Bots and artificial intelligence company Kasisto today announced that it has raised $9.2 million. The money will be used to bolster the company's personal finance bot KAI and expand its AI virtual assistant offerings to markets beyond finance. When asked by VentureBeat, the company declined to state which industries it plans to enter but said that specifics would be shared at a later date. Kasisto is a spinoff of SRI International, creator of Apple virtual assistant Siri. Kasisto launched AI-powered KAI for personal finance and banking last June.

Nintendo revealed the Switch, its latest console, back in October -- but the company left out plenty of key details about the half-portable, half-living room system. So, that's what tonight is all about. Nintendo will host a live stream at 11P ET on Thursday, January 12th, intended to outline more of the features, hardware specs and games coming to the Switch when it lands in March. Watch the live stream right here with us tonight and keep the Engadget home page open for all of the news as Nintendo announces it. Until then, here are a few things to expect out of tonight's Switch event: Nintendo hasn't indicated how much the Switch will cost, but Japanese news organization Nikkei predicts it will hit shelves at less than $250, at least in Japan.

After a decline in 2015, U.S. patenting activity rose to a record high in 2016. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted 304,126 patents last year, up from 298,407 in 2015. The increase was largely driven by West Coast technology companies, including Amazon, Apple, AT&T, Boeing, IBM, Intel, Google, and Microsoft. According to a 24/7 Wall St. analysis of data provided by Information for Industry (IFI) Claims Patent Services, Korean conglomerate Samsung Electronics was granted the most patents in 2016. Including its major subsidiaries, Samsung was awarded more than 8,500 patents, slightly higher than IBM's 8,088 awarded patents.

The Nintendo Switch video game console, which will launch next March. Half of game developers believe Nintendo's Switch video game console will outsell the Wii U, but are unsure whether the device's hybrid concept will attract consumers. The sentiments come from a State of the Industry survey ahead of next month's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. The survey features responses from 4,500 professionals in the video game industry. The survey found 50% of developers believe the Switch will sell better than its predecessor, the Wii U, which struggled to gain momentum against more powerful home consoles including the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. The Switch is the combination of a home and portable device, featuring a tablet players can travel with or pop in to a docking station attached to a television to play games at home with a traditional controller.

The UK is one step closer to a super-fast transport system after four potential routes have been short-listed fro Elon Musk's Hyperloop One project. The US start-up has disclosed a list of 35 routes in locations around the world vying to put near-supersonic rail transit system to the test. In the UK, four routes have been picked, that could see lines built from London to Edinburgh, Liverpool to Hull, Glasgow to Cardiff or a'Northern Arc' across a series of northern cities. The London-Edinburgh scheme was led by an Edinburgh University team that has plans to take the route via Birmingham and Manchester. If selected, it would mean travelling between the two capital cities would take just 45 minutes, and the journey from London to Manchester would take only 18 minutes.

One of the newer technologies getting buzz these days is the voice-enabled digital assistant – and new data from Accenture [pdf] suggests that it's not all hype. In fact, the use of embedded voice-enabled digital assistants in smartphones and PC/laptops has reached the mainstream among 14-17-year-olds, per Accenture's survey of almost 26,000 consumers across 26 countries. The results indicate that 31% of 14-17-year-olds regularly use voice-enabled digital assistants, with another 20% just getting started using them. Adoption – not surprisingly – declines with age, but still remains above one-third (38%) of Millennials (18-34) and higher than one-quarter (27%) of Gen Xers (35-54). Although only 15% of Boomers (55) are currently using voice-enabled digital assistants, another 35% are interested in doing so.

Lloyds Banking group's online customers have expressed frustration after a second day of problems with online and app banking. An outage on Wednesday morning prevented customers from logging into their accounts. At one point the group, which includes Lloyds Bank, the Halifax and Bank of Scotland, assured customers that the glitch had been resolved. However, complaints from customers continued on Twitter on Thursday. A spokesperson for Lloyds confirmed the banks were still experiencing "intermittent issues" and were investigating what caused the glitch.

This post is part of an ongoing blog series examining "Sure Things" (predictions that are almost guaranteed to happen) and "Long Shots" (predictions that are less likely to happen) in cybersecurity in 2017. In the last few years, the digital footprint of organizations has expanded beyond the confines of the on-premise data center and private cloud to a model that now incorporates SaaS and public clouds. To date, InfoSec teams have been in a reactive mode while trying to implement a comprehensive security strategy across their hybrid architecture. In 2017, we will see a concerted effort from InfoSec teams to build and roll out a multi-cloud security strategy geared toward addressing the emerging digital needs of their organizations. Maintaining a consistent security posture, pervasive visibility, and ease of security management across all clouds will drive security teams to extend their strategy beyond security considerations for public and private clouds and also focus on securely enabling SaaS applications.

FILE - In this Wednesday, Sept. 29, 2015 file photo, Sahara, a rare red-haired female Hamadryas Baboon holds 3 weeks old dark-furred baby in the Ramat Gan Safari Park near Tel Aviv, Israel. A new study in France shows that baboons can make human-like vowel sounds, and its authors say the discovery could help scientists better understand the evolution of human speech. The study was published in the journal Plos One on Wednesday Jan. 11, 2017 by a team of scientists. FILE - In this Wednesday, Sept. 29, 2015 file photo, Sahara, a rare red-haired female Hamadryas Baboon holds 3 weeks old dark-furred baby in the Ramat Gan Safari Park near Tel Aviv, Israel. A new study in France shows that baboons can make human-like vowel sounds, and its authors say the discovery could help scientists better understand the evolution of human speech.

As China's economy enters a period of slowing growth, its leaders are increasingly looking to robots to pick up the pace. A link has been sent to your friend's email address. As China's economy enters a period of slowing growth, its leaders are increasingly looking to robots to pick up the pace.