Emirates NBD's Pepper, the artificial intelligence (AI) powered humanoid robot, has learnt to speak Arabic as it seeks to help more of the bank's customers. The robot, brought to the UAE by Emirates NBD last year, has been widely popular and will now also cater to the bank's Arabic-speaking customers, a statement said. The bilingual Pepper will continue to interact with customers at the bank's Jumeirah Emirates Towers and Dubai Mall branches and provide assistance with issuing branch queueing tokens, presenting information about products and services in an engaging manner and obtaining customer feedback through a happiness meter. "Pepper has been extremely popular with customers and well received at our branches and promotional events," said Suvo Sarkar, senior executive vice president & group head - Retail Banking & Wealth Management, Emirates NBD. "As a bank that has been at the forefront of digitisation and in bringing innovations to the region, we are pleased to offer our customers the opportunity to interact with Pepper in the language of their choice. Pepper brings in a modern and contemporary aspect to banking, complementing our multi-channel yet personalised banking proposition."

Google is deepening its push into China as it seeks an edge in one of technology's most competitive fields: artificial intelligence. The Alphabet unit will announce the opening of a new Beijing research facility on Wednesday during its second annual developers conference in Shanghai, the company says. The Google AI China Center will have a small group of researchers supported by several hundred China-based engineers. Google has been re-building its presence in China, where it defied the government in 2010 by refusing to self-censor search content and later had most of its services blocked. The U.S. giant has been ramping up hiring and promotion of its TensorFlow AI tools, features that Sundar Pichai, CEO at Google, highlighted when he visited the country earlier this month.

Google Assistant has been available on recent Android phones for a while. However, that still puts it out out of reach of many Android users when a whopping 46.5 percent of active Android users are running a version older than Marshmallow. To help address this, Google is making Assistant available on devices running Android Lollipop. If you're still rocking an older phone, you'll get the same AI helper as a shiny new handset. The update is starting to reach phones with English language settings in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, India and Singapore. It'll also be available in Spanish in the US, Mexico and Spain, and will hit devices in Brazil, Germany, Italy, Japan and South Korea.

We have had many previous hype cycles around AI. As I wrote in Silicon Collar: "Since the 1950s! That is when Alan Turing defined his famous test to measure a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to that of a human. In 1959, we got excited when Allen Newell and his colleagues coded the General Problem Solver. In 1968, Stanley Kubrick sent our minds into overdrive with HAL in his movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey. We applauded when IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer beat Grandmaster Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997. We were impressed in 2011 when IBM's Watson beat human champions at Jeopardy! and again in 2016 when Google's AlphaGo showed it had mastered Go, the ancient board game. Currently, we are so excited about Amazon's Echo digital assistant/home automation hub and its ability to recognize the human voice, that we are saying a machine has finally passed the Turing Test. The good news is over the seven decades, the AI community has gifted us a wide range of big words like deep learning, neural networks, cognitive computing and natural language processing. Yale computer science professor David Gelernter thinks we have only scratched the surface. In his book The Tides of Mind, he calls it "the spectrum of consciousness," which is "essentially a range of mental states through which all humans cycle each day.

The US search engine has announced it will launch an artificial intelligence (AI) research center in China, albeit most Google services have been blocked in the country. According to Google, the research center will be "the first of a kind" in Asia, and will target China's local talent. Despite new censorship restrictions on the Internet, introduced last year, the initiative has received a warm welcome among Chinese policy makers, who seek to advance technologic development in the country. China has been maintaining tight control over the Internet, with officials saying that the web has undermined socialist ideas and stability in the country. To access forbidden content, many people use VPN services, which grant them access to Google services and other blocked web-sites.

Nearly three years ago, Brendan Greene was living on welfare in his home country of Ireland. PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is a title few non-video game diehards have ever heard of. That's partly because Greene and game developer Bluehole Studio have not marketed the game. Instead, a combination of viral buzz through streaming services like Twitch and a novel spin on the shooter genre propelled PUBG (pronounced "pub-gee") to popularity on par with Call of Duty, with massive production and advertising budgets. This week, having thrived on PC, PUBG will enjoy a new wave of players by making its debut on Microsoft's Xbox One.

Google on Wednesday disclosed plans to create a research lab in China dedicated to artificial intelligence.

Even though Google is blocked in the country, it is cementing its position in China by focusing on Artificial Intelligence. This year, the California-based company held a Go tournament in collaboration with the local authorities in eastern China.

AI-Induced Empathy Can we use AI to increase empathy for victims of far-away disasters by making our homes appear similar to the homes of victims? Deep Empathy gets you closer to the realities of those that suffer the most, by helping you imagine what neighbourhoods around the world would look like if hit by a disaster. Around the world, 50 million children have migrated across borders or been forcibly displaced within their own countries. In Syria alone, the brutal six-year old war has affected more than 13.5 million people and 80% of the country's children--8.4 million young lives shattered by violence and fear. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced and their homes destroyed.

When something goes wrong with the appliances in your home, what do you do to fix them? Then you dig out a manual or look one up online. If none of that helps, you might call the company who made the thing, and then spend an age on the phone trying to explain what's gone wrong. But what if you didn't have to explain -- what if you could just show someone the problem, and have it explained to you? That's the proposition from Israeli company TechSee, which is building a customer support platform using two of 2017's most overused buzzwords: augmented reality and artificial intelligence.