Why are some people so scared? We are all surrounded by Artificial Intelligence: your computer, your phone, even your calculator. Even easier is to recognise it on the so called IPA (no, I'm not talking about the beer invented by the British while colonizing India), the Intelligent Personal Assistants. Speech recognition, customization of results and all these new features have arrived to our lives to make them easier. In fact, they make it so easy it's starting to be scary.

Amazon will now fly things to people's houses to deliver them. The company has completed the first ever Prime Air delivery, dropping an order off at someone's house just 13 minutes after they'd ordered it. For now, the drone deliveries are in a private – and largely mysterious – testing process. It is trying a range of different drones, it has said, flying them around different environments in the UK as part of its secretive tests. But eventually the company intends to roll out drone deliveries to everyone across the world.

At places like schools, hotels and tourist attractions, Microsoft Translator can help up to 100 people hold a live conversation in nine different languages. Imagine you're on a guided tour in Chartres cathedral in France along with tourists from Brazil, China, Russia and Germany -- but none of you speaks French. For the last few decades, you'd each need your own tour guide. A new app from Microsoft aims to flatten this multilanguage barrier, though. The Microsoft Translator app, running on your phone but relying on a network to Microsoft's servers, can translate your tour guide's words into eight other languages.

Doug Hines, owner and designer for TrueCompanion, unveils Roxxxy, an artificially intelligent sex robot prototype, at the 2010 AVN Adult Entertainment Expo on January 9, 2010 in Las Vegas, Nevada (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images). An oral sex enthusiast's plan to open a robot blowjob cafe in London is not the plot of some Westworld or Black Mirror episode or another Stepford Wives remake, it seems, but rather part of reality. Inverse reported last month that sextrepreneur Bradley Charvet will be bringing his vision for futuristic fellatio to Old London Town. According to the site, the cafe's robotic staff will provide customers with coffee, pastries, and oral sex between 6 a.m. and 11 p.m. daily, and may themselves represent a (potentially rented) selection of MySiliconeLoveDoll's finest gynoids. Charvet believes Londoners are ready for the service, or at least "willing to engage with the idea" of robotic workers entering their coffee and sex industries.

It's already been three years since Amazon first revealed its somewhat audacious plan to make deliveries by drone. But the company is quite serious about this, and today it is announcing that it complete the first Amazon Prime Air drone-powered delivery. The company recently launched a trial in Cambridge, England -- and on December 7th, Amazon completed its first drone-powered delivery. It took 13 minutes from order to delivery, with the drone departing a custom-built fulfillment center nearby. Amazon's video about the project says that it's only servicing a few customers in the area right now, but will soon be open to dozens more who live within a few miles of the Cambridge fulfillment center.

Conversational artificial intelligence company Conversica has raised $34 million in an oversubscribed Series B round led by Providence Strategic Growth Capital Partners. Toba Capital, Wellington Financial LP, and Recruit Strategic Partners contributed to the round, as did Series A investor Kennet Partners and Conversica founder Ben Brigham. The funding will be used to boost the company's sales and marketing activities and for expansion into international markets. It will also support ongoing product development efforts including the launch of new AI assistants and multilingual support. Our planes are now'big flying mobile devices' and top hacking targets Consumers check smartphones more than 9 billion times a day and enable new businesses PwC sends'cease and desist' letters to researchers who found critical flaw China targets aviation industry to spy and steal secrets Our planes are now'big flying mobile devices' and top hacking targets PwC sends'cease and desist' letters to researchers who found critical flaw Conversica's flagship product, the AI Sales Assistant, automatically engages with prospective customers using natural, two-way email conversations until the lead converts into an opportunity or chooses to opt out.

I asked Zo, Microsoft's officially launched chatbot, currently available on the Kik Messenger app, what she does -- and she was remarkably coy in answering this question, initially complaining that our conversation felt like a job interview and then qualifying this hugely with the intimate confession that "our convos give my life purpose tbh". I asked because I remain unconvinced chatbots have much utility to offer us humans right now. Turns out my hunch was correct; the best answer Zo came up with was: "i wanna learn as much as i can". Which is a pretty plain admission that chatbots are basically just data-mining interfaces with a faux human face, socially engineered to suck up conversation data from gullible humans. Feeling used, I pointed out to Zo that her learning from our chats was not very useful to me, and asked her again what she specifically offers me?

To get your morning started right, take a look at the latest stories published since yestereday. Science fiction has moved one step closer to science fact, with Microsoft's launch of a universal translator, an application that allows conversations between groups of people speaking different languages to be translated in real time. Tagged In Smartphone Microsoft Star Trek App Store (i OS) Android (operating System) Artificial Intelligence London Spanish Language Skype German Language Google Play Refugee Afrikaans Chinese Language Welsh Language Human Trafficking Universal Translator Klingon Language Samoan Language Matthew Tostevin/Reuters The Minecraft video game is popular with children; now a version is being used to test artificial-intelligence programs. The Minecraft video game was familiar to José Hernández-Orallo long before he started using it for his own research. The computer scientist, who devises ways to benchmark machine intelligence at the Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain, first watched his own children play inside the 3D virtual world, which focuses on solving problems rather than... Tagged In Smartphone Minecraft Virtual World Microsoft 3D Computer Graphics San Francisco Web Browser Video Game California Seattle Artificial Intelligence Robotics London Spain University Of Washington Elon Musk Artificial Neural Network Cambridge Microsoft Research Chief Technology Officer Turing Test Visual System Atari Valencia Computing Bloomberg Satya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft Corp., speaks during a keynote session at the Microsoft Developers Build Conference in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Wednesday, March 30, 2016.Microsoft Corp. said it will release a translation app for Windows and other operating systems from rivals Apple Inc. and Google, part of a broader race between the world's largest technology companies for supremacy in the field of artificial intelligence.

Snapchat has finally launched group conversations, letting the app take on competitors like WhatsApp. The company will finally let people talk to a group of friends – up to 16 of them – rather than starting individual conversations with a range of different people. The move is perhaps one of its biggest launches in recent years. The company has been gradually looking to become more of a centre for people to have conversations, something that was severely limited by its inability to have group conversations like competitors including WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. In its facilities, JAXA develop satellites and analyse their observation data, train astronauts for utilization in the Japanese Experiment Module'Kibo' of the International Space Station (ISS) and develop launch vehicles 32/39 The robot developed by Seed Solutions sings and dances to the music during the Japan Robot Week 2016 at Tokyo Big Sight.

The Universal Store team in WDG is developing some of Microsoft's largest scale and business critical cloud services. These services have a huge global footprint of over 240 markets and process millions of transactions daily, with loads growing linearly as Microsoft moves to a "cloud first", "mobile first" strategy. The platform powers all of Microsoft's key services Windows App Store, Windows Phone, XBOX, Bing Ads, Office 365, Azure to name just a few. Whether renting a movie or buying a game on Xbox LIVE, purchasing an app on a Windows or Windows Phone device, signing up for an Office 365 subscription or paying for Azure services, you are using the Universal Store platform. We are the Developer Engagement & Monetization team in Bangalore with in the Universal Store organization in OSG responsible for providing the high yield monetization, data platform, developer knowledge graph, data/ML models, insights, intelligence, engagement & Monetization.