With machines running up a series of victories against their human competitors, it almost seems like they're capable of beating humans in every aspect of life. But could they trounce us even when it comes to emotions? A special piano competition between man and machine took place Monday at Seongnam Arts Center. The performers were Italian pianist Roberto Prosseda, and a robot-pianist called Teo Tronico. Both played the same piece of music in their own style, and then assessed each other in the form of a talk show.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Google is creating tools for software developers to build chat bots that run inside messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger and Google's own messaging products, according to a published report. The technology giant plans to discuss some of the details at its annual developer conference, which starts Wednesday, The Information reported. "Essentially, Google wants to get into the bot-making business more broadly than people realized, and in a way that's similar to Microsoft's strategy, and relying on its strengths in artificial intelligence to convince developers to use its tools," the report reads. Google, like Microsoft, missed out on the new wave of messaging apps which are some of the world's most popular apps. The Wall Street Journal reported in December that Google planned to integrate chat bots, interactive software powered by artificial intelligence that answer questions inside a messaging app, so that users can send queries as text messages.

Japan's Sony said it plans to build up its artificial intelligence (AI) business and eventually turn it into a major revenue source, beginning with an investment in a U.S. startup. The electronics maker has invested an undisclosed sum in California-based Cogitai. The year-old firm, founded by three researchers, focuses on technology that allows machines to learn continually and autonomously from interaction in the real world. The move comes a time when major technology companies such as Facebook, Apple, and Alphabet's Google are spending aggressively on AI ventures. "From an objective perspective, we are lagging behind," Hiroaki Kitano, chief executive of Sony Computer Science Laboratories, said in an interview. "But there are still unexplored areas -- some in cyberspace but vastly more in the physical world," Kitano said.

We more or less knew this day was coming, and apparently it is coming to Russia first. An app called FindFace will run a facial recognition algorithm on any photograph -- say, of a stranger on the Moscow subway -- and correlate it with the membership of Vkontakte, Europe's largest social network. In effect, it allows users to find out the name and other information of any person they see in public. Kabakov says the app could revolutionise dating: "If you see someone you like, you can photograph them, find their identity, and then send them a friend request." Widespread, simple facial recognition technology has implications far beyond dating stalking.

Everyone in San Francisco these days wants to build a self-driving car. So in a company town that prides itself on going against the grain, this startup wants to build a self-driving truck. On Tuesday, several former Google, Tesla and Apple engineers announced they had quit their prestigious jobs to start Otto, which aims to sell automation kits for the massive semi-trailers that crowd America's highways. The company says it has logged more than 10,000 test miles and recently tested its truck on a Nevada highway. Self-driving startups have become commonplace in the latest tech boom as many engineers have lost interest in simply building apps and robotics technology becomes cheaper.

The first is that human labor cost must exceed the cost of purchasing and using the alternative technology. In Roman Alexandria the cost of employing humans to do manual work was very low, a reflection of the fact that the supply of labor was much greater than the demand for producing goods and services. It was a lot cheaper to pay someone to do something, or indeed to buy a slave, than buying and using one of Hero's steam engines. In 18th century England labor costs were rising as more hands were needed to keep up with the global demand of goods, particularly as England, and soon to follow Europe, established trade posts and colonies around the world. Fast forward to the 21st century: for the past few decades the world economy has enjoyed low inflation and global growth thanks mostly to China, and the millions of Chinese workers who migrated from the rural areas to the urban cities and started working on factories.

Imagine a world in which you could not walk past someone on the street without them being able to identify you. This is already a reality for some people, thanks to a new website designed in Russia. 'FindFace' uses a new algorithm to identify anyone from their profile picture using only a photograph, with 70 per cent accuracy. 'FindFace' uses a new algorithm to identify anyone from their profile picture using only a photograph, with 70 per cent accuracy. The website works by comparing photographs to profile pictures on Vkontakte - a social network popular in Russia and the former Soviet Union with more than 200 million accounts.

Fujitsu Laboratories today announced the development of technology that can be easily set up and autonomously carry on a dialogue, based on AI technology, while accurately understanding a user's request and naturally eliciting the necessary information. The technology is intended primarily for customer service support. With previous technology, dialogue with computers required preparations of dialogue scenarios laying out how to respond when certain things are said, and business systems usually operated based on these scenarios. Now Fujitsu Laboratories has developed a new technology that can structurally extract the relationships between word meanings of input text to deal with the multiple meanings, ambiguity and other problems particular to Japanese language expressions, enabling a highly accurate understanding of users' speech and realizing smooth dialogue. In addition, by properly incorporating information from external databases, such as linked open data (LOD), while also using a knowledge-based dialogue creation technology that automatically learns response options for natural dialogue from records, Fujitsu Laboratories has developed technology that can autonomously conduct dialogue.

The naval base at La Spezia in northern Italy is in an advanced state of decay. The grand Mussolini-era barracks are shuttered; the weeds won their battle with the concrete some time ago. But amid the crumbling masonry, there is an incongruously neat little building, shaded behind a line of flags, with smartly outfitted security men behind its glass doors. This is Nato's Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE). As one battleship after another has been removed from what remains of the Italian navy, and the base is wound down, the centre is preparing for a new kind of marine warfare amid the wreckage of the old. In a line of workshops along the quay, technicians tinker at the innards of the next generation of naval weapons. They may look like large bright yellow torpedoes, but they are in fact underwater drones, capable of being remote controlled on the surface and taking autonomous actions in the deep.

People in India can now open an account with a bank that's only accessible via mobile devices. Called Digibank, it's staffed by chatbots intelligent enough to answer thousands of questions submitted via chat. The machine-learning-based technology is a product of Kasisto, a New York startup that spun out of the company that created Apple's Siri assistant. Kasisto trained its KAI artificial-intelligence platform with millions of questions asked by customers during their banking experiences. "A lot of the bots that are out there are what we would consider'dumb bots.' It's very easy to break them, and it's very easy to ask an out-of-context question, and they just don't know how to handle it," says Dror Oren, Kasisto vice president of product.