The African smartphone market is gaining rapid traction. According to predictions, smartphones sold this year will outnumber feature phone sales, and mobile penetration is far higher than line-based internet access. Currently, most people in Africa use text messages to send money with a service called M-Pesa from the largest tech start-up in Kenya. Now, chatbots could potentially replace text-based transactions altogether. Budapest-based Hungarian start-up UXstudio has created a chatbot called Nuru.

A healthcare revolution is being predicted after the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics (ECR) received new funding. Researchers there are using artificial intelligence to create robots that will learn from their environment, each other - and us. The ECR is a joint initiative between Heriot-Watt University and the University of Edinburgh. Its new Robotarium will open later this year thanks to £8m of support from the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). Now the EPSRC is giving almost £1m more to develop four new robots that will use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to transform healthcare and emergency response.

Individuals in Toronto looking for escorts keep finding themselves at an eSports bar thanks to a quirk in Siri's algorithm. It's unclear why the mix up is occurring but the owners of Meltdown eSports Bar in Toronto's Little Italy have been getting late night calls for escorts. Meltdown is an eSports bar, where customers eat drink and watch or play eSport video games. One of the owners, Alvin Acyapan, who gets business calls to his cell phone, told The Star that since the bar opened in November, he's been getting calls from people looking for prostitutes. Prostitution was outlawed in Canada in 2014.

HBO's Westworld features a common plot device--synthetic hosts rising up against their callous human creators. But is it more than just a plot twist? After all, smart people like Bill Gates and Steven Hawking have warned that artificial intelligence may be on a dangerous path and could threaten the survival of the human race. They're not the only ones worried. The Committee on Legal Affairs of the European Parliament recently issued a report calling on the EU to require intelligent robots to be registered, in part so their ethical character can be assessed.

My mother waited two months for her Amazon Echo to arrive. Then, she waited again -- leaving it in the box until I came to help her install it. Any device that requires vocal instructions makes my mother skeptical. She has bad memories of Siri. "She could not understand me," my mom told me.

SirionLabs, a startup providing vendor management software to enterprises, is adding a US headquarters to its footprint. The company was initially founded in India and has raised $16.95 million from Sequoia Capital India, Canopy Ventures and Qualgro VC to extract data from contracts to ensure transparency and accountability. The establishment of a US presence represents a strategic shift in the company's growth plans. Last year, SirionLabs told TechCrunch that it was looking to hire and relocate workers from Silicon Valley to India. While the startup has had offices in the UK, Germany, Denmark and Singapore, it has been slow to establish a permanent US team.

Apple hopes to eventually make smart glasses that will put computers on your face. That's according to a new report that claims the company is working on augmented reality as its next major product. It will initially come as a feature of the iPhone, the report claims, but eventually make its way onto people's faces. Apple is now on an ambitious bid to bring the technology to the people, according to the report by Bloomberg, and that effort is being led by Tim Cook. It has built a huge team combining hardware and software to create special augmented reality (AR) products. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

The launch of the Samsung Galaxy S8 is just over a week away, and alleged pricing details for the new phone have just emerged. The handset will be unveiled on 29 March and start shipping in late April and, according to figures revealed by Evan Blass, it will be a lot more affordable than the upcoming iPhone 8. In a Twitter post, the tech tipster claimed the S8 will cost €799, with the larger S8 priced at €899. These line up with previous leaks from Roland Quandt, and aren't far off the £799 and £899 figures recently quoted by MobileFun. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

Devon and Cornwall Police are set to launch the first 24-hour drone unit in the UK. It plans to assist officers with unmanned aerial vehicles equipped with cameras from this summer. They'll be used to help officers with investigations, by searching for missing people and taking photographs of crime scenes, for instance. Devon and Cornwall Police, which started trialling the system with a small number of DJI Inspire 1 drones in November 2015, will share the unit with Dorset. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

NASA's Space Robotics Challenge awarded Northeastern University with a $2-million Valkyrie Robonaut 5 (R5) robot, which is now undergoing tests in a Massachusetts warehouse to prepare for the finalist round this June in a virtual simulation of a red-planet landing. The robot arrived at Northeastern in 2015 as part of a proposal that Engineering Professor Taskin Padir sent to NASA for the Space Robotics Challenge software testing, reports Tech Crunch. "They've done all of the hardware and we're developing these high-level capabilities so Valkyrie does more than just move limbs," Northeastern PhD student, Murphy Wonsick told Tech Crunch. "She can autonomously make decisions, move around, and accomplish tasks." Researchers moved the R5 to "NERVE (New England Robotics Validation and Experimentation) Center, a large warehouse space operated by UMass Lowell that houses large obstacle courses designed to put test robots and drones through their paces," just outside of Boston.