Bots will one day sweet-talk their way into our good graces, but that day is not today. Judging from recent debacles such as Microsoft's Tay and the fembots of Ashley Madison, AI-assisted chatbots still have a long way to go before gaining genuine and socially acceptable conversational skills. Just visit YouTube and you'll realize that giving bots an eerily human-like appearance is much easier than granting them the gift of gab. That means you'll have to wait just a bit longer before a real-life version of either Jarvis (The Avengers) or Samantha (Hers) will arrive to stir your intellect or your emotions. Nonetheless, chatbots have certainly made huge strides since they were first used decades ago.

Father Gabriele Amorth, a prominent Roman Catholic exorcist, has died after a long illness, an Italian care facility said Saturday. Santa Lucia Foundation, a Rome rehabilitation center, said Saturday that Amorth died a day earlier in another Rome hospital, where he was recently transferred after his health worsened. Foundation officials said he had suffered from various respiratory and circulatory problems. Exorcism in the Catholic Church received more attention after Pope John Paul II repeatedly sought to convince skeptics the devil was very much active in the world. During his papacy, the Vatican issued guidelines for driving out devils and stressed the power of evil.

Only a few decades ago, the concept of virtual offices was more like science fiction than a potential future scenario. However, more and more organisations are jumping on the remote working and virtual office bandwagon. In the near future, we won't need a conference room anymore. For important meetings we will just sit down – or stand – with our tablet and VR headset and wait for the others to join the virtual conference room. Across the table from you is your co-worker John, who is working from his home office in Zurich today.

The sanctuary formerly known as Orange County's Crystal Cathedral is on the brink of undergoing its makeover into the Christ Cathedral as part of its transformation into a Catholic church. And you can strap on virtual reality goggles to see its future. Officials from the Diocese of Orange, the nation's 12th largest, gathered earlier this week to preview the changes, which they plan to unveil for the public at Sunday's celebration of the diocese's 40th anniversary, an event expected to draw nearly 10,000 of the Catholic faithful. The diocese bought the famed building in 2011. During the preview, people can take a virtual tour and see a sanctuary splashed in white, highlighting an altar, the bishop's chair and baptismal font.

I recently watched a movie called'Her' starring Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson. Set in the future the beautiful, strange and emotional story of a letter writer, Theodore Twombly (Phoenix) who, after separating from his girlfriend, downloads an intelligent computer operating system (OS) personified through a female voice, 'Samantha' played by Johansson. Director Spike Jonze conceived the idea of the film after reading about Cleverbot, a web application that uses an artificial intelligence algorithm to have conversations with humans. Twombly had quite simply created his'perfect' woman. He had answered a few questions; What gender was he?

At our recent bots, ai & messaging meetup we talked through our thoughts on simplifying the bot strategy and design process -- from objectives to conversation trees and beyond. Here is a roundup of our latest thoughts on designing and building effective messaging applications, bots and more. The first step in the bot planning process is deciding what the bot will do for the bot's creator, and what it will do for the bot's users. There's no point in in making something no-one will want to use, and no point in making something that does nothing for your business. So define both sets of objectives clearly and look for how these could overlap within a messaging application.

Chrissie Lightfoot takes a detailed look at how AI is used by law firms and what is on the horizon. As a futurist, an entrepreneur, and a lawyer, I always get asked, 'What do you think is the next big thing in the legal world?' I always begin my response with a catch-all reply: 'The next big thing is anything that helps you attract and keep a client. No client equals no business. A bit of a cliché, I know.

New York City-based Datorama, a marketing analytics provider, closed on a 32 million round of Series C funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. It plans to invest the funds in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to support its machine-learning capabilities. Datorama has raised 50 million since it was founded in 2012. Before founding the company, Sarig spent nearly three years in at MediaMind (now Sizmek), most recently as vice president of research and development. He also worked for Swets Information Services and Pointech Information Systems and spent six years as an officer in the Israeli Navy.

We were inspired this week by author Tom Chatfield's article in the Guardian on how Technology is killing the myth of human centrality, where he described robots as: "Tireless, infinitely patient, endlessly consistent -- our creations measure up in ways we can only dream of." That accurately defines how we believe the role technology -- and more specifically Artificial Intelligence -- plays in our lives. If we can embrace our own shortcomings as humans and build the tools that fill that gap, we will only become stronger and more efficient. How does that apply to mortgages? Well, we've built the first artificially intelligent digital mortgage adviser to provide free, unbiased advice so our experts can spend more of their time helping customers.

Manuel Le Gallo's research will inspire a new generation of extremely dense neuromorphic computing systems. Inspired by the way the human brain functions, a team of scientists at IBM Research in Zurich, have imitated the way neurons spike, for example when we touch a hot plate. These so-called artificial neurons can be used to detect patterns and discover correlations in Big Data with power budgets and at densities comparable to those seen in biology, something which scientists strived to accomplish for decades. They can also learn, unsupervised at high speeds using very little energy. The paper entitled "Stochastic phase-change neurons," which appeared today on the cover of Nature Nanotechnology, outlines the research and its findings.