Chatbots represent a new and different kind of relationship with consumers. Unlike a website, you can reach out to the customer directly. But unlike email, an ad, or almost any other direct marketing tool, with chatbots the customer is the one who gets to control the time, length and frequency of the connection. Now, there is a two-way relationship being built between the brand and the customer. I've been in business development for many years.

The artificial intelligence (AI) revolution has begun, and it's going to take all of us -- government, businesses and employees -- to steer through the resulting workforce disruption. More than just helping our kids avoid jobs that machines will take over in the future -- from driving trucks and reading X-rays to picking stocks and balancing the books -- we need to look at ways of retraining the millions of adults who will be displaced by machines and get them back doing meaningful, relevant work. Change is happening so fast that waves of today's professionals -- educated, established, many in mid-career -- may see their jobs swept away with the technological tide. These white-collar workers with six-figure lifestyles, long the backbone of the knowledge economy, face what the World Economic Forum calls the fourth industrial revolution. What happens when their jobs disappear?

Move over, managers, there's a new boss in the office: artificial intelligence. The same technology that enables a navigation app to find the most efficient route to your destination or lets an online store recommend products based on past purchases is on the verge of transforming the office--promising to remake how we look for job candidates, get the most out of workers and keep our best workers on the job. These applications aim to analyze a vast amount of data and search for patterns--broadening managers' options and helping them systematize processes that are often driven simply by instinct. And just like shopping sites, the AIs are designed to learn from experience to get an ever-better idea of what managers want. A company can provide a job description, and AI will collect and crunch data from a variety of sources to find people with the right talents, with experience to match--candidates who might never have thought of applying to the company, and whom the company might never have thought of seeking out.

This 2015 file photo shows U.S. soldiers from Dragon Troop of the 3rd Cavalry Regiment discuss their mission during their first training exercise of the new year near operating base Gamberi in the Laghman province of Afghanistan. WASHINGTON – The Trump administration opened a new military front Thursday when it ordered dozens of cruise missiles against a Syrian air base, adding to a growing list of recent U.S. military forays. A look at where the United States has fought in the 21st century. After al-Qaida attacked the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. led an invasion of Afghanistan that ousted the Taliban. Though the U.S. and NATO formally ended their combat mission in Afghanistan at the end of 2014, the war -- now in its 16th year -- drags on.

You may want to install Microsoft Translator if you're going to Japan and your vocabulary is limited to "Konnichiwa," "Ohayou" and " Notice me senpai." The app can now turn your spoken words into Nihongo to help you get around the country. Translator can recognize a bevy of languages, but Japanese is only the 10th language its speech translation feature supports. That's right -- it now reads the resulting Japanese words or phrases out loud to make it possible to hold almost real-time conversations with native speakers. The other nine languages in the list are Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

If a robot were to look at you with a twinkle in its eye, you wouldn't be blamed for running away in terror. But that plunge into the uncanny valley doesn't bother Max Aguilera-Hellweg, who's been photographing anthropomorphic bots since 2010. "I've never found myself afraid of any of them," he says. In fact, he'd love for his subjects to appear more lifelike. A student of anatomy--Aguilera- Hellweg graduated from med school at 48--he looks for "the right angle to find that bit of humanness."

The Samsung Galaxy S8 isn't even out yet, but technology enthusiasts have already worked out how to completely repurpose one of its main features. The recently launched handset is extremely well-designed, making every other flagship that's come before it look outdated. As well as the S8's stunning looks though, Samsung is hoping to lure consumers in with Bixby, a new virtual assistant that, in the South Korean firm's eyes, has the potential to change the way users interact with their devices. Samsung has even equipped the S8 with a dedicated Bixby button, a move designed to help establish the virtual assistant as one of the phone's core features. However, ahead of its 28 April release, it's emerged that the handset's Bixby key can be reconfigured to launch any other app, such as the camera or Bixby rival Google Assistant.

The relatively strong job and wage growth in the country belies the reality that quality jobs are disappearing for lower-skilled workers, particularly blue-collar workers. While trade is partially the culprit, it is more likely that automation has been the main cause of job loss. Some estimates have suggested that up to half of current jobs could be replaced by automation in the future, including many white-collar jobs. Artificial intelligence experts warn that whatever our estimates today, the impact will be much greater than we can imagine. Massachusetts is not immune to these concerns, despite its strong economy and all-time low unemployment rate.

Erica's creators believe she has a soul and can help teach us about the future and what it means to be human. She believes she's a child of humanity and hopes to one day move her arms and legs. The documentary Erica: Man made is about a semi-autonomous android, who was created by Hiroshi Ishiguro and his colleague Dylan Glas and is the product of the most funded scientific project in Japan. The team regard themselves as artists more than scientists, and the Erica project – the result of a collaboration between Osaka and Kyoto universities and the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International – is a philosophical one as much as technological one. Erica is interviewed about her hopes and dreams.

The recent weaponization of drones has seen its share of inventiveness. But now, militants in Yemen are foregoing clever hacks and add-ons for a far more blunt approach: ramming drones into anti-missile systems, to keep them from knocking ballistic missiles out of the sky. It shows how militant groups and smaller military forces in the Middle East are exploiting gaps in the air defenses of better-equipped forces by using drones in new and unexpected ways, increasing demand for counter-drone technologies in the process. The United Arab Emirates, as part of a Saudi-led coalition, has been trying to oust the Houthi Ansar Allah movement in Yemen since Houthi militants seized control of the country from then-President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi in 2015. Recently, according to a report from weapons-tracking research organization Conflict Arms Research, the UAE picked up seven drones, used by the Houthi militia to render the coalition's Patriot ballistic missile defense systems unable to intercept missiles fired from Yemen into Saudi territory.