Amazon is setting its sights on another industry, this time it's call centers. In doing so, the company plans to use Alexa, Lex and also Polly in the said market. According to an article at Geek Wire, Amazon Web Services is developing a suite of cloud-based tools to sell to the enterprises that would manage call centers. Aside from its big plans of invading the call center industry, the company plans to incorporate its digital assistant Alexa to answer some questions on the phone as well as via text message. Amazon also plans to employ Lex, a chatbox building service that uses deep-learning technology similar to Alexa, and a text-to-speech program named Polly as well.

Two automated coffee machines in the back grind coffee, pull espresso shots and steam milk. The robotic arm -- made by Mitsubishi and designed for industrial applications -- places the cup near the front of the glass to await pickup. Once the customer arrives and inputs the four-digit code sent to their phone, the drink is sent down a tiny elevator and delivered to the customer. It all seems a little excessive for what amounts to a glorified vending machine, but the end result is a delicious espresso drink. This is the first robotic coffee shop from Cafe X in the United States -- the first Cafe X has been up and running for several months now in Hong Kong.

BARCELONA: SoftBank founder and CEO Masayoshi Son today outlined his vision for artificial intelligence and said computers running AI programs will exceed human intelligence within three decades. Delivering a keynote address at the Mobile World Congress here, Son said he expects one computer chip to have the equivalent of 10,000 IQ within this period. "In the past 2,000 years, the hardware in our brains has not improved... In the next 30 years, AI will overtake human intelligence," he said. Son added that with the strong growth seen for Internet of Things (IoT), the number of embedded chips that are recording and transforming data into something useful will top "one trillion".

Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) and Japan Exchange Regulation (JPX-R) revealed that they have been reviewing artificial intelligence (AI) technologies developed by NEC Corporation and Hitachi to improve market intelligence operations. At present, surveillance systems identify orders that might have benefited from unfair trade practices, based on certain criteria. Surveillance personnel based on the trading situation of the orders then investigate the possibility of unfair practices – and determine if detailed investigations are warranted. When NEC's Rapid machine learning and Hitachi AI Technology/H were applied for preliminary investigations, the results were impressive: AI showed to be highly accurate at weeding out orders that might be tainted. Further, unlike the pre-set criteria used in existing systems, AI was able to learn on its own and improve its success rate.

There has certainly been no lack of punditry and controversy in the US regarding the hacking of John Podesta's email account (along with the DNC email hack), with some claiming they were responsible for Mrs. Clinton's loss in the election. I will leave the impact of these claims to those who write and talk about politics. I don't discuss politics in a work setting, so will leave that aspect to them. What I would like to address is the security infrastructure versus security posture that made this hack possible. For the uninitiated, Mr. Podesta received a targeted phishing email directing him to reset his password.

The fears of a robot uprising are one-step closer to becoming a reality. A video of Nintendo's Super Smash Bros has surfaced and it shows an artificial intelligence (AI) system beating top ranked human players – and without mercy. Researches trained a neural network model by feeding it coordinates of objects in the game, such as players and ledges, and gave it incentives to be sure it would win. A video of Nintendo's Super Smash Bros has surfaced and it shows an artificial intelligence (left) system beating top human players (right) – and without mercy. The AI was developed by a team at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

One Japanese woman has proved that age really is just a number. Masako Wakamiya learned how to use a computer at the age of 60 and now, at 81-years-old, she has released an app that shows people how to properly display traditional dolls for Hinamatsuri. Not only is Wakamiya a developer, but she has a blog where she shares clips from her travels and also teaches people how Excel can be used to make digital art. Masako Wakamiya learned how to use a computer at the age of 60 and now, at 81-years-old, she has released an app that shows people how to properly display traditional dolls for Hinamatsuri. The app, called Hinadan, asks players to place 12 dolls in their respective positions on a standard display with four tiers.

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer. A woman uses a translation app on her smartphone in Paris on Nov. 4, 2014. If you have ever traveled through a foreign country armed with little more than Google Translate to communicate, you know how awkward it can be to use the app to ask a friendly local for directions to the zoo only to unwittingly end up insulting his sister.

A strange thing is happening along the way to the Internet of Things, namely far too many devices to work with and manage. It has become clear that we'll need much higher efficiency user experiences that can allow us to more easily and scalably work with the thousands of devices that will soon be in each of our lives. Enter the conversational interface revolution, combining bots we can literally talk with, gesture to, and even direct with our thoughts, with embedded artificial intelligence, which can process our conversational commands and orchestrate the outcomes we request across our personal and professional realm of connected devices. In his keynote at @ThingsExpo, Dion Hinchcliffe, Chief Strategy Officer at 7Summits, discussed how far from being part of the near future, "conversational things" is arriving now and explored with real-world examples. Speaker Bio Dion Hinchcliffe is an internationally recognized digital expert, bestselling book author, frequent keynote speaker, analyst, futurist, and transformation expert based in Washington, DC.

Helicopter drones which could shoot down Islamic State's new remote-controlled weapons are under development, the Defence Secretary announced yesterday. Sir Michael Fallon said the terror group's latest drone tactics in Iraq – in which they drop grenades from the skies – had been a'wake-up call' for Britain. Unmanned craft would enable the UK to stay ahead of enemies as they would be faster, fly for longer, and spare pilots from any risk, he said. In a speech at Oxford University to engineers and academics, he said drone wars were the future, adding: 'Science fiction will soon be science fact. Unmanned warfare is coming absolutely.'