The big companies developing them show no interest in fixing the problem.

IBM's Watson unit is receiving heat today in the form of a scathing equity research report from Jefferies' James Kisner. The group believes that IBM's investment into Watson will struggle to return value to shareholders. In recent years, IBM has increasingly leaned on Watson as one of its core growth units -- a unit that sits as a proxy for projecting IBM's future value. In the early days, IBM's competitive advantage was its longstanding relationships with Fortune 500 companies. IBM Watson effectively operates as a consultancy where the company engages in high-value contracts with corporates to implement Watson technology for specific business cases.

Last summer, Apple was busy advertising its latest move to beef up Siri, the personal digital assistant for the iPhone, iPad and Mac computers. For the first time, Apple said, developers would be able to use Siri with our favorite apps, thus promising a brighter future for the heavily used, but often maligned, voice computing tool. "Siri," Apple said in September, when the latest IOS mobile operating system was released, "works with your favorite apps from the App Store." Apple in 2016 opened up Siri to bring the personal assistant to apps, but few developers have signed on. Jefferson Graham explains why, on #TalkingTech.

The 2018 Audi A8, just unveiled in Barcelona, counts as the world's first production car to offer Level 3 autonomy. Level 3 means the driver needn't supervise things at all, so long as the car stays within guidelines. Here that involves driving no faster than 60 kilometers per hour (37 mph), which is why Audi calls the feature AI Traffic Jam Pilot. Go ahead, Audi's saying, read your newspaper or just zone out while traffic creeps along. Take a look at the company's promotional video.

Over the last several years, a team of roboticists at the University of Tehran has been working on increasingly large and complex life-size humanoids. For their latest project, however, the Iranian researchers decided to build something smaller--and cuter. Surena Mini is a knee-high robot with a sleek 3D-printed body, articulated limbs, and a round head with two camera-eyes. "The main purpose of this robot is to provide researchers and students with a reliable robotic platform for educational and research applications," Aghil Yousefi-Koma, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Tehran, told IEEE Spectrum. He added that his group also has plans to offer the robot "for helping autistic and deaf children."

Visabot, a Facebook-owned artificial intelligence tech company, has launched a $150 service to help the Facebook Messenger users navigate through the complicated process of applying for a Green Card. "We created our own immigration AI so our success rate grows as the bot learns. What you need to do is answer are you a U.S. citizen other thing you should know and the bot will use this info to generate the whole package for you all you have to do is file it with us immigration services," Visabot COO Andrey Zinoviev announced Tuesday. Read: Immigration Reform 2016: Were Green Cards Sent To Wrong People? The service will let you know -- immediately upon entering your data -- whether you qualify for a Green Card.

The clip comes from researchers at the University of Washington, who developed an algorithm to take audio of someone talking and turn that into a realistic video of someone speaking those words. In the video below, you can see a side-by-side comparison of the original audio--which came from actual Obama remarks--and the generated video. Obama was a natural subject for this kind of experiment because there are so many readily available, high-quality video clips of him speaking. In order to make a photo-realistic mouth texture, researchers had to input many, many examples of Obama speaking--layering that data atop a more basic mouth shape. The researchers used what's called a recurrent neural network to synthesize the mouth shape from the audio.

Amazon's biggest problem is that it can't teleport products into the homes of customers. As the largest online retailer, the company struggles with the "last mile problem," or the difficulty of moving goods that final distance between a hyper-efficient warehouse and the eager customer's front steps. To help solve this issue, the company has famously been working on drones to make the final drops. It still sounds like science fiction, but Amazon's drone delivery program is actually deep into testing, and it is built like infrastructure, to accommodate the instantaneous demands of a massive population, where it can. Along with the testing, Amazon has filed several drone-related patents, including a concept for recharging stations mounted on streetlights, and a distribution center contained within an airship.

COVER A conceptual illustration of an artificial neuron evokes a technology that is transforming many fields of science: artificial intelligence (AI). One common form of AI is a neural network, which "learns" as connections between simulated neurons change in response to inputs. Such systems can find meaningful patterns in vast data sets, ranging from genomics to astronomy, and are even beginning to design experiments.