The chatbot craze began in 2016 with Facebook's announcement of a developer-friendly platform to build chatbots on Facebook messenger. Soon, chatbots were heralded as the next stage of the conversational revolution. Toolkits that helped you build a bot in five minutes grew popular, companies raced to the market with new bot announcements and technology conferences headlined buzzword-driven keynotes about how bots would take over human jobs. The hype that bots would become the next great thing can be attributed directly to app fatigue. Consumers currently spend most of their time using apps created by Apple, Google and Facebook.

Researcher groups at the University of the Basque Country in Spain, and at Facebook, have separately developed unsupervised machine-learning techniques for teaching neural networks to translate between languages without requiring parallel texts. Researchers at the University of the Basque Country (UPV) in Spain and Facebook have separately developed unsupervised machine-learning techniques for teaching neural networks to translate between languages with no parallel texts. Each method employs as training strategies back translation and denoising; in the first process, a sentence in one language is approximately translated into the other, then translated back into the original language, with networks adjusted to make subsequent attempts closer to identical. Meanwhile, denoising adds noise to a sentence by rearranging or removing words, and attempts to translate that back into the original. The UPV method translates more frequently during training, while the Facebook technique, in addition to encoding a sentence from one language into a more abstract representation before decoding it into the other language, also confirms the intermediate language is truly abstract.

The U.S. official said armed drone flights could begin as early as next week or at least by the end of December. The memorandum of understanding limits the drones to defensive missions, the official said. The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and so spoke on condition of anonymity.

Smart speakers are set to be the hottest Christmas gift this year. On Black Friday, Amazon dropped the price of its core Echo product to £79 (it is back up to £90 now), while Google slashed the cost of its Home device from £129 to £77.50 at most outlets (it is also back up now). Meanwhile, Apple is promising to launch its version, HomePod, although the price point is rumoured to be significantly higher. With the pre-Christmas launch of the Echo Show, which ups Alexa's game with a built-in screen, are they the next must-have device? A simple voice command can fill your room with music – and change tunes whenever you wish. They will answer questions on a vast range of topics, set alarms, tell you the weather and what your commute holds in store.

When Waymo, the autonomous car company once known as Google's self-driving car outfit, announced it was suing Uber for trade secret theft in February, the action seemed to center on a single person: Anthony Levandowski. According to Waymo, the former Google engineer downloaded 14,000 secret documents from its system and used the contents to launch his own self-driving truck startup, Otto, in January 2016. By August, Uber had acquired Otto for an alleged $680 million, and Waymo says the ridehailing giant was in on the theft from the start. Well forget Levandowski and say hello to the litigation's newest and most unlikely star: former Uber intelligence employee Richard Jacobs. Last weekend, the US Attorney's Office pulled the very unusual move of forwarding a piece of evidence to Judge William Alsup, who is overseeing the lawsuit in the Northern District Court of California.

NEW YORK (November 29, 2017)--Technology-driven competition is becoming fierce and unrelenting. Companies today can deliver seamless, high-quality customer experiences across the whole of their marketing, commerce and supply chain function. With the ability to tap multiple data sources while interfacing with knowledge workers using natural language, "augmented intelligence" systems leverage business rules, machine learning and advanced analytics to comb through mountains of data and help teams deliver end-to-end optimization. According to a new report by Forbes Insights, in association with IBM, "Industry-Leading Customer Experiences: How to Identify Opportunities, Bridge Silos and Accelerate Results With Augmented Intelligence," the use of myriad, single- or limited-purpose, and thus disconnected, technologies lead to a severe lack of interoperability. Processes remain optimized by function as opposed to enterprise-wide.

An Amazon Echo, circa 2015, perched on a table beside a lamp. Not pictured: the actual Amazon Echo referenced in the case against James Bates. An Amazon Echo, circa 2015, perched on a table beside a lamp. Not pictured: the actual Amazon Echo referenced in the case against James Bates. Arkansas prosecutors have dropped their case against James Bates, whom they had charged with first-degree murder partly with the help of evidence collected by an Amazon Echo smart speaker.

Japanese car maker Toyota unveils a new humanoid robot that mirrors the movements of its remote operator, as Stuart McDill reports. A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. Japanese car maker Toyota unveils a new humanoid robot that mirrors the movements of its remote operator, as Stuart McDill reports.

The pick station will be trialled at the firm's high-tech depot in Andover, southern England, which already features other automated technologies.