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.

When translating between English and French in a vast sentence database, both systems received a bilingual evaluation understudy score of about 15 in both directions, compared to Google Translate, which scores about 40, and humans, who can score more than 50.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.