A seven-year-old girl from Hereford who penned a letter to Google asking for a job, was delighted to receive a personal response from the chief executive himself. Chloe Bridgewater sent a handwritten letter to the tech giant in which she noted her computer skills and her interest in working in a place where she can "sit on bean bags and go down slides". The letter, first published by Business Insider, makes a pretty solid case for hiring Ms Bridgewater. She wrote in it that she is experienced in tablet usage, computer robot games, swimming, spelling, reading, and sums. She even provided reference: "My teachers tell my mum and dad that I am very good in class."

Ten per cent of American households will own a housekeeping robot by 2020, with global unit shipments reaching 48 million in 2020, up from 15.7 million this year, according to a new study by Juniper Research. Urbanisation and a reduction in available time for household chores were cited as key drivers behind the growth. This was reflected at CES 2017 where nearly half of the robotics marketplace was dedicated to this class of consumer robot. In addition, a swathe of large-scale vendors, including Dyson, Samsung and LG have unveiled housekeeping robots, demonstrating a viable commercial proposition. The new research, Consumer Robotics: Investment, Disruptors & Future Prospects 2017-2021, predicted that consumer appetite for social robots will be more limited and not gain traction until 2021.

Pepper, the humanoid robot from Japan's SoftBank Group Corp., has just scored one of its first jobs in the U.S.: hawking beer. Bloomberg Technology's Ian King went to meet the new employee at the Oakland, California airport.

Almost two-thirds of companies either have or soon will have IoT as the backbone of their business. Though, IoT is far more complex than most firms expected with a majority of IoT projects having failed. How can you not get trapped in the pitfalls? In his session at @ThingsExpo, Tony Shan, Chief IoTologist at Wipro, will introduce a holistic method of IoTification, which is the process of IoTifying the existing technology portfolios and business models to adopt and leverage IoT. The interdisciplinary techniques and anti-patterns of this method will be discussed, along with best practices and lessons learned, to help organizations transform to and enable IoT more effectively.

Sounds like a self-help group for frustrated call center employees. Rather, it's a catch-all term for how companies manage customer interactions and data. It covers strategies involving everything from customer service to sales. Each incoming phone call or email may contain an overwhelming amount of data that a mere human in today's hyper-competitive, tech-intensive environment can't handle alone. Time to bring in some help with artificial intelligence.

Research on machine learning and artificial intelligence needs to be done in the open and not by military research labs, Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google's parent Alphabet has said. Mr Schmidt was speaking at the RSA Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. Some 40,000 security professionals have been attending the event this week. Security threats discussed at hundreds of sessions include the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee in advance of the US presidential election last year, as well as threats to business, to government and to internet-connected devices. In conversation with journalist Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Mr Schmidt said machine learning capabilities, which allow computers to learn without being programmed, needed to be done in the open and not by military research labs.

In the voice assistant market, Apple has Siri, Google has Google Assistant, Microsoft has Cortana. There are also voice assistants that aren't natively integrated into phones or computers, such as SoundHound's Hound and Amazon's Alexa. We have also heard that Samsung is planning their own voice assistant called "Bixby". This is why it doesn't really come as a complete surprise to learn that Huawei could be working on their own voice assistant platform as well. This comes from a report from Bloomberg in which people familiar with the matter told the publication about Huawei's plans.

Ethan Bloch was in junior high school in Baltimore during the dot-com boom. For his bar mitzvah -- the ceremony that welcomes 13-year-old Jewish boys into adulthood -- Bloch received $7,000 in cash. It was 1998 and, like so many amateur traders at the time, he plunged his wealth into the stock market, mostly software and telecommunication names like Lucent and Nortel. He quickly tripled his money. By age 15, it was all gone.

Huawei, the third largest smartphone manufacturer in the world, is reportedly working on its own digital voice-activated assistant. The company's AI assistant will soon be competing with Apple's Siri, Google Assistant and Amazon's Alexa. Huawei has formed a team with over 100 engineers in Shenzhen, China which is currently in early stages of development for the new digital smart assistant, according to one of Bloomberg. Huawei's digital assistant will be aimed at Chinese customers meaning it will communicate in Chinese languages. One of Bloomberg's sources claimed that Huawei will continue to work with Google and Amazon when it comes to providing other services to its phones internationally.

The development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been remarkable and, in recent years, has experienced several breakthroughs. Will 2017 continue this trend? Commercial enterprises are procuring and developing systems that use AI to aid in their corporate goals, enhancing their performance through the use of autonomy. By exploiting advancements in big data analytics, processing power and clearer computer systems and networks, companies can use automation and AI to augment their current work processes and generate methods of long-term value creation. The stage is set, however, for AI to rise higher than ever before as large players including Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft all open-source or share their latest research in AI, to advance collective advancement.