USA TODAY tech reporter Mike Snider looks into Microsoft's $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn and how it might help the company. A user demonstrates the look and feel of Windows 10 operating system for smartphones and at the Microsoft stall at the CeBIT technology fair in Hanover, Germany. SAN FRANCISCO -- Microsoft has made yet another acquisition designed to retool the former software king into an enterprise solutions leader. The Redmond, Wash-based company announced Monday that it was buying virtual-assistant start-up Genee for an undisclosed sum, according to blog posts by Microsoft and Genee executives. The move comes on the heels of Microsoft's $26 billion purchase of professional networking site LinkedIn, a bold chess move by CEO Satya Nadella as he aims to make his company's cloud-based Office 365 platform ubiquitous in the business environment.

LONDON, ENGLAND - AUGUST 03: The Apple logo is displayed on the back of an iPhone on August 3, 2016 in London, England. Apple is continuing to make inroads into artificial intelligence. The Cupertino, Calif.-based tech behemoth bought Turi, a machine learning platform, for $200 million, according to sources at GeekWire. Apple would not confirm the move to USA TODAY, but said the company buys smaller technology companies "from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans." The Cupertino-based tech behomouth appears to be coming to terms with slumping demand for the iPhone by expanding into other markets, including artificial intelligence.

Developers gathered at the Microsoft BUILD developers conference in San Francisco to hear about the latest and greatest from Microsoft. Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, speaks at the keynote ceremony of the Microsoft Build Developers conference. SAN FRANCISCO – Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella kicked off the company's Build developers conference with a vision of the future filled with chatbots, machine learning and artificial intelligence. "Bots are the new apps," said Nadella during a nearly three-hour keynote here that sketched a vision for the way humans will interact with machines. That's the world you're going to get to see in the years to come."

SAN FRANCISCO - Amazon is working on a portable version of the Echo, its surprisingly successful voice-activated tabletop device released earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal reports. The Seattle e-commerce company plans to release a beer can sized version of Echo "in the coming weeks," the paper said. The new carry-along device will be priced lower than Echo's $180 and will require charging like a phone. It is code named "Fox," the Journal reported. A lower price "is always a good thing for greater adoption. Echo v.1 has received rave reviews from consumers and reviewers. I think they'll only benefit getting it in more hands," said Sucharita Mulpuru, a senior Amazon analyst with Forrester.

In this handout image provided by Google, South Korean professional Go player Lee Se-Dol puts his first stone against Google's artificial intelligence program, AlphaGo, during the third Google DeepMind Challenge Match on March 12, 2016 in Seoul, South Korea. SAN FRANCISCO -- IBM's Watson computer now has company at beating humans in very complicated games. Google's artificial intelligence machine, called DeepMind, this week defeated a human champion three straight times at the ancient board game of Go. The feat has been viewed widely as a huge breakthrough in artificial intelligence, one that intensifies the high-stakes race among tech giants to develop ever-smarter machines. "DeepMind is doing what appears to be thinking -- that's what has everybody jazzed," says Jonathan Crane, chief commercial officer of IPsoft, a startup that makes an AI-based customer-service product.

BARCELONA -- Ford's Motor's CEO stressed privacy and security when asked to weigh in on whether Apple should hack into a killer's iPhone, aligning with concerns big tech companies have raised on the issue. CEO Mark Fields' stance is fitting since one of the key issues driving his appearance at Mobile World Congress this week is Ford's continuing goal of being viewed as both automotive company and a tech-driven mobility company. "We're watching the (Apple) situation closely," Fields said during an interview with USA TODAY. "Our view as a company is we take the security and privacy of our customer data when they share it with us very carefully. We want to be trusting stewards for that data and we're committed to protecting it."

In Palo Alto on Oct. 14, 2015, USA TODAY's Marco della Cava tested out the new autopilot feature of Tesla's Model S. The updated software enables the car to change lanes by itself. A German robotics professor with the University of Nevada-Reno just completed a 1,500-mile autonomous car drive across Mexico. SAN FRANCISCO -- A University of Nevada-Reno researcher said he recently completed a 1,500-mile road trip across Mexico behind the wheel of his autonomous car, an impressive milestone in the pursuit of fully automated vehicles that can find their way in a variety of conditions. Raul Rojas, a robotics expert with the university, drove from the U.S. border at Nogales to Mexico City, using an onboard computer processing data from seven laser scanners, nine video cameras, seven radars and a precision GPS unit. The drive was done in Rojas' modified 2010 Volkswagen Passat Variant, dubbed Autonomos, whose steering, speed and braking systems are controllable by the computer.

Mike Rhodin is senior vice president of IBM Watson. DETROIT -- IBM Watson initially won fame as the artificially intelligent computer system that won $1 million for whipping former Jeopardy! Since then, under the leadership of 1984 University of Michigan graduate Mike Rhodin, Watson has morphed into a muscular big business with lots of tentacles and more than 2,000 employees. Earlier this month in Ann Arbor, I interviewed Rhodin, the New York-based senior vice president of IBM Watson who was in town to speak with two groups of University of Michigan business students and budding entrepreneurs. Rhodin smiled when I asked the sci-fi question he hears often: When will machines turn on humans and take over the world?

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon could be able to listen in on voice communications in difficult environments and then quickly translate and transcribe them for use by intelligence analysts and combat troops by 2017, according to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Newly released DARPA documents show it is continuing the next two stages of its Robust Automatic Transcription of Speech program, which is aimed at separating speech from background noise, determining which language is being spoken and then isolating key words from that speech for analysis. The Air Force, DARPA says, is testing the third phase of the program in the field now, while "the research division of a government agency will be testing the speech activity detection algorithm to incorporate into their platform." References to "a government agency" usually refer to a part of the intelligence community, such as the CIA or National Security Agency. So far, DARPA has spent $13 million on RATS.

Today's computer processors and displays will also support tele-immersive environments. Handling and transporting all that time-sensitive data, however, is still a stretch for ordinary desktop operating systems and the Internet. Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of California at Berkeley have developed software, dubbed Tele-immersive Environments for EVErybody (TEEVE), that aims to bridge this gap. The system captures and coordinates video streams from three or more sets of four cameras, each of which generates a stream of three-dimensional video data. The system generates macro video frames made up of the frames from all of the cameras at one time interval, and sends them over a network in a way that evenly distributes the data so that it does not overload the network.