And now Microsoft has a pool of valuable data -- based on personal and professional information -- that Google, despite its expensive past efforts, does not. Google will have to answer -- particularly since one product Microsoft said LinkedIn will assist with is Cortana, its artificial intelligence-powered personal assistant. AI is a linchpin feature that Google is using with its enterprise software sales pitch. Google's AI is widely considered best in the industry; but with LinkedIn's data, Microsoft could have a critical edge in its offering that trumps Google. If it wants to catch up, Google's not short on the cash.

One of China's most popular smartphone assistants, HTC's Hidi, has ambitions to serve as the voice and personality of countless home robots. The company behind Hidi, Turing Robot, supplies voice recognition and natural-language processing technology for a growing array of hardware, including car systems developed by Bosch and home appliances from Haier. Now the company has developed an operating system for service robots. So far, Turing Robot provides the voice--and brains--for several popular Chinese home entertainment robots. Supplying the intelligence for home robots could be a shrewd move.

Can artificial intelligence help visually impaired people recognize objects around them and improve their quality of life? EyeSense, an iPad app developed in Egypt, has the ability to "learn" objects in its environment, having been trained by its users. A visually impaired person can point their device in the direction of where they think something might be--say, a coffee cup--and a voice will say that the app recognizes that object. "The key strength of the app is that it also recognizes basic facial expressions, like winks or smiles. This enhances human interaction," says Joanna Marczak, a spokesperson for its developer, ID Labs.

NEW DELHI – Scientists from Britain and India will release underwater robots into the Bay of Bengal in a bid to more accurately predict India's monsoon, an event critical to millions of farmers, they said Tuesday. Researchers will also fly a plane packed with scientific equipment over the bay to measure the atmosphere as part of the multimillion-dollar study of the monsoon, which hit southern India last week. Better forecasting will improve the livelihoods of India's more than 200 million farmers and agricultural laborers, who are reeling from a devastating drought. Scientists from the University of East Anglia will release seven underwater robots from an Indian ship next week to study how ocean processes influence monsoon rainfall. At the same time, colleagues from the University of Reading and climate experts in India will use instruments on board the plane flying from the southern city of Bangalore to measure heat and moisture in the air.

The concluding instalment in From Software's acclaimed action role-playing series provides all the impassable enemies, labyrinthine locations and gothic cruelty we expect from director Hidetaka Miyazaki. What we said: The Dark Souls series is beloved of designers, who see its singular, idiosyncratic approach, and seemingly uncompromised vision as an example of everything they hope to achieve. Chris Bourassa and Tyler Sigman's unrelentingly doom-laden exploration game follows a group of treasure hunters as they wander monster-infested tunnels, going slowly mad in the process. What we said: Darkest Dungeon is something fresh in one of gaming's most overdone genres, and the stress system is a winner – a particular delight being how a long-lived character will accumulate various mental scars. Gambling against death is at the heart of the game, because every time something glitters, the truly crazy decision would be to walk away. Returning to the glory days of the famed Colin McRae Rally series, Codemasters provides a thrilling and highly authentic off-road driving sim, jammed with exciting vehicles and snaking international circuits.

In the early 1970s, at Silicon Valley's Xerox PARC, Alan Kay envisioned computer software as something akin to a biological system, a vast collection of small cells that could communicate via simple messages. Each cell would perform its own discrete task. But in communicating with the rest, it would form a more complex whole. "This is an almost foolproof way of operating," Kay once told me. Computer programmers could build something large by focusing on something small.

At the 2016 E3 conference, USA TODAY's Brett Molina speaks to CEO of Insomniac Games, Ted Price, about a new Spiderman game unvielded for the Playstation 4. Shawn Layden, President of Sony Interactive Entertainment America and Chairman of SIE Worldwide Studios, speaks on stage during the PlayStation E3 2016 Press Conference at The Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, California. The doors to the Electronic Entertainment Expo haven't even opened yet, but the video game industry has already dazzled video game players. Sunday and Monday delivered press events from Microsoft, Sony and other video game publishers offering a peek into the future of the video game industry. Here are 10 announcements -- in no particular order -- that generated the most buzz during E3 2016. It's more than a year away from making its debut, but Project Scorpio certainly carries a lot of potential.

Shares of Apple (AAPL) today closed down 1.49, or 1.5%, at 97.34, following the company's developer conference in San Francisco earlier today, and the Street is just now catching up with some research views on the matter. Highlights of the presentations included new features for the company's Apple Watch smartwatch, such as handwriting recognition; enhancements to the iOS software of the iPhone and iPad to allow for integration of third-party apps; and several "machine learning" functions, such as an ability to automatically have an iPhone perform image recognition tasks on one's photos collection. There were no new hardware announcements, despite some users pining for updates to the MacBook Pro laptop line. Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster reiterates an Overweight rating, and a 153 price target, writing that "the event was largely incremental and a warm-up for new products in the fall." "The two biggest announcements were opening up Siri and Messaging to iOS developers and adding Apple Pay to the browser (Mac and iOS)," he believes.

Artificial intelligence tools like deep learning have come on in leaps and bounds in recent years, powered by two main resources: cheap processing power, delivered by the cloud; and stacks and stacks of user data. For a company like Apple -- which has banged the drum of user privacy like no other -- this presents a problem. How does it deliver deep learning smarts without constantly sending your data to the cloud? And how does it get that data in the first place? At this year's WWDC, the company promised that it can square the circle.

The seasonal monsoon, which hits the region between June and September, delivers some 70 percent of India's surface water. Its arrival is eagerly awaited by hundreds of millions of subsistence farmers across the country, and delays can ruin crops or exacerbate drought.