People in India can now open an account with a bank that's only accessible via mobile devices. Called Digibank, it's staffed by chatbots intelligent enough to answer thousands of questions submitted via chat. The machine-learning-based technology is a product of Kasisto, a New York startup that spun out of the company that created Apple's Siri assistant. Kasisto trained its KAI artificial-intelligence platform with millions of questions asked by customers during their banking experiences. "A lot of the bots that are out there are what we would consider'dumb bots.' It's very easy to break them, and it's very easy to ask an out-of-context question, and they just don't know how to handle it," says Dror Oren, Kasisto vice president of product.

For all the buzz over conversational bots these days, they're still pretty crude, as some users of Facebook Messenger's new chatbots recently discovered. It's not necessarily that they're dumb, but they do need to be trained to respond intelligently in the specific situations in which they're employed. Today MindMeld Inc., one of the pioneers behind conversational artificial intelligence technology, will roll out a version of its bot platform specifically for retailers and e-commerce companies. MindMeld for Commerce is intended to help customers find products, do messaging-based transactions, check on order status and get support without requiring another human to get involved. Tuttle contends that MindMeld's bots can converse, either in text or by voice, better not only than other bots but also virtual assistants such as Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa and Microsoft's Cortana.

Jifiti, the startup attempting to reinvent digital gift-giving, announced this morning that their new chatbot API was approved by Facebook Messenger. It's a big deal for the Columbus, OH startup, who already has relationships with many companies ranging from IKEA to Evite. This new avenue could give Jifiti access to brands lining up to be available in Facebook's ecosystem since chatbot intentions were announced at F8 last month. It's planned to be used for e-commerce, support, personal assistance and other tasks. Jifiti, who we've been covering since their "product teleportation" launch in 2013 (which I always thought was a neat marketing play), through their pivot to white label gift registry in 2014 are now able to integrate their gift-giving process directly with Facebook Messenger chatbots (or any chatbot actually) via this API.

Trump plays the role of Mike Tyson in Punch Out!! Courtesy of Jeff Hong Trump is trapped in the NES classic Donkey Kong Jr. Courtesy of Jeff Hong Little Mac goes head-to-head against Donald Trump in Punch Out!! In the original game, Mike Tyson is "The Dream Fight." Humble plumber Mario is replaced by Bernie Sanders in Super Mario Bros. Courtesy of Jeff Hong The final battle between Mario and Bowser in Super Mario Bros. is replaced by Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. The main characters have been switched from white to black. Bomberman's helmet is colored in to resemble the ISIS uniform.

Autonomous cars are difficult because of the various technical and regulatory hurdles that hamper testing. Otto is hoping to slim down the problem by focusing the self-driving tech on highways, leaving a human operator to handle the difficult stuff like the back roads. As soon as the driver hits the freeway, they can engage the autopilot and spend the next half hour working on their version of the great American novel. Otto's founders have enough experience in navigation technology to make rivals like Google, Tesla and Uber slightly nervous. The aforementioned Levandowski started out at 510 Systems building self-driving cars before Google purchased it in 2011.

Google is about to hold its biggest show of the year. And we've got a pretty good idea of what's going to happen. The company holds its I/O conference every summer to show off the biggest updates to developers and let them get their hands on its newest products. And this year that's going to be the technology that will power your house, take over your wallet and create the reality that you live in – as well as the now relatively small matter of powering your phone. Google I/O runs from 18 May to 20 May.

Welcome to the Silicon Valley Robotics Influencer series, hosted at HAX and curated by Cory Kidd of Catalia Health, Tim Smith of Element Public Relations and Andra Keay of Silicon Valley Robotics.

It's a familiar adage but people still tend to highlight their successes and sweep their failures under the rug, as a professor at Princeton University pointed out last week when he published his "CV of Failures" (pdf), which has since gone viral. Now, in a study published this week in Nature, a team of researchers at Haverford College in Pennsylvania have taken this idea to the next level--by applying it to the scientific community. Even though most experiments fail, it is only the successes that are reported in scientific literature and discussed among experts. The vast majority of the data is discarded, left to collect dust in forgotten laboratory notebooks or never written down at all, making it effectively unavailable for use in further research. "Scientific literature is biased against failure," says experimental chemist Alexander Norquist, one of the study's lead authors.

"Machine learning" will pave the way to delivering better experiences including "how quickly we can put apps on the X1 platform," Comcast EVP and chief technology officer Tony Werner explained here in an introductory overview at the Imagine Park opening session on Monday. He envisioned "a ton of very cool apps," comparing the ability of DOCSIS 3.1 to replace "a backhoe or forklift" in implementing new services for cable operators. "I love Full Duplex," Werner enthused about a symmetrical multi-gigabit project underway at CableLabs and being demoed here by Nokia, before he scooted off stage to support other Comcast executives at the opening of their nearby booth on the INTX show floor. As fellow panelist and visionary Andy Lippman, senior scientist and Associate Director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, showed his "Ultimate Media" project, Werner quickly noted that, "You don't have all the online sources loving it." Werner cited the prioritization for certain news sources within the MIT algorithm.

Thousands of genes are involved in intelligence, according to a new study which effectively shatters any hopes of eugenicists that babies can be genetically designed to be clever. In one of the largest studies of the human genome to date, a group of 253 scientists from around the world identified 74 genetic variants that are associated with the number of years spent in formal education. Humans' genetic make-up is believed to be responsible for at least 20 per cent of the difference in educational attainment between individuals, with the rest down to social factors and the environment in which they are raised. But the researchers found that the largest effect of any one genetic variant was tiny – just 0.035 per cent. This suggests that there must be at least several thousand of genes that are involved.