There are companies out there working fast and furious to develop artificial intelligence in computers and what will that mean for our human society? Will developers develop themselves out of a job? Can computer artificial intelligence evoke human emotion and move people to buy products and services? If so, I am out of a job. In all seriousness, it will be interesting to see the applications and if it will be used to assist the human race, or to replace it.

Chinese internet giant Alibaba has built artificial intelligence that it hopes will be able to correctly predict the outcome of reality TV talent show I'm a Singer. According to Tech in Asia, Alibaba's technology uses performance information such as "voice pitch and energy," and maps that against factors such as song choice and real-time audience response. The results will be shown online, pitching the technology, named'Ai', against the judges as the show is aired. The experiment is being held as a "proof-of-concept" for the technology, with Alibaba suggesting that it'll be used for purposes closer to its core business of online retail in the future. It's not the only internet company to be testing new technology on reality TV shows in Asia.

Of course, some of this is because Facebook was wise enough to seed its SDK to developers months in advance. But it's also because the company laid out its groundwork for bots in Messenger as early as last year. In 2015, Facebook unveiled its Messenger for Businesses program, which would allow consumers like you and me to talk with businesses on Messenger. You could chat with Hyatt to ask for more towels in your room or with Sprint to find out why your network was slow. Of course, you'd be speaking to a customer-support agent rather than a bot, but it was a starting point. On top of that, Facebook has been working with partners like Uber, Lyft and KLM to try out an early version of a bot system where you could request a car or book a flight through Messenger.

Intel is in transition right now: An executive shakeup this month laid the path for new boss Venkata Renduchintala to put his imprint on the company's PC, Internet of Things and software operations. So no wonder the vibe at this week's Intel Developer Forum in Shenzhen was mellow. Intel kept the show a low-key affair, choosing not to bring it to the attention of a worldwide audience, unlike previous years. But IDF Shenzhen remains an important event on Intel's calendar. China is a huge market, and it's also a place where the chip maker encourages small hardware shops in the alleys of Shenzhen to experiment with PC, mobile and now, IoT ideas.

Japan's Sharp will launch in May a smartphone that's built into a humanoid robot. Or is it a humanoid robot with a built-in smartphone? The Robohon is said to be the world's first mobile robotic phone--and judging from the price and slightly unwieldy form factor could also be the last. It's 19.5 centimeters (7.7 inches) tall and weighs 390 grams (13.8 ounces), making it several times the size and weight of a conventional smartphone, and it will cost 198,000 yen, which is just over 1,800 and more than double the price of a high-end iPhone. But those shortcomings are more than made up in cuteness.

But while we've been traditionally involved in providing you with the data that you need, we are now taking it a step further by helping you analyze it as well. To this end, we'd like to officially announce the MonkeyLearn integration for Scrapy Cloud. This feature will bring machine learning technology to the data that you extract through Scrapy and Portia. MonkeyLearn is a classifier service that lets you analyze text. It provides machine learning capabilities like categorizing products or sentiment analysis to figure out if a customer review is positive or negative.

A United Nations meeting this week in Geneva is debating the future of autonomous weapons--the controversial weapons systems capable of selecting and engaging targets without human intervention. Delegates from about 90 countries are discussing the far-reaching technical, legal, and ethical questions that these robotic weapons raise, and at the end of the week-long meeting they hope to agree on what to do next. For a group of arms control activists that has long been concerned about autonomous weapons, the next step countries should take is clear: they should ban these weapons. That's the goal of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a coalition of non-governmental organizations that was formed in late 2012 and whose steering committee includes groups like Human Rights Watch and the International Committee for Robot Arms Control. On Monday Human Rights Watch released a memorandum to the delegates in Geneva calling for countries to "adopt an international, legally binding instrument that prohibits the development, production, and use of fully autonomous weapons."

Japan's Sharp will launch in May a smartphone that's built into a humanoid robot. Or is it a humanoid robot with a built-in smartphone? The Robohon is said to be the world's first mobile robotic phone -- and judging from the price and slightly unwieldy form factor could also be the last. It's 19.5 centimeters (7.7 inches) tall and weighs 390 grams (13.8 ounces), making it several times the size and weight of a conventional smartphone, and it will cost 198,000 yen, which is just over US 1,800 and more than double the price of a high-end iPhone. But those shortcomings are more than made up in cuteness.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is expanding into cloud services to help companies build data-rich mobile and enterprise applications and analyze data such as photos, audio clips and comments on social media. Haven OnDemand, which runs on computers operated by Microsoft's Azure cloud-computing, gives users access to sophisticated techniques such as machine learning without the need to maintain a data center or develop the underlying technology. HPE first pioneered this effort in December 2014 with the beta launch of HPE Haven OnDemand. Today, HPE Haven OnDemand has more than 12,750 registered developers who currently generate millions of API calls per week, and have provided feedback to improve and refine the offering. "The software industry is on the cusp of a new era of breakthroughs, driven by machine learning that will power data-driven applications across all facets of life," said Kamal Dutta, Managing Director - Software, Asia Growth Countries, Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Extreme developments in the field of artificial intelligence have become an integral part of the technology industry. AI has helped the world reach a point where continuous improvements have resulted in making life easier for humans. "A chatbot is an artificially intelligent software program that uses natural language processing to simulate intelligent conversation with end users via auditory or textual methods".Chat Bots date as far back as 1960's and this was the time when the computer world idealized such machines which could be used to impersonate humans in real-time, sufficiently well that the reviewer was unable to distinguish, whether the conversation was between real humans themselves or between the program and a real human. Joseph Weizenbaum's, a professor at MIT developed a program named ELIZA, published in 1966. ELIZA operated in a unique way, as it focused on the recognition of cue words or phrases in the input.