Microsoft wants to join the rest of the software giants in the AI game, but it just keeps striking out. Weeks ago the firm's lovable teen chatbot turned into a Hitler supporting racists and this week its CaptionBot isn't living up to its potential. CaptionBot, which analyzes pictures in order to formulate captions, has been spot on with some results, but horridly wrong for others – it thought the First Lady Michelle Obama was a cell phone. Weeks ago the firm's lovable teen chatbot turned into a Hitler supporting racists and this week its CaptionBot isn't living up to its name. This technology combines three different services to process images and write descriptive captions – and sometimes includes an appropriate emoji.

Anything sounds weighty when uttered by the President of the United States, which is why a new internet text-to-speech app called "Talk Obama to Me" is such fun. All you have to do is input whatever text you want to make the President himself read it back. According to developer and Stanford Linguistics PhD candidate Ed King, the program is a "video speech synthesizer that automatically chops up video of Barack Obama and puts it in order, so that he says whatever you want him to."

Japan's Sharp will launch in May a smartphone that's built into a humanoid robot. Or is it a humanoid robot with a built-in smartphone? The Robohon is said to be the world's first mobile robotic phone -- and judging from the price and slightly unwieldy form factor could also be the last. It's 19.5 centimeters (7.7 inches) tall and weighs 390 grams (13.8 ounces), making it several times the size and weight of a conventional smartphone, and it will cost 198,000 yen, which is just over US 1,800 and more than double the price of a high-end iPhone. But those shortcomings are more than made up in cuteness.

The biggest leak in history has connected more than 70 current and former world leaders to tax evasion schemes that channel billions of pounds into secretive off-shore accounts. This is how the data was analysed. The Panama Papers show that law firm Mossack Fonseca helped hundreds of clients, with connections to some of the most powerful people in the world, launder money, dodge tax and potentially avoid sanctions. The papers themselves were leaked to news organisations by an unknown person and have been shared with more than 100 news organisations and 400 journalists – the investigation has been ongoing for almost a year. The process of making the raw data accessible for journalists involved converting it to digital formats, high-performance computers, and algorithms to find well known names among the thousands of details. While the actual leaked documents have not been published -– the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) say the full list of companies linked to the papers will be revealed in May – how much data they contain is known.

The last place you want to learn you have heart failure is where it often winds up being diagnosed: in the emergency room. Researchers analyzing electronic health records are using artificial intelligence and GPUs to get ahead of this curve. They've shown they can predict heart failure as much as nine months before doctors can now deliver the diagnosis. A research team from Sutter Health, a Northern California not-for-profit health system, and the Georgia Institute of Technology, believe their method has the potential to reduce heart failure rates and possibly save lives. "The earlier we can detect the disease, the more likely we can change health outcomes for people and improve their quality of life," said Andy Schuetz, a senior data scientist at Sutter Health and an author of a paper on the research.

Bots seem to be all the rage this week, thanks to the release of Facebook's Messenger Bot program at F8, but not everyone sees bots as the way to keep up with the customer service glut. DigitalGenius, a former TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield finalist, thinks there's a better way using artificial intelligence and machine learning. The company released an entirely new product this week called the Human AI Customer Service Platform that links to popular customer service platforms like Salesforce, Zendesk and Oracle. The trouble with bots is they are limited by their programmed actions, says Mikhail Naumov, chief strategy officer at DigitalGenius. "While chat bots are cool and are getting lots of attention today -- they often break once the user asks for something that has not been pre-programmed into the bot. The DigitalGenius platform, however, combines the best of human and machine intelligence in a seamless customer service experience," Naumov told TechCrunch.

Though foreign companies invested primarily in production/manufacturing operations in France, last year saw many groundbreaking transactions for U.S. businesses in the French tech sector. First, Facebook made the monumental decision to choose Paris as the location for its first artificial intelligence research center outside of the U.S. But that was, by far, not the only major U.S. investment in our country. Also choosing Paris, Alexion Pharmaceuticals will bring us its first research lab outside of the U.S., dubbing it the Alexion R&D Center, Paris. And Matter, an incubator for health and e-health startups, has partnered with Paris City Council's network of health-sector incubators in order to provide easier access to the European market for American health startups, to attract European companies to Matter's home city of Chicago, and to encourage even greater interaction and collaboration between health-sector startups from our two countries.

Crown-of-thorns starfish are the zombies of the sea. They won't die even if you cut them in half. To kill one, you must dismember it completely--or inject it with poisonous (to them) bile salts. Instead of braaains, these zombies munch coral, and off the coast of Australia, infestations of the beasts are damaging the Great Barrier Reef at an alarming rate. In development since late 2014, the underwater droid identifies and assassinates the ravenous stars--autonomously.

An underwater robot exploring Loch Ness has discovered a dark, monster-shaped mass in its depths. Disappointingly, tourism officials say the 30-foot (9-meter), object is not the fabled Loch Ness Monster, but a prop left over from a 1970 film. Billy Wilder's "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes" puts the great detective on the trail of the monster -- which turns out to be a disguised submarine. A model of the submarine-monster sank during production to the bottom of the 750 foot (230 meter) -deep lake. Tourism body Visit Scotland is backing a survey of the Highlands lake by a marine robot to study its depths and see if there is any sign of the fabled monster, which helps attract hundreds of thousands of visitors a year to the region.

Scientists at the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA have developed a new technique for identifying cancer cells in blood samples faster and more accurately than the current standard methods. In one common approach to testing for cancer, doctors add biochemicals to blood samples. Those biochemicals attach biological "labels" to the cancer cells, and those labels enable instruments to detect and identify them. However, the biochemicals can damage the cells and render the samples unusable for future analyses. There are other current techniques that don't use labeling but can be inaccurate because they identify cancer cells based only on one physical characteristic.