Westworld's AI world might not be science fiction. If you needed any clarification that Artificial Intelligence is on everyone's mind, you need only tune into HBO's new buzzed-about series Westworld. But AI is quickly making its move from the futuristic and fictional to the realm of reality with many practical AI tools already available today. From space, robotics, transportation, healthcare, marketing, music, photography and more, many industries are affected by AI, and we've only just began to see the changes that are yet to come. Since AI is developing at such an astonishing rate, many industries are reaping the rewards of its integration.

Tesla is expanding operations in Europe with the purchase of German engineering firm Grohmann to form a new automated manufacturing research centre. Grohmann Engineering, which will be renamed Tesla Grohmann Automation, specialises in automated assembly systems serving the automotive, telecommunications, consumer electronics and biotechnology industries. The deal, whose financial terms were not disclosed, is expected to add more than 1,000 engineering and skilled technician jobs in Germany over the next two years, subject to purchase approval by Germany, Tesla said in a blogpost. Grohmann employs around 700 people and had revenues of €123m (£109m) in 2015. The German engineering firm is expected to help Tesla ramp up production volume and quality, while cutting costs, as it attempts to produce 500,000 of its electric vehicles a year by 2018.

On November 6 2014, Amazon announced Echo, a smart speaker featuring a voice-controlled assistant service called Alexa. The company didn't exactly go out of its way to whip up excitement for these newcomers. In sharp contrast to the rollout of its ill-fated Fire Phone--which kicked off with a press-conference extravaganza starring Jeff Bezos--it simply disclosed that Echo existed and would be sold, at first, on an invitation-only basis to Prime members. But Echo spoke for itself--and not just literally. People quickly saw that the pint-size cylinder was a genuinely new kind of consumer-electronics device.

Samsung is developing a new digital assistant for its upcoming Galaxy S8 smartphone. According to The Wall Street Journal, the South Korean firm's prototypes include a dedicated button to easily summon the AI-based helper. Following last month's acquisition of artificial intelligence company Viv Labs (co-founded by the creators of Apple's Siri), Samsung is expected to integrate its new conversational user interface into future Galaxy smartphones. "Samsung is excited to begin integrating initial AI capabilities into its future products and we look forward to sharing further details at a later date," a Samsung spokeswoman told PCMag. The software maker declined to share any further details about the forthcoming technology.

Sedonah, 5, speaks Chinese fluently but her father doesn't know a lick of it. So when Sedonah saw a video of him singing a Chinese song, she lit up with amazement. Nikhil Jain didn't spend any time practicing to impress his daughter. But he did spend two years training a computer to sing in his likeness. A technologist's daughter isn't the ideal unbiased tester, but Sedonah's response to the singing routine is what's making her father bullish about the software he's developing.

Artificial intelligence is the future. Artificial intelligence is science fiction. Artificial intelligence is already part of our everyday lives. All those statements are true, it just depends on what flavor of AI you are referring to. For example, when Google DeepMind's AlphaGo program defeated South Korean Master Lee Se-dol in the board game Go earlier this year, the terms AI, machine learning, and deep learning were used in the media to describe how DeepMind won.

Written by C. Raja Mohan Updated: November 8, 2016 12:21 am Media reports say an artificial intelligence (AI) system called MogIA, developed by Sanjiv Rai, an innovator based in Mumbai, has predicted that Donald Trump will win Tuesday's presidential elections in the United States. Unveiled in 2004, the system apparently got it right in the last three presidential elections. It also predicted that Trump and Hillary Clinton will be the nominees of the Republican and Democratic Parties respectively. Rai is quoted as saying that the algorithm got even better as it has "learnt" from the last few rounds. MogIA is named after Mowgli from The Jungle Book.

Samsung Electronics Co. plans to equip its next Galaxy S smartphones with a Siri-like digital assistant, seeking to make a comeback after the global debacle that precipitated the death of its flawed Note 7 lineup. Samsung, which last month acquired U.S.-based artificial-intelligence software company Viv Labs Inc., said the Galaxy S8 slated for next year will come with AI-enabled features "significantly differentiated" from those in the market, such as Apple Inc.'s Siri or Google. Those services now offer up potentially useful information from the weather to flight times based on user activity. What to eat, drink, wear and drive – in real life and your dreams. The school, work and life hacks you need to get ahead.

Given that Sinovation Ventures founder Dr. Kai-Fu Lee has around 50 million followers on Chinese social networks, he has become an oracle when it comes to predicting the future of tech in China. Kai-Fu Lee talked about the most important trends in Chinese startups at TechCrunch Beijing 2016. Sinovation Ventures recently raised the equivalent of $675 million in total across a Chinese and an American fund, and the firm has over 300 companies in its portfolio. "We can invest up to $15 million per company now," Kai-Fu Lee said. And by far, the most important area for future Sinovation Ventures investments will be artificial intelligence.

Tucked into a courtyard in central Paris, the 35 employees of Snips are hunched over their computers trying to put the finishing touches on a new version of the company's artificial intelligence app for smartphones. The company is packed full of big brains, many of them products of France's leading universities and a culture that is historically strong in mathematics. And they're not afraid to let you know it. Etched into winding wooden staircases that lead to Snips offices are a series of math puzzles that job recruits are asked to solve as they work their way upstairs. Snips' app wants to scan all the data across the apps on your smartphones to deliver insight about you and eventually become a hyper-smart personal assistant. But it promises to take a privacy-friendly approach by keeping all the data on your phone, where it will do the processing, rather than hoovering data up into the cloud.