The headline story here is that for the first time a system has been developed that exceeds human performance in one of the most difficult of all human speech recognition tasks: natural conversations held over the telephone. This is known as conversational telephone speech, or CTS. The reference datasets for this task are the Switchboard and Fisher data collections from the 1990s and early 2000s. The apocryphal story here is that human performance on the task is about 4% error rate. But no-one can quite pin down where that 4% number comes from.

StartupSource's Liam Tracey-Raymont recently spoke with Andrew Arruda, CEO and co-founder of ROSS Intelligence Inc. ("ROSS"), to discuss ROSS's growth and to shed some light on the developmental timeline and hurdles associated with launching a tech startup. ROSS, initially developed in Canada and founded by University of Toronto ("U of T") students, is a cloud-based software program that assists users in answering legal questions efficiently and without relying on complicated boolean queries and keywords. While ROSS is still a relatively new product, it has quickly attracted significant media attention and immense interest from U.S. clients, which are predominantly law firms. Liam caught up with the ROSS CEO after Andrew returned to his new home in San Francisco, California, following a week on the road. Andrew, it's been a while. What have you been up to recently?

Human minds are only one example of mind on earth. So what are those other minds really like? It is often talked about as the ultimate prize of artificial intelligence: a machine that can think like a human. But human minds are only one example of the kinds of minds on earth. So what are those other minds like? How do they work and how can we understand them?

Companies like Google, IBM and SAP are making massive investments in artificial intelligence. German software maker SAP is investing heavily in artificial intelligence, or AI, especially for business software. AI is expected to fundamentally change our lives in the near future. Cars that navigate autonomously through traffic. Digital assistants that provide doctors with key information needed to make a diagnosis.

In September, Apple quietly acquired Tuplejump, a little-known Hyderabad-based startup. Tuplejump is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) company that helps clients store, process and visualise data. In simple terms, it helps, say, an e-commerce player to use all the data it collects to improve conversion rates--the number of people who end up buying something out of the total number of visitors. This was Apple's first acquisition in India and the third one this year of an AI company. India-based AI startups are hardly visible and don't command eyepopping valuations that e-commerce companies do.

Plans are afoot to build the U.K.'s first National College of Cyber Security at Bletchley Park, the birthplace of the country's wartime codebreaking efforts. It was at Bletchley Park that Colossus, the world's first electronic computer, was built during World War II to crack the Lorenz code used by the German high command. Bletchley is also where Alan Turing developed some of his mathematical theories of computing while working on breaking the enigma code. After the war the site fell into disrepair, but parts of it have been restored and now house the U.K.'s National Museum of Computing. Other buildings at Bletchley Park, though, are still vacant and it is in one of those that Qufaro, a company founded only last year, hopes to set up a cyber security school.

It has been clear for some time that the internet majors are battling for dominance in AI and machine learning. Unusually, it is an area that is of key strategic importance to both consumer and enterprise players. So it is not just Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon but also IBM, SAP and Salesforce that are building teams in this space. It is also a global phenomenon with Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, Softbank and Rakuten investing in the area. This has profound implications for early stage AI businesses.

TechCrunch Disrupt in London is on December 5-6. As well as speakers and panels, we'll be featuring some demos by some amazing tech companies. The first will be by Boston Dynamics. Yes, folks, delegates to Disrupt London will get to see one of those amazing BD robots up close and personal, almost literally in the flesh (if they had any flesh, that is). Marc Raibert, CTO and Founder of Boston Dynamics will be demonstrating one of the amazing robots his team has created, but you'll have to come to find out which one… Raibert was Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and a member of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1986 through 1995.

As is tradition, this year's Black Friday deals are starting to roll in, with numerous games consoles going on sale across the internet. With the new Playstation Pro console now on general sale, prices of the standard models has decreased significantly. Over this weekend, the best prices for a standard Playstation 4 and Xbox One consoles are currently around the £250 with extra games, sometimes below that. Here are the best deals for all PS4 and Xbox models. Due to the new console being just that - new - there are barely any reductions.

Google's artificial intelligence (AI) has created its first own language through the use of machine learning, allowing it to improve how it translates languages. The search giant fired up its Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) back in September to aid the development of the Google Translate service. Google found that be training the system to learn to say translate English to French and French to Italian it could create a means for the system to translate English to Italian even if it has not studied the language before. The system works by analysing whole sentences of language rather than individual words then inferring similarities between them and other sentences in different languages to seek out common patterns in the languages. By doing this the system can translate a language into another even if it has not seen a translation between the languages before.