GoButler, the startup that originally offered a virtual assistant that let you request anything on-demand, appears to be pivoting for a second (and maybe final) time. The New York-headquartered company is shuttering the GoButler consumer-facing service altogether in favour of offering natural language processing technology to third-parties. Angel.ai is based on the same NLP technology that previously powered GoButler's "fully-automated" flight search and discovery, and will enable commerce companies to build'conversational' user interfaces, such as Facebook Messenger chat bots, or other kinds of natural language search. However, instead of targeting a single vertical, Angel.ai The idea is to let consumers express intent in a more natural way, and by translating natural language expressions into structured, actionable requests, commerce companies can capture that intent and make their products easier to find and purchase.

According to SciFi canon, AI and Big Data might not be a good idea. In recent years, big data and artificial intelligence (AI) have received overwhelming attention, however the interesting – even obvious – connection between the two hasn't often been explored. It is the combination of big data and AI working together that is now enabling business leaders to deliver new insights, efficiencies and even new functions that haven't been possible before. This is evident in the increasingly useful role big data and AI are playing in a broad spectrum of traditionally outsourced functions such as recruitment, HR, finance and supply chain, through to security and IT. The combination has already had a major impact on how the stock market works, synthesising more and more data to the point at which some people believe it will eventually be able to accurately predict both market trends and human influences on the market.

The trial zone, the first of its kind in China, will allow Baidu to become the only company to test autonomous driving in public transportation in Wuhu. If the technology is proven to be workable, the local authorities in Wuhu are even considering replacing all of the city's buses and part of its taxi fleet with driverless vehicles in another five years.

HANNOVER, GERMANY - MARCH 02: Robots play football in a demonstration of artificial intelligence at the stand of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer Kuenstliche Intelligenz GmbH) at the CeBIT Technology Fair on March 2, 2010 in Hannover, Germany. CeBIT will be open to the public from March 2 through March 6. (Photo: Sean Gallup/Getty Images) Artificial intelligence or AI is among the most favorite subjects today. With AI's versatility and flexibility, you can find them anywhere. There are already companies run by AI and factories with robots operating the machines. But did you know that AI robots also suffer stereotypical sexism in the workplace?

An engineer who helped spearhead the self-driving Google car project at Alphabet Inc. has quietly launched a Silicon Valley startup that plans to retrofit tractor trailers with autonomous-driving technology. Anthony Levandowski, one of the founders of Google's self-driving car program, left Google toward the end of January. He was joined by Lior Ron, another former Alphabet employee who earlier led Google Maps and the development of...

If robots are going to take over the world, they could at least have the courtesy not to bump into us while they're at it. That's not as easy as it sounds, though, especially when a robot is trying to make its way through a bustling space like a mall, hospital, or crowded city street. Thankfully, researchers have developed an algorithm that could give robots the ability to deftly maneuver through spaces packed with unpredictable humans. Robots are gradually leaving controlled spaces like labs and factories and edging into more settings in which they will inevitably encounter human beings (see "Are You Ready for a Robot Colleague?"). We navigate hectic spaces by reading other people's movements and planning our paths accordingly.

The trucking industry is ready for revolution. Autonomous trucks aren't as sexy as driverless cars, but they could have a bigger impact on our lives. Within years, they could make the roads safer, the air cleaner, and deliveries cheaper. All of this is closer than you think. Last year, Daimler unveiled the world's first autonomous semi.

IBM wants its Watson computer system to learn how to fight cyber crime and it's asking eight leading universities, including three in Canada, for help. Watson -- IBM's question answering computer system -- was originally designed to compete (and win) on the television quiz show Jeopardy, but the technology has since been used on other problem-solving projects. Now IBM is launching Watson for Cyber Security -- a cloud-based version of their cognitive technology -- that will be trained over the next year to examine threats of cyber crime. Caleb Barlow, vice-president of IBM Security, said it is becoming increasingly difficult for security staff to deal with the growing number of cyber threats. "Your average enterprise is dealing with 200,000 incidents a day that they've got to dig through. Human beings simply cannot look at all of that data," he said.

Ever since IBM's Deep Blue defeated then world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game contest in May 1997, humanity has been looking over its shoulder as computers have been running up the inside rail. What task that we thought was our exclusive preserve will they conquer next? What jobs will they take? And what jobs will be left for humans when they do? The pessimistic case was partly set out in the Channel 4 series Humans, about a near-future world where intelligent, human-like robots would do routine work, or stand on streets handing out flyers, while some people worked (law and policing seemed to get a pass, mostly) but others were displaced – and angry.

The subtle relationship between machines and language has evolved over a reasonably long period but is now accelerating. Soon after the first computers were built, various abstract languages were formulated in order to link these machines' inner mechanisms to processes coded by humans. The man-machine relationship has evolved dramatically since then, especially through the languages used both to instruct the machine and to relate to it. These languages now have a double role: meta-knowledge (language used for the functional description of processes) and content (language processed in various forms but in the end reduced to readable text). The digitalization of everything, by both institutions and private companies, is progressively producing impressive "corpuses" which, in their ethereal digital nature, can be goldmines for neural network software.