Recent Blog Posts

If you are starting to suspect that the AI hype is overblown, and that it's just the latest term that marketing folk love to add to make their product sound more interesting, you are not alone. ...

This week, we suppose we’re meant to have some kind of sideways take on Downtime icon Elon Musk selling flamethrowers to his lamewad fans, but documenting this man’s hijinks is starting to become ...

One app mentioned at Zendesk’s customer experience conference this month was Replika, an AI friend that on first impression seems barely an improvement on grandparent’s crumpet Eliza from 1964. ...

Amid the growing arms race between the US and China to dominate the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence (AI), it is industry players and markets that will really drive adoption of the ...

Every time a robot does something that humans deem to be suspicious, a debate is sparked about when artificially intelligent beings will take over the world. There have been more than enough films ...

This is a guest post co-authored by Zach Katsof, director of intelligent communications at Arkadin; Holger Reisinger, SVP of large enterprise solutions at Jabra; and Alan Shen, VP of consulting ...

Guangzhou-based drone company EHang has broken the world drone display record for the most drones used at an airborne show, but the decidedly indifferent Chinese media preferred to point out the ...

A new study by Seagate has revealed that APAC organisations are warming up to artificial intelligence (AI), but a significant number have not invested in the data and technical solutions required ...

One of machine learning’s most well-known use cases is fraud detection, an area that has drawn the attention of a growing number of technology suppliers looking to develop the best algorithms and ...

The House of Lords report on AI and UK economy and society came out this week, with the guardedly bullish title: “AI in the UK: ready, willing and able?” The question mark is moot. I think a strong ...

At Huawei’s annual analyst summit in Shenzhen this week, the Chinese technology giant unveiled its predictions about what the future holds from a technology perspective in its Global Industry ...

It’s the week of the 2018 London Book Fair at Olympia, and the worrying news has reached Downtime that our jobs are indeed under threat from the rise of the robots, with the publication of the ...

What will happen to London's high streets when robots replace the people that buy all the flat whites?

The technology industry is still relatively young, and certainly has a lot more growth to come. But it’s old enough now for us to see the repeating trends that make regulatory and legal ...

In a country that, according to Michael Gove, has “had enough of experts”, you might have expected the death of Stephen Hawking to trigger a bunting rush not seen on these shores since the street ...

Philip Hammond’s Spring statement, as UK chancellor, reached, predictably, for the rhetoric of the so-called fourth industrial revolution. Not for the first time. Whenever he gets the chance to say ...

It is not surprising that telemarketing jobs will be taken by robots but the fact that modelling jobs are 98% likely to be done by robots in 2035 is.

This is a guest blogpost by Luiz Aguiar, data scientist at GoCompare. We produce a massive amount of data every day. Not only that, our attitudes towards the data we produce are also changing. ...

This is a guest blogpost by Matt Jones, lead analytics strategist at Tessella, in which he argues companies with physical products and infrastructure cannot simply cut and paste the tech giant’s AI ...

Despite recent advancements in deep learning, which has its roots in neuroscience, it not a dramatic breakthrough in artificial intelligence as it is sometimes portrayed. That was the key point ...

It’s nice that we have a prime minister that chooses to use one of her most high-profile speeches of the year to talk about technology. It’s equally good that her chancellor similarly discussed the ...

Amazon, originator of the smart speaker category in the home, is taking Alexa into the office too. However, as David McClelland explores in the first of a two-part feature, Amazon isn't the only ...

Time now to check in with Downtime linchpin Sophia the robot, who’s been dazzling the world once again – this time at CES 2018. No, it’s not wig-cleaning day for Ray’s wife at Disney World’s “Hall ...

The babel fish is around the corner but look out for the arrival androids that are indistinguishable from humans

In this guest post, Darren Roos, president of SAP ERP Cloud, explains why automation, AI, machine learning and cloud are key to improving workplace productivity. If you take productivity at its ...

Robots should be ideal at home or in the workplace, right? These fully co-operative, obedient and reliable machines should make all our lives easier, right? They can’t think for themselves, they ...

Helpdesk technicians in IT departments around the world will rejoice at Amazon’s announcement of a corporate version of its voice-enabled assistant Alexa for use in the workplace. It cannot now be ...

At a recent media event in Singapore, the CEO of Boston-based AI tools supplier DataRobot blamed the media for hyping up the potential of AI, and over-stating the technology’s impact on jobs. After ...

Did anyone else catch Richard & Judy on 1 April 2003? In case you missed it, they pranked the nation with a segment on a device they claimed could convert sampled speech into other languages in ...

Software has been taking over roles carried out by humans for a long time but the humanisation of tech is making it personal