Apple made several new product announcements on Thursday, most notably a new MacBook Pro laptop with a touchscreen strip above the keyboard. Apple introduced a pair of new MacBook Pro laptops with what's called the "Touch Strip." It's a touchscreen bar that sits above the keyboard and takes the place of the function keys. The strip offers different functionality depending on the software being used -- when you're using iTunes, for instance, you would see playback controls. The new laptops also have Apple's Touch ID fingerprint scanner, enabling Apple Pay as well as quick user-swapping on shared computers.

IBM Watson may be coming soon to an enterprise iOS app near you, the company announced at the IBM World of Watson 2016 event on Tuesday. In a first-of-its-kind move, IBM MobileFirst for iOS apps can now integrate Watson technology to enhance decision-making, productivity, and the employee experience. With Watson's cognitive and conversational capabilities, these enterprise apps will be able to understand, reason, and learn using data analytics, according to a press release. "Apple and IBM set out more than two years ago to define the enterprise mobility market, ensuring that professionals could finally enjoy at work the same experience they'd come to expect as consumers," said Mahmoud Naghshineh, general manager, Apple partnership at IBM, in a press release. "We are taking that to a whole new level by combining the power of Watson with the new speech framework of iOS 10. The combinations and possibilities are virtually endless."

MasterCard (MA) is taking payments, the last -- and sometimes, the most painful -- part of shopping into the future, replacing card swipes with robots, artificial intelligence and the ubiquitous selfie. The steps, including this week's introduction of a chatbot for banks called "MasterCard KAI" that uses artificial intelligence to respond to customer queries via texts or through apps like Facebook Messenger, are vital parts of CEO Ajay Banga's strategy of leverage technological development to expand the $113 billion company beyond traditional card-based transactions. To create the chatbot, MasterCard partnered with startup Kasisto, developing a "conversational artificial intelligence platform" that banks and merchants can use to let customers make transactions, monitor their spending habits, check account balances and ask questions, the company said at the Money 20/20 conference in Las Vegas. It will be released in the U.S. early next year. "This bot enables entirely new experiences, bringing Mastercard benefits and offers to consumers with human-like conversations that are personal and contextual," Zor Gorelov, Kasisto CEO and co-founder, said in a statement.

IBM is teaming up with Slack Technologies Inc. to make it easier for companies to build custom chatbots into the startup's workplace-messaging systems, the latest move by Big Blue to add more diverse business cases for its Watson artificial-intelligence technology. The two companies will release a developer toolkit that includes Watson technologies and can integrate easily into Slack, they said in a statement Wednesday. International Business Machines Corp. will also build a chatbot -- a conversation-based application -- that will help IT departments identify and resolve issues without having to leave the Slack platform. The startup's own customer-service bot will incorporate the Watson Conversation system, which includes technologies such as speech-to-text conversion and natural-language processing, or the ability for a computer to understand what a person is saying. "Right now, if you say something to Slackbot in Slack, it will kind of blindly take what you ask it and do a search," Slack Chief Executive Officer Stewart Butterfield said.

The smart energy startup Verdigris announced today that it has raised $6.7 million to scale production of its Einstein smart sensor and frequency detectors. The sensors are used to predict the failure of machines and improve energy efficiency. Factories, manufacturing facilities, and other large buildings using Verdigris technology reduce energy use 8 to 22 percent, CEO Mark Chung told VentureBeat in a phone interview. The Einstein frequency detector from Verdigris made its debut in August. "Rather than take a big data approach where we study thousands of motors and this is the failure pattern, we instead take a physics based model which is looking at a signal through our sensors," Chung said.

IBM, Microsoft Vie for Lead in New-Age Advanced Computing By David Ramel 10/26/2016 Whether it's machine learning, artificial intelligence, cognitive computing or whatever, new-age software development is opening up huge new opportunities, with IBM and Microsoft vying for the lead in this new technological space. During this week's World of Watson conference, IBM unveiled a new Watson Data Platform and made available the Watson Machine Learning Service, among a host of other announcements. Microsoft, meanwhile, stole some of Big Blue's thunder by releasing an updated Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit for "deep learning," yet another moniker in the new movement. Coincidentally, these announcements were made just one day before a news release was issued by research firm IDC to tell the world that "Worldwide Cognitive Systems and Artificial Intelligence Revenues Forecast to Surge Past $47 Billion in 2020." That gives an indication of the kind of stakes that IBM, Microsoft and other leaders are competing for.

Udacity, the education platform focused on helping workers gain skills they need for great careers in tech, has partnered with IBM Watson, Didi Chuxing and Amazon Alexa to offer a new nanodegree in artificial intelligence, the companies announced today at the IBM World of Watson conference. IBM Watson is co-developing the curriculum of the course with Udacity. Chinese ride-hailing company Didi Chuxing intends to hire students who successfully complete the nanodegree, as does IBM. And Amazon Alexa is serving as an advisor to Udacity in developing the new AI nanodegree. According to Udacity's founder Sebastian Thrun, who previously started Google's innovation shop Google X and its self-driving car initiative, the new AI nanodegree will be for students who already have a level of mastery in software development.

The same internal, deep learning tools that Microsoft engineers used to build its human-like speech recognition engine, as well as consumer products like Skype Translator and Cortana, are now available for public use. Redmond announced today that it is open-sourcing the Cognitive Toolkit that has led to many key developments coming out of its dedicated AI division. In other words: anyone can now train their own artificial intelligence. Formerly known as the CNTK, Microsoft says the beta version of the Cognitive Toolkit is not only faster than previous incarnations, but it is also beats out competing deep learning toolkits – especially when crunching large datasets across multiple machines. On a more practical level for startups and hobbyists, Microsoft says the platform is flexible enough to run on a solo laptop -- just in case you don't have a server farm loaded with NVIDIA GPUs at your disposal.

On-board processing will give every digital eye a very powerful brain. San Mateo-based Movidius may still be in the process of getting bought up by Intel, but the company's latest deal will put its low-power AI and computer vision platform into more than just DJI drones and Google VR headsets. The company announced today that the Movidius Myriad 2 Video Processing Unit (VPU) will soon power a new generation of Hikvision smart surveillance cameras capable of recognizing everything from suspicious packages to distracted drivers. While most deep-learning neural networks require a lot of cloud-based processing power, the same platform found in Movidius' Fathom AI-on-a-stick will allow Hikvision cameras to do more on-board processing. Hikvision's cameras have already been able to achieve around 99 percent accuracy in scenarios like identifying car models, detecting intruders, spotting suspicious baggage and even calling out drivers who don't buckle up.

Earlier Tuesday, Uber announced the first successful run of one of its self-driving freight trucks, developed by San Francisco-based company Otto. The truck, designed by Otto, successfully completed a 120-mile journey between Fort Collins, Colorado and Colorado Springs, Colorado, delivering 2,000 cases of Budweiser beers with nary an issue along its journey on Interstate 25. So what's the deal with Otto, the company acquired by Uber in August, driving (pun intended) this push of self-driving technology? When it launched, Otto estimated that the price of its autonomous drive system would be a "small fraction" of the 100,000 to 200,000 price tag of a brand-new semi truck.