Every major technology company is obsessed with voice control right now. From Amazon's Alexa speakers to Google's new Pixel phones -- almost everything has an assistant which you can strike a conversation with. Not wanting to be left out, Microsoft is still hard at work on Cortana for Windows 10 and various mobile operating systems. Today, the company has announced a "fresh" and "simplified look" for the iOS and Android apps which lean heavily on the color purple. The apps are faster than before, and a new Quick Actions section puts your most common requests front and center, such as reminders, meetings and weather summaries.

MIT's computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory has developed technology to "predict the future." When shown videos of various situations (such as people about to kiss or shake hands) their custom computer can correctly predict what happens next about 20 percent of the time. The computer then generates an (as of yet imperfect) visual representation of what it expects to happen. Among the potential applications of this technology are better safety systems for cars. RT's Lindsay France has the story.

OpenAI, the billion-dollar San Francisco artificial intelligence lab backed by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, just unveiled a new virtual world. It's called Universe, and it's a virtual world like no other. It's a place where AI can learn to do just about anything. Other AI labs have built similar worlds where AI agents can learn on their own. Researchers at the University of Alberta offer the Atari Learning Environment, where agents can learn to play old Atari games like Breakout and Space Invaders. Microsoft offers Malmo, based on the game Minecraft.

On the day that I was born--winter solstice, 1959--a headline in Life magazine proclaimed "Target Venus: There May be Life There!" It told of how scientists rode a balloon to an altitude of 80,000 feet to make telescope observations of Venus's atmosphere, and how their discovery of water raised hopes that there could be living things there. As a kid I thrilled to tales of undersea adventure with telepathic Venusian frogs in Isaac Asimov's juvenile science-fiction novel Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus. In 1975, when I was 15, a family friend--a planetary scientist--gave me a picture of the first-ever photograph taken from the surface of another planet: Venus. The Soviet Venera 9 probe had sent back a black-and-white image of a landscape with angular rocks and fine-grained dirt.

Granville V., Rasson J.P. Multivariate discriminate analysis and maximum penalized likelihood.... Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, 57 (1995), 501-517.

The next iPhone is going to be red, according to at least one rumour. Apple will release an iPhone 7s and 7s Plus towards the end of next year, sporting the new colour, according to a report from MacOtakara. Other than the big change to the colour, the phone will keep the same aluminium design and look almost the same as the iPhone 7, the blog reported citing a Taiwanese supplier. That means that it will look almost identical with the iPhone 6 and 6s, too – with the exception of the headphone jack – meaning that Apple would have been using the same basic design for four generations of iPhone. In its facilities, JAXA develop satellites and analyse their observation data, train astronauts for utilization in the Japanese Experiment Module'Kibo' of the International Space Station (ISS) and develop launch vehicles 32/39 The robot developed by Seed Solutions sings and dances to the music during the Japan Robot Week 2016 at Tokyo Big Sight.

You are on a two week long business trip across multiple locations. Its been 5 days and you are wondering how much you current trip has cost you yet. You tap on your banks app on your phone and type in - 'What's my spend in New York last week?' A bot answers back'a total of $343.54' The bot promptly marks it to your expense list to submit to your company and sends you an email report of the same.

Artificial intelligence is already transforming a range of industries but it has still to make an impact on healthcare. Scans are still largely studied by humans. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are predicted to be part of the next industrial revolution and could help business and industry save billions of dollars by the next decade. The tech giants Google, Facebook, Apple, IBM and others are applying artificial intelligence to all sorts of data. Machine learning methods are being used in areas such as translating language almost in real time, and even to identify images of cats on the internet.

To get your morning started right, take a look at the latest stories published since yestereday. Artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities are beginning to make an impact within radiology, as vendors start rolling out initiatives to assist professionals in making diagnoses. Tagged In Artificial Intelligence Cloud Computing IBM Dementia Data Center Cancer Machine Learning Philips University Of Chicago Cleveland Electronic Health Record Radiology Neuroradiology Health Informatics Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Multiple Sclerosis Subarachnoid Hemorrhage Artificial intelligence and machine learning technology hold a lot of disruptive potential for the enterprise. Tagged In Virtual Reality Smartphone San Francisco USS Enterprise (NCC 1701 D) Business To Business Computer Security Artificial Intelligence Cloud Computing Big Data Supply Chain Mobile Network Operator Machine Learning Natural Language Processing Test (assessment) Artificial General Intelligence Data Mining Unstructured Data Expert System Turing Test Instant Messaging Software Ford Fiesta Unsupervised Learning Ontology (information Science) Vertical Market Expo Hall SAN FRANCISCO – Forget the Terminator. The next robot on the horizon may be wearing a lab coat.

Delegates at an event hosted by Accenture last month in the Conrad Hotel in lower Manhattan were welcomed and registered by a smiling Amelia. But Amelia does not work only in events. She is a hologram -- a cognitive agent who can take on a wide variety of service desk roles, emulating human intelligence and capable of natural interaction with people. The age of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) has been predicted for decades -- and it may finally be arriving, thanks to the explosion in data, the fuel that powers the AI machines. Consulting firms are not only implementing automation and AI for clients but also using it to transform their own back-office functions and operations.