MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--If you own an iPhone, there's yet another way to talk with an artificial intelligence trained on the whole internet and beamed down to your handset from a cluster of computers somewhere in the world. Tuesday, Google made its artificial-intelligence powered Assistant available for the iPhone. The service, which uses a conversational interface to do things and provide information for users, has been available on Android phones since spring of last year. The move brings the company's voice interface into direct competition with Apple's own Siri. For the first time, you can now have both assistants on the same phone in your palm.

Our brains make memories of many kinds -- how to walk and jump, facts and figures, our fears, the events in our lives. Nanthia Suthana of the UCLA Brain Research Institute studies the way we remember events. As depicted here, she explains what scientists believe happens when a person remembers her 21st birthday party. Images, sounds, smells and other stimuli from the party are translated into electrical signals and channeled to different parts of the cerebral cortex. The cerebral cortex then channels the signals to another part of the brain that will form, or encode, the memory.

The company said it has added picture-in-picture video, so that that users can do things like watch video while looking at the calendar. Android gets Notification Dots, which places a small dot on an app icon if there is a notification coming from the app. Users click to see the notifications. Auto-fill has been added so that users can get some help entering information on a mobile device when setting up a new service or a new phone. This requires an opt-in from the customer.

Google announced a host of new features for its Google Home AI assistant at its I/O 2017 keynote Wednesday. New features include proactive assistance, hands-free calling, visual responses and expanded support for various music and video applications. Proactive assistance helps users keep on top of tasks that are already included within other features such as Google Calendar. For example, Google Home will alert users of when they need to leave home to get to an event on time. Hands-free calling allows users to enable a phone call by simply asking Google Home to call a contact.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced that there are now 2 billion active devices based on the company's Android software and touted the company's new AI efforts as he took the stage at Google's annual developer conference on Wednesday. He also announced a new product called Google Lens, which will be part of the Google Assistant for Android phones. Lens can identify objects in the real world for a variety of uses. "It's been a very busy year since last year. We've been focused on our core mission of organizing the world's information," he said.

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A judge has granted a partial reprieve to Uber in its high-profile intellectual property lawsuit with Google's self-driving car operation, allowing the ride-hailing company to continue developing its autonomous vehicle technology. The judge, however, has barred an Uber executive accused of stealing trade secrets from Google spin-off Waymo from continuing to work on self-driving cars' radar technology, and has ordered Uber to return downloaded documents to Waymo. The judge also said that evidence indicates that Waymo's intellectual property has "seeped into Uber's own … development efforts" – suggesting that Uber could face a tough battle as the case moves ahead. Google's lawyers were seeking a broader injunction against Uber, which could have significantly impeded the taxi startup's entire self-driving car program, a move that could have been a fatal setback. The partial victory for Uber follows a judge's recommendation that federal prosecutors launch a criminal investigation into the accusations that it stole Waymo's technology.

The data that tracks our behavior feeds into machine-learning algorithms that make judgments about us. When used for advertising, they can reproduce our own prejudiced behavior. Latanya Sweeney, the director of the Data Privacy Lab at Harvard University, found that Google searches for black-sounding names more often resulted in ads for arrest records compared to searches for white-sounding names, likely a result of the algorithm learning to predict what users are likely to click on. Marketers can also use machine learning to figure out your unique quirks--do you respond better to words or to pictures? Do you make impulsive shopping decisions?--to

Historically, most of the data businesses have analyzed for decision-making has been of the structured variety--easily entered, stored, and queried. In the digital age, that universe of potentially valuable data keeps expanding exponentially. Most of it is unstructured data, coming from a wide variety of sources, from websites to wearable devices. As a recent McKinsey Global Institute report noted: "Much of this newly available data is in the form of clicks, images, text, or signals of various sorts, which is very different than the structured data that can be cleanly placed in rows and columns." At the same time, we have entered an era when machine learning can theoretically find patterns in vast amounts of data to enable enterprises to uncover insights that may not have been visible before.

Five years ago, researchers made a sudden leap in the accuracy of software that can interpret images. The technology behind it, artificial neural networks, underpins the recent boom in artificial intelligence (see "10 Breakthrough Technologies 2013: Deep Learning"). Yann LeCun, director of Facebook's AI research group and a professor at New York University, helped pioneer the use of neural networks for machine vision. That's what would allow them to acquire common sense, in the end.