JUST a few months ago, businesses and citizens were complaining about the poor adoption of technology in the insurance sector. So, the leaders have responded by ramping up investments in new and emerging technologies to streamline operations, wow customers, and transform their business. Going by the solutions they're announcing, it seems that the industry is particularly keen on exploring the applications of artificial intelligence (AI) over other technologies. Their choice, of course, has been appreciated by customers. Most recently, Singapore Life, a digital native insurance firm launched an AI-powered chatbot, the SingLife Chatbot.

Passengers scan their passports at the gates of a new, automated airport in Singapore. Automation and AI may soon free people to tackle the social aspects of commerce and innovation. This is the second article in a weeklong series about artificial intelligence. The first installment can be read here. One activity humans should be exceptionally good at is innovation.

This week we saw a huge milestone with China beating Amazon to successfully establish fully commercialized drone delivery, a new type of online to offline buying experience combining China's Spotify with retail, and artificial intelligence (AI) predicting which roads will flood in advance in order to reduce traffic congestion. China is pushing the boundaries of technological advancement faster than any country on Earth and This Week In China Tech is the place to stay on top of the news that you won't find in the Western media. Aerial photo taken on May 10, 2018 shows a drone carried with parcels, taking off from a branch post office in Weicheng Township, Qingzhen City of southwest China's Guizhou Province. You probably remember how Amazon captured the consumer imagination when they announced their concept for delivery drones at the end of 2016, but they never really materialized. Chinese retailers have now delivered fully operational drone delivery systems, confirming 17 authorized routes last week (article in Chinese).

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been present for more than half a century, but the revolution is just about to begin. How exactly is AI transforming businesses across the world? Prakash Mallya, managing director for the sales and marketing group at Intel India, explained the growing potential of AI during a fireside chat with VCCircle editor-in-chief Archna Shukla at the TechCircle Live 2018 summit. Sign up for our daily newsletter to get our top reports & videos.

An undergraduate student from China's Fudan University showcased a new artificial intelligence (AI) software that can turn regular human photos into an anime masterpiece using the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) and Deep Learning method. Yanghua Jin is attempting to create a computer program that can learn from its own mistakes the longer it works. This is all done using GAN's two networks: the generator and the discriminator, according to SoraNews24. The generator is in charge of producing the anime picture that runs through the software. It uses attributes taken from anime images, such as hair and eye color, whether the hair is long or short, and whether the mouth is open or not, and studies them.

Collaborative robots that work alongside humans -- "cobots" -- are getting cheaper and easier to program. That is encouraging businesses to put them to work at new tasks in bars, restaurants and clinics. In the Netherlands, a cobot scales a 26-foot-high bar to tap bottles of homemade gin, whiskey and limoncello so that bartenders don't need to climb ladders. In Singapore, robots give soft-tissue massages. Cobots made up just 5% of the $14 billion industrial-robot market in 2017, according to research by Minneapolis-based venture-capital firm Loup Ventures.

If you fancy a flutter on the World Cup, you may want to put your money on Brazil. According to more than a million simulations of the tournament, the five-time winners are the favourites to lift the coveted trophy on July 15th. The study, from experts at Goldman Sachs, also predicts England will make it to the quarterfinal stage where they will be knocked out by Germany. The financial firm made the predictions after feeding an AI data on team strategy, the strengths and weaknesses of individual players, and recent team results. Brazil are set to be crowned this year's Fifa World Cup winners, according to a prediction driven by more than one million simulations of the tournament.

So this year's E3, currently underway in Los Angeles, has been good news for gamers but terrible news for a wide variety of fictional planet Earths. In game after game at the big Microsoft and Sony press conferences, developers showed off crumbling cities, violent hordes of survivors in various states of physical and mental decline, and lots of nigh-indistinguishable gunplay. To help you tell one post-apocalyptic wasteland from another, we've sorted the trailers based on which horseman seems most responsible. Nothing says "apocalypse" like "global thermonuclear warfare," so it's no surprise that mushroom clouds play a big role in several of these upcoming games. Fallout 76's new trailer gets pride-of-place for showing a doomed soldier take it all in before the blast wave knocks him or her to the ground for what looks like a pretty slow and painful death, as deaths caused by nuclear weapons go: Fallout 76 turns out to be an online multiplayer game rather than the single-player adventures that have characterized the Fallout series so far.

Voice controlled technologies are growing in popularity everywhere. From home automation to cab booking or ordering a meal, customers are getting pampered with the luxury of using voice to control things around them. In this blog post, I present a tutorial to build a voice-activated Oxford dictionary using Amazon Alexa. You can talk to the dictionary and ask for definitions, example usage, synonyms or antonyms of any English word present in the Oxford dictionary. Often I stumble across some word from a classic English literature.

China Money Network, a Chinese investment and technology media and data company based in Hong Kong and Beijing, today launched a campaign to compile a list of the 50 leading Chinese artificial intelligence companies to shed light on China's rising AI power. Called the China AI Top 50, the list will be released at the World Economic Forum 2018 Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Tianjin city, China on September 18 to 20, in front of top-level government officials, influential business leaders and international media organizations. "China Money Network tracks China's technology and venture capital industry daily, providing intelligence and data to our international audience on what may soon be the world's center of venture capital and technology development," says Nina Xiang, founder of China Money Network. "Despite the growth, there is a lack of solid research and data on the most important tech sectors in China. We will fill that knowledge gap by visiting all of these companies' offices and factories, talking to their founders and staff members, as well as mining our own proprietary data accumulated over the years on this industry."