Natural Language Generation (NLG) is a hot topic and seems to be popping up in increasing areas of our lives. Alexa, Siri, customer service chatbots, and automated text messages provide information about products and services, and more of our interactions with businesses involve some level of NLG.

Every organization I encounter is going through it in one way or another: digital transformation. Of course, this is a bit of a catch-all phrase that could apply to almost everything and anything that organizations are doing in the digital space. So, it would be useful to define what we mean.

Many advanced artificial intelligence projects say they are working toward building a conscious machine, based on the idea that brain functions merely encode and process multisensory information. The assumption goes, then, that once brain functions are properly understood, it should be possible to program them into a computer. Microsoft recently announced that it would spend US$1 billion on a project to do just that.

Australia is on the cusp of a new era where consumers will be granted the right to access and share data about themselves and their transactions as captured by businesses they deal with, such as banks, electricity retailers, and phone and internet service providers.