Whether a business requires linear, departmentalized chatbot support for basic user interactions, such as customer service or tech support, or more complex AI bots equipped with natural language processing capabilities, bots will boost your business. From improved key performance indicators like customer conversion to better results in user-behavior-based metrics such as engagement rates, both chatbots and AI bots provide a foundation for sustainable business growth through improved user experiences, scalability, and low overhead, high return efficiency. As a leader in innovative marketing technologies, I have been involved in the enterprise application of bots to assist in various business objectives. I'm also a keynote speaker on bot technology and the impact bots can have on a multitude of revenue streams. Regardless of whether a business uses focalized chatbot technology or more advanced AI bots, businesses can advance the user experience with bots while managing expenses.

A drone is flown during a property inspection following Hurricane Harvey in Houston. The mass destruction brought on by Harvey has been a seminal moment for drone operators, proving that they can effectively map flooding, locate people in need of rescue and verify damage to speed insurance claims. A drone is flown during a property inspection following Hurricane Harvey in Houston. The mass destruction brought on by Harvey has been a seminal moment for drone operators, proving that they can effectively map flooding, locate people in need of rescue and verify damage to speed insurance claims. Tropical Storm Harvey disrupted at least 17 emergency call centers and 320 cellular sites, and it caused outages for more than 148,000 Internet, TV, and phone customers, according to the Federal Communications Commission.

New studies show that a machine can understand what you are saying without hearing a sound. Researchers at Oxford University in the U.K. and Google have developed an algorithm that has outperformed professional human lip readers, a breakthrough they say could lead to surveillance video systems that can show the content of speech in addition to the actions of an individual. The researchers developed the algorithm by training Google's Deep Mind neural network on thousands of hours of subtitled BBC TV videos, showing a wide range of people speaking in a variety of poses, activities, and lighting. The neural network, dubbed Watch, Listen, Attend, and Spell (WLAS), learned to transcribe videos of mouth motion to characters, using more than 100,000 sentences from the videos. By translating mouth movements into individual characters, WLAS was able to spell out words.

A new $240 million center at MIT may help advance the field of artificial intelligence by developing novel devices and materials to power the latest machine-learning algorithms. It could, perhaps, also help IBM reclaim its reputation for doing cutting-edge AI. The project, announced by IBM and MIT today, will research new approaches in deep learning, a technique in AI that has led to big advances in areas such as machine vision and voice recognition. But it will also explore completely new computing devices, materials, and physical phenomena, including efforts to harness quantum computers--exotic but potentially very powerful new machines--to make AI even more capable. "A lot of innovation is happening using standard silicon and architectures, but what about the devices and the material science?" says Dario Gil, vice president of AI at IBM Research.

You might not have, but Alexa did. Voice assistants have been successfully hijacked using sounds above the range of human hearing. Once in, hackers were able to make phone calls, post on social media and disconnect wireless services, among other things. Assistants falling for the ploy included Amazon Alexa, Apple's Siri, Google Now, Samsung S Voice, Microsoft Cortana and Huawei HiVoice, as well as some voice control systems used in cars. The hack was created by Guoming Zhang, Chen Yan and their team at Zhejiang University in China.

Having extra robotic limbs sure sounds cool, in theory. With an extra arm, you could do all kinds of stuff! Seriously though, if we're going to get real about supernumerary robotic limbs, we have to know what people really want them for. Guy Hoffman's lab at Cornell has some experience with sticking bits of robots onto people, and in a paper presented at RO-MAN 2017, grad student Vighnesh Vatsal figures out the kinds of tasks for which a third arm might actually be useful. The robotic arm that the Cornell researchers are experimenting with is a new design that's a compromise between an extra arm mounted on the torso and extra fingers (or an extra thumb) mounted on the hand.

The House just passed a bipartisan bill to encourage autonomous vehicles testing. On Wednesday, the House of Representatives did something that's woefully uncommon these days: It passed a bill with bipartisan support. The bill, called the SELF DRIVE Act, lays out a basic federal framework for autonomous vehicle regulation, signaling that federal lawmakers are finally ready to think seriously about self-driving cars and what they mean for the future of the country. "With this legislation, innovation can flourish without the heavy hand of government," said Representative Bob Latta, the Ohio Republican who heads up the Digital Commerce and Consumer Protection Subcommittee, in a floor speech just before the SELF DRIVE Act passed by a two-thirds majority. The Senate will need to pass its own bill before the legislative framework can become law.

"Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia, but for all humankind. It comes with colossal opportunities, but also threats that are difficult to predict. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world," Russian President Vladimir Putin said. However, the president said he would not like to see anyone "monopolize" the field. "If we become leaders in this area, we will share this know-how with entire world, the same way we share our nuclear technologies today," he told students from across Russia via satellite link-up, speaking from the Yaroslavl region.

Science fiction has an uncanny ability to predict the future of technology, from Star Trek's Padd, essentially an iPad, to the Jetsons' robot vacuum, basically a Roomba. Now that the voice assistant is here, that's another checklist off the sci-fi predictor, but while our Alexas, Siris, Cortanas and Google Assistants are pretty basic right now, if sci-fi continues its great prelude to the future, what will the computers of the future really be like? According to Amazon's head of devices, Dave Limp, the next phase in computing is less about the physical thing and more about how and where you access it. He says: "We think of it as ambient computing, which is computer access that's less dedicated personally to you but more ubiquitous. "Our vision is to create that Star Trek computer and work backwards from that.

For drone users, Hurricane Harvey is likely to be the event that propelled unmanned aircraft to become an integral part of government and corporate disaster-recovery efforts. In the first six days after the storm hit, the Federal Aviation Administration issued more than 40 separate authorizations for emergency drone activities above flood-ravaged Houston and surrounding areas. They ranged from inspecting roadways to checking railroad tracks to assessing the condition of water plants, oil refineries and power lines. That total climbed above 70 last Friday and topped 100 by Sunday, including some flights prohibited under routine circumstances, according to people familiar with the details. Industry officials said all of the operations--except for a handful flown by media outlets--were conducted in conjunction with, or on behalf of, local, state or federal agencies.