Josh Newlan wrote a small piece of software he calls "Say What" that listens to meetings for him and alerts him if his name is called. Newlan works for Splunk, a U.S.-based machine data company, but he lives in Shanghai. "I end up having lots of early [and] late calls with the U.S. office ... hence the need for this tool," he told CNNMoney. Newlan's python script starts to run when a meeting begins and his computer's microphone listens in the background. It uses an open source speech recognition program to recognize phrases based on the silences between people's sentences.

AN ALARMING app that can scan a person's face and identify who they are and what they are into has become very popular in Russia. This is the opposite of great, and represents a threat to privacy that has staggered even The Guardian newspaper, which has reported that the FindFace app is very accurate and can even be used to recognise whole crowds. It is the sort of thing that we might have expected to report alongside words like'Snowden' and'National Security Agency', but actually it's a consumer thing that draws on Vkontakte, the Russian equivalent of Facebook, to match mugs with, well, mugs. "In the short time since the launch, FindFace has amassed 500,000 users and processed nearly three million searches," said a report in The Guardian. "Some have sounded the alarm about the potentially disturbing implications. Already the app has been used by a St Petersburg photographer to snap and identify people on the city's metro, as well as by online vigilantes to uncover the social media profiles of female porn actors and harass them."

Clutter is a special challenge for robots, but new Carnegie Mellon University software is helping robots cope, whether they're beating a path across the Moon or grabbing a milk jug from the back of the refrigerator. The software not only helped a robot deal efficiently with clutter, it surprisingly revealed the robot's creativity in solving problems. "It was exploiting sort of superhuman capabilities," Siddhartha Srinivasa, associate professor of robotics, said of his lab's two-armed mobile robot, the Home Exploring Robot Butler, or HERB. "The robot's wrist has a 270-degree range, which led to behaviors we didn't expect. In one case, the robot used the crook of its arm to cradle an object to be moved.

Google yesterday confirmed rumors that it has been working on a custom chip designed to speed up computing related to its artificial intelligence efforts. The result, it said at its I/O developer conference, is a chip it calls a Tensor Processing Unit. It's designed to work with TensorFlow, an open source software library for developing AI applications. The TPU chips, Google says, are designed to be built into its existing computing infrastructure and are already in use boosting the performance of services like Street View and voice recognition. They also played a part in Google's AlphaGo software that defeated the human champion at the board game Go.

Artificial technology has recently been viewed as an asset of precision medicine that can outsmart several diseases. With the advancement and sophistication of modern technology, artificial intelligence has seamlessly coalesced into the field of medicine. In fact, AI technology has recently been viewed as an asset of precision medicine that can outmaneuver tough medical problems. The presence of artificial intelligence in the field of medicine is nothing new. Last month, a team of scientists at the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA has developed a new technique using artificial intelligence to efficiently detect cancer cells without damaging blood samples, as previously reported.

It is hard to miss the warnings. In the race to make computers more intelligent than us, humanity will summon a demon, bring forth the end of days, and code itself into oblivion. Instead of silicon assistants we'll build silicon assassins. The doomsday story of an evil AI has been told a thousand times. But behind the apocalyptic words of Stephen Hawking, the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, and Elon Musk – who compared AI to nukes even as he launched an AI company – lies a more numbing existential threat.

Before we get on to the business of the review, I should confess that I have never been able to get past a dozen or so screens of the video game "Food Fight." I have never been able to chuck more than a pie or two at the murderous chefs. I have never figured out why a handful of peas will take down the white-toqued aggressors while a banana seems to whirl right past their heads. I have never reached the moment, beloved of the game's aficionados, where I manage to whiz slice after slice of watermelon at my adversaries, which seems to be the best way to rack up enough points to register on the leader board. I feed token after token into the machine.

In my article Voice and Mobile Search-the way forward, I have discussed that search is constantly evolving, as technology improves the lives of people and consumer behavior shifts. Search is getting more into local mode. Local consumers are now using mobile technology more that has affected how marketers engage with and convert the local shoppers who are always curious about deals and discounts. This means search must be an integral part of a strong marketing strategy in a smarter way which can't be a one-size-fits all approach and need to be planned meticulously to understand the consumer activities. Data available from social media channels is a great example of the way in which new digital technologies provide business with a more comprehensive understanding of the consumer.

Pepper, the robot that has been trained to "perceive" human emotion, is opening up its platform to Android developers. Maker SoftBank is hoping that it will spur new apps and new capabilities for the humanoid robot which has sold well but still has no clear defined purpose. Ten thousand of the robots have been sold but developers have been slow to make apps for its closed Naoqi operating system. Android will run on a tablet strapped to the robot's chest. Neither Google nor SoftBank has disclosed what sort of business deal they have struck and it is unclear if the robot will take advantage of new features such as the recently announced artificial intelligence Google Assistant. But it will almost certainly offer Google some degree of control over the robot as well as a cut of revenues.

Ratan Tata, chairman emeritus of Tata Sons pumped an undisclosed amount in Bangalore-based artificial intelligence startup niki.ai. Along with Mr. Tata, Existing investor, Ronnie Screwvala's Unilazer Ventures also participated in this funding round. Unilazer had invested in the chat App back on October 2015 and had made a commitment of a follow-on investment round of up to Rs 5 crore. "Chatbots have now picked up globally and Niki has been at the forefront of this innovation, building the technology for over a year now. We continue to support the team as we believe in their vision to simplify transactions for consumers," said Screwvala.