Bots sometimes get a bad rap, but here are a few that will brighten your feeds. Are bots the new apps? Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella reckons they are. This week, Kik – a messaging app popular with teenagers – launched a "Bot Shop" where users can interact with brands or play games with chat bots instead of talking to their real friends.

Jeffrey Hawkins is the American founder of Palm Computing (where he invented the Palm Pilot) and Handspring (where he invented the Treo). He has since turned to work on neuroscience full-time, founded the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience (formerly the Redwood Neuroscience Institute) in 2002, founded Numenta in 2005 and published On Intelligence describing his memory-prediction framework theory of the brain. In 2003 he was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering "for the creation of the hand-held computing paradigm and the creation of the first commercially successful example of a hand-held computing device." Hawkins also serves on the Advisory Board of the Secular Coalition for America and offers advice to the coalition on the acceptance and inclusion of nontheism in American life. Andrew Yan-Tak Ng is Chief Scientist at Baidu Research in Silicon Valley.

Computing giant Nvidia has announced the world's first "supercomputer in a box" – the DGX-1. With a cool 170 teraflops of performance, the machine is designed to tackle the complex worlds of deep learning and artificial intelligence, areas of research requiring massive amounts of computing power. The DGX-1 uses the company's newly developed Pascal architecture that recently showed up in its beastly in-car supercomputer. The DGX-1 has eight Tesla GP100 GPUs, each with 16 gigabytes of memory. Alongside that, the knowledge hungry supercomputer contains 512 GB of RAM, and four 1.92 terabyte solid state hard drives.

Google's job since inception has been to make everyone's lives easier, from everyday consumers to business people. At the NEXT Google Cloud Platform user conference in San Francisco, Google's officials announced they're taking it a step further by offering limited access to a new machine-learning platform that everyone can use. The service they're offering is used by Google Photos, Translate, and Inbox to collect data and streamline processes in business. It's supposed to make it easier for developers to use the power of Big Data and machine learning to power other features offered by Google, including the ability to identify images inside apps, recognize commands spoken into Android Phones, and collect data to improve the user experience online. "Major Google applications use Cloud Machine Learning, including Photos (image search), the Google app (voice search), Translate and Inbox (Smart Reply)," the company says in the official announcement.

Just yesterday, for example, Facebook Inc. (FB) rolled out a new feature, VoiceOver, that uses AI technology to give oral descriptions of FB photos for blind and visually-impaired users (iPad and iPhone users only, so far). Perhaps the big Stanley Kubrickian monolith moment for AI happened in March, with the resounding win by the Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL) AI program AlphaGo,over a champion in the complex board game Go--a game previously thought to be far too complex for a computer to play better than a human. If true believers in AI are correct that this long-promised technology is ready for the mainstream, whichever company controls AI could steer the tech industry for years to come. Hence we are witnessing a high-stakes competition to develop the next platform to establish industry dominance in upcoming product cycles. While Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), FB, GOOGL and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) are all jockeying furiously, the one company with the most riding on the outcome is International Business Machines Corp. (IBM).

Despite predictions of a tech slowdown, big-name businesses like Facebook, Apple, and IBM are pouring resources into artificial intelligence (AI), changing the field and gaining the interest of venture capitalists everywhere. As investors actively seek innovative players in the AI space, more entrepreneurs are gravitating toward the technology as they build and grow their own companies. Businesses such as Sentient, Context Relevant, and Scaled Inference all continue to work on their own multifunction AI platforms for computation and analysis, but this is only a small segment of the AI market. Multiple businesses now invest time and effort into purpose-built AI products. Here are a few of the businesses that are capturing attention in their respective industries for their AI work. With total capital of 58 million, AI specialist Kensho is already showing just how serious investors are about the technology.

Cameras are used routinely by police across the US to identify citizens, their faces cross-matched against databases of suspects and past criminals. Yet researchers claim there is too little scrutiny of how these tools work, and have found inherent racial bias in the system. So does a sophisticated, visual analysis tool reflect human prejudice and if so, who does that effect? "Studies indicate there's racial bias in the software," said Jonathan Frankle, staff technologist at Georgetown Law School. Working with law fellow Clare Garvie, Frankle has requested public information from more than 100 police departments across the country.

Until recently, Robyn Ewing was a writer in Hollywood, developing TV scripts and pitching pilots to film studios. Now, she is applying her creative talents toward building the personality of a different type of character - a virtual assistant, animated by artificial intelligence, that interacts with sick patients. Ewing works with engineers on the software program, called Sophie, which can be downloaded to a smartphone. The virtual nurse gently reminds users to check their medication, asks them how they are feeling or if they are in pain, then sends the data to a real doctor. As tech behemoths and a wave of startups double down on virtual assistants that can chat with human beings, writing for AI is becoming a hot job in Silicon Valley.

In a major win for artificial intelligence, Google DeepMind's AlphaGo has beat European Go champion Fan Hui in the complex 2,500-year-old Chinese game of Go, touted the official Google blog. A victory in a Go game against a human champion has long been coveted among AI researchers, because the possible moves that a player can take can reach into the quadrillions and beyond. As a result, Go has proven a formidable challenge for artificial intelligence researchers. Microsoft and Facebook, for example, have been working on ways to win in the game over a human champion, but have had no luck to date, according to a BBC news report. Last October, Google DeepMind held a private, closed-door Go match in its London office between its AlphaGo system and Hui.

It takes a lot of work to create a good movie or TV character, and apparently much of the same work is now going into creating the characters behind AI assistants like Siri, Cortana, and Alexa. As this piece in the Washington Post points out, creative workers like poets, fiction writers, and comedians are fast becoming the ones responsible for making these assistants seem human--coming up with everything from human-sounding filler words to jokes to a background story and small personality details. It makes sense: if you want to get people to use these software-based assistants, they should be approachable, dynamic, and have consistent personalities. Throwing in some party tricks--such as Siri's ability to beat box--doesn't hurt, either. But just because your AI assistant has a carefully curated personality doesn't mean it's going to be useful. Making AI conversational interfaces is still very, very hard (though Baidu seems to be doing pretty well with it in China), as it can misunderstand what you're requesting, or may only be able to help in specific situations.