written for it that solves enterprise problems.

Last week, $6 billion software company Atlassian announced that it's bringing its popular HipChat app to the Amazon Echo family of smart speakers — making HipChat the first chat program available on Echo, and possibly marking a milestone in moving virtual assistants from the living room to the boardroom.

Most Amazon Echo services (Amazon calls them "skills") are passive, meaning you need to call on Alexa, the device’s personal digital assistant, before it will do anything. But HipChat on Echo is designed to be active, calling out when certain pre-set conditions are met.

HipChat General Manager, Steve Goldsmith, says that Atlassian teams have been testing Echo internally as an alert system when things go wrong: If an Atlassian site or service goes down, the system automatically sends a message into HipChat, which then triggers the Echo to activate and shout an alert at the team.

Instead of sending alerts to personal smartphones or tablets, Goldsmith says, the Echo is a "neutral piece of hardware." Put one in the corner of the room, and it's a team's communal voice box. In the same way that a family might share an Echo, so too does a software team, Goldsmith says.

Amazon says the Echo will become a key pillar of its business in the future, with thousands of developers tasked to building and improving it. The existence of the forthcoming Google Home device, a direct Echo competitor, is certainly a sign that Amazon is on the right track.
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While, right now, so much of the Echo's use is fun and games, the device's continued popularity, and the overall industry shift towards voice, means that HipChat on Echo could be a sign of things to come.

According to Amazon, the cop of the future won’t just be a robot; it will be one that fits in the palm of your hand.

Recently, the retail giant was granted a patent for a miniature, voice-controlled “unmanned aerial vehicle assistant” to be used by everyone from officers making traffic stops to shoppers just trying to figure out where they parked their cars.

According to the patent, off-board processing could be used to significantly reduce the size of the assistants compared to today’s drones while substantially increasing their capabilities. In one scenario described by Amazon, a UAV assistant would launch from a dock on a police officer’s microphone to act as a mobile dash cam and miniature partner.

 “As shown in [the illustration above], during a routine traffic stop, for example, the officer can command the [drone] to ‘hover’ or ‘follow me,’” reads the patent. “In some examples, if a foot chase develops during a traffic stop, the officer can command the [drone] to follow the suspect so that he can attempt to cut the suspect off in the cruiser. Similarly, if there are two or more suspects, the officer can command the [drone] to follow one the suspects, while he gives chase to the other.”

While the patent’s diagrams focus on law enforcement applications, Amazon believes the assistant could be used “for many other purposes,” including clearing buildings for military forces and even helping people decide if it’s worth waiting in line.

“If a user is waiting in a long line to buy concert tickets, for example, the user may not be able to see over the crowd to see how many total people are in line,” reads the patent. “In this case, the user can just say ‘hover’ to the UAV and the UAV can take up a position at a predetermined distance above the user (e.g., 15 feet).”
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When Amazon began investing in drones, it aimed to make a world where flying robots delivered customers their books and USB cables. Now, it seems, the internet’s biggest retailer has set its sights even higher.

Over a year ago, Google announced plans to build a modular smartphone. Since then, they have been quiet about what they were doing until this year’s I/O Developer’s Conference. Google said that Project Ara would deliver a developer’s edition of the phone by fourth quarter 2016 and a consumer version should be available sometime in 2017. You may want to watch Google’s YouTube video of the project.

Project Ara is based on the idea that you should be able to assemble a smartphone around different modules, swapping components at will. That may sound a lot like LG's G5, which lets you replace the bottom of the smartphone with parts like a camera module with dedicated shutter controls, but Ara's approach is a lot more complex. The design Google showed off has slots for six modules.

Swapping in those different parts will let you easily tailor the functionality of your phone to your liking. More important, Google argues, it means you can replace outdated components of your phone with newer parts while keeping the phone itself, thus extending the life cycle of your mobile devices.
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In a demo done at this year’s I/O conference, a Google engineer inserted a camera module onto a phone that could take a photo without rebooting. That's a vast improvement over last year’s demo where the Ara phone had to reboot before the camera module would work. Removing the module is simply a matter of using a voice command or selecting an eject option from settings. The prototype looks fairly compact if the modules themselves sport a blocky appearance — like a Tetris board if you could use it to make phone calls.
Google has already lined up some partners to develop Ara modules, including Panasonic and TDK among a host of others. And it hopes the release of a developer kit will bring along even more modules, which could include everything from health monitoring to navigation.

When we look into the crystal ball, we are finding some prominent technology trends in the consumer space that are also stimulating innovation and transformation in the enterprise space.

There are many technologies impacting manufacturing and other sectors ranging from healthcare, transportation, retail and education. But here we are going to focus on a single potential game-changer, artificial intelligence (AI).

AI could reboot businesses and empower them to achieve a sustainable, quantum improvement in performance that alters the trajectory of the future. It’s about identifying new ways for companies to do things differently, and to innovate around the technology.

AI is coming of age as business leaders grasp the immense potential of ‘smart’ machines as catalysts for greater efficiencies and competitiveness. By 2019, the global market for content analytics, discovery and cognitive systems software is projected to reach $9.2 billion, according to IDC’s recent Worldwide Content Analytics, Discovery, and Cognitive Systems Software Forecast.

Late last year, AI advanced with image recognition software being used to challenge the typical text search. Pinterest and online footwear retailer Shoes.com are testing new ways to search or browse using just images rather than text, according to a recent report in MIT’s Technology Review.

Each year, Edge.org, a think tank organization publishes essays from thought leaders and researchers related to a hot topic in public and academic discourse. This year’s question was, “What do you think about machines that think?” In grappling with this question, a major comment thread was that AI is no longer a future abstraction but rather is becoming a tangible reality.

In the Edge.org probe, several other themes emerged. AI is expected to augment human workers—making humans more effective, sharpening their expertise and facilitating innovation by reducing the barriers between humans and machines. For now, augmentation is more common in the area of cognitive computing, in which machines can sense, comprehend and even act alone. Cognitive computing is more about “person and machine” rather than “person versus machine.”

Other scenarios see AI in the form of digital assistants that humans can use to more effectively perform tasks like enterprise customer service, workflow management or collaboration. 
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This trend is disrupting the “old order.” Smart, connected products are transforming companies, corporate strategies, entire value chains or ecosystems, as well as quality of life and competition. AI holds the promise of unleashing a new wave of creativity, opportunities and profitability. It will drive another chapter in the ongoing industrial technological revolution and offer companies, countries and economies opportunities to reinvent themselves for a more vibrant and optimistic future. 

There are times when, out of the blue, a new product hits the market and blows all of the competition away. That appears to be the case with the new app called Hound. This is a digital assistant application written by the makers of the music discovery app SoundHound.

Typhone.nl, a Dutch testing organization, conducted tests between the various voice assistant features on multiple platforms. The tests put Hound up against more established players like Siri, Google Now and Cortana. So how did Hound fare against all the competition? Extremely well.

It seems that one of the strong suits of Hound is its ability to recognize users who have a heavy accent. It is also able to follow up on previous enquiries made by the user, as opposed to the other apps where a followup query is usually treated as a new search, meaning that depending on how you phrase it, they won’t be able to catch onto the context of your query.

Several sources say that the company has had the app in development for years and it shows. Hound takes the other three digital assistants to the woodshed and just beats them up! There are two YouTube videos listed at the end of this article. Be sure to visit each so you can see what Hound can really do. Here are some of the questions Hound can answer with lightening speed:

•  “How many days are there between the day after tomorrow and three days before the second Thursday of November 2022?”
  
•  “What is the population of the capital of the country in which the Space Needle is located?”
  
•  “What is the capital and population for Japan and China and their areas in square miles and square kilometers, and also tell me how many people live in India, and what is the area code for Germany, France and Italy?”
  
•  “Show me Asian restaurants excluding Chinese and Japanese?”
  

The app doesn’t just answer complex questions.  You can have it book a hotel inside of a specific price range with a given number of stars in its rating that has a gym, free wi-fi and is not a bed and breakfast.

The demos on YouTube point to a product that is close to release. But the app is currently in an invite-only beta and the company hasn’t commented on any release date.

YouTube Videos:

Functionality Overview   
Speed Demo