Google has reached a milestone in its DeepMind artificial intelligence (A.I.) project with the successful development of technology that can mimic the sound of human voice. Dubbed as WaveNet, the breakthrough was described as a deep neural network that can generate raw audio wave forms to generate speech. It can reportedly beat existing Text-to-Speech systems. According to researchers in the Britain-based WaveNet unit, the gap in human performance, which could be demonstrated in an actual A.I. -- human conversation -- is reduced by as much as 50 percent. What is also interesting about the WaveNet technology is that it is capable of learning different voices and speech patterns to the point that it can even simulate mouth movements and artificial breaths in addition to emotions, language inflections and accents.

Artificial intelligence (or AI) has permeated most facets of our lives. Algorithms suggest our social media mates. But could the arrival of the robots be applied to education? Jozef Misik, managing director of Knowble, a language tech start-up whose products are built on AI, believes so: "Most educational technology products will have an AI or deep learning component in future," he says. Already, AI is able to address common learning challenges.

Blockchain technology brings security structures and incentives in line with the way we share information in the 21st century. Lloyd's of London knows a thing or two about business losses--for three centuries, the world's oldest insurance market has been paying out damages triggered by wars, natural disasters, and countless acts of human error and fraud. So, it's worth paying attention when Lloyds estimates that cybercrime caused businesses to lose 400 billion between stolen funds and disruption to their operations in 2015. If that number seems weighty--and it ought to--try this one for size: 2.1 trillion. That's Juniper Research's total cybercrime loss forecast for the even more digitally interconnected world projected for 2019. To put that figure in perspective, at current economic growth rates, it would represent more than 2% of total world GDP.

According to certain experts, by the year 2050, sex robot tourism, marriage, and prostitution will be commonplace. Robotics expert John Snell of Iowa's Kirkwood College suggests that sex robots, which are robots with which one can presumably have intercourse, will be better in the sack than humans. "'Because they would be programmable," Snell explained to Metro UK, "sexbots would meet each individual user's needs." Concerned about the human condition, Snell notes a possible downside, saying, "Robotic sex may become addictive. Sexbots would always be available and could never say no, so addictions would be easy to feed." The University of Victoria Management School's Ian Yeoman and Michelle Mars wrote a paper entitled, "Robots, Men, and Sex Tourism" which suggested that sex robots would be used as high-end prostitutes by the year 2050.

Dmitry Malioutov can't say much about what he built. As a research scientist at IBM, Malioutov spends part of his time building machine learning systems that solve difficult problems faced by IBM's corporate clients. One such program was meant for a large insurance corporation. It was a challenging assignment, requiring a sophisticated algorithm. When it came time to describe the results to his client, though, there was a wrinkle. "We couldn't explain the model to them because they didn't have the training in machine learning." In fact, it may not have helped even if they were machine learning experts. That's because the model was an artificial neural network, a program that takes in a given type of data--in this case, the insurance company's customer records--and finds patterns in them. These networks have been in practical use for over half a century, but lately they've seen a resurgence, powering breakthroughs in everything from speech recognition and language translation to Go-playing robots and self-driving cars.

Mad Street Den, an India-US based artificial intelligence startup plans to scale up its fashion retail vertical Vue.ai after recently raising Series A funding from Sequoia India, Exfinity Ventures & growX Ventures. "For the next 12-18 months, we plan to scale Vue.ai both in terms of product offerings and new markets" Ashwini Asokan, co-founder & CEO of Mad Street Den told ETtech "Now that we've gone global and established a product market fit, it's really about scaling that global presence". Vue.ai, Mad Street Den's first vertical, offers AI-based products to help retailers improve brand loyalty and stickiness, at a time when there are fighting with product differentiation and customers jumping around different sites based on discounts. It currently offers around 14-15 products spanning across the entire consumer lifecycle on a website or an app including visual recommendations, visual search and homepage personalizations among others. "We work with brands where we are pushing as much as 40% of GMV through our visual recommendations platform" said Ashokan.

In 2014 Google bought a UK-based artificial intelligence research lab called DeepMind for a hefty 530 million. Since then, DeepMind has made rapid progress in AI technologies, including health and gaming applications. The latest achievement of DeepMind is WaveNet, an AI computer program that can almost mimic the way humans speak. Experts say that WaveNet has "halved" the gap between machine-speak and a natural human voice. So what we're talking about here is more like Jarvis from Iron Man than Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator – or any of his other movies, for that matter!

A study has found that during sleep, the experiences you care about are more likely to enter your long-term memory. Eighty non-Welsh speaking participants were taught Welsh words before either a period of wake or sleep. Those who slept showed an increased ability to learn the words, and the effect was greatest in those who placed personal value on the language. This suggests that memories perceived as important undergo preferential treatment by the brain during sleep. While it has long been established that sleep helps the consolidation of memories, this is the first study to show that the effect is influenced by how much you care about the memory.

For millennia, our species has understood that what helps separate us from the animal kingdom is our ability to articulate abstract phenomena, like a fear of death in the absence of an immediate cause for alarm. But is our intelligence reducible to our biology? In the computer age, this question has assumed greater urgency since people such as Stephen Hawking have warned that unscrupulous research into artificial intelligence could pose a threat towards the human race. The idea of an untamed A.I. has energized the popular imagination for some time. In film, there are archetypes like HAL 9000 from "2001: A Space Odyssey" and the eponymous Terminator.