Two of the biggest digital assistants are taking different pathways to find more users. Amazon recently made its intentions clear: It wants to play nice with its rivals. That's on top of the thousands of third-party skills Amazon's AI already has. Google, on the other hand, is focussing on making its tech more self-reliant. Judging by its latest demonstration, its efforts are paying off.

The International Space Station hovers a couple hundred miles above the Earth's surface, yet it appears it, or at least one of its patches, is not above commercial plugs. Officials have unveiled the new mission patch for the U.S. national laboratory aboard the ISS that will adorn the apparel of our astronauts. The patch, in the shape of the rebel spaceship Millennium Falcon, includes the silhouettes of the spherical spacecraft called the Death Star that the Galactic Empire and their evil dictator Darth Vader use to blow up entire planets full of innocent people; and three robots from the movie franchise, BB-8, K-2SO and Chopper, meant to symbolize technology. The bots were featured in the two most recently released Star Wars movies, "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" and "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story," chosen over the highly identifiable R2-D2 and C-3PO that people grew to love in the original three films from the late 1970s and early '80s. To cap things off, the bottom of the patch is emblazoned with "Star Wars" and "Lucasfilm."

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Everyone has seen all of those sci-fi movies where the machines took over the planet while the unwary humans weren't looking, The good news is that we aren't quite there yet Still, there are real examples of machines that are seeping into our world and most of us aren't really paying attention to them. Artificial intelligence has arrived and the applications that are using it are running the gamut from voice powered assistants like Cortana or Siri or Alexa to the more fundamental ones such as search suggestions, to the downright amazing ones such as self driving cars and trucks, we've got AI working all around us. AI as a technology is a newborn technology, barely in its infancy. In fact, what some companies are calling AI actually--isn't. Real AI is an entity that actually learns on its own.

Today we are excited to announce the Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) format in conjunction with Facebook. ONNX provides a shared model representation for interoperability and innovation in the AI framework ecosystem. Cognitive Toolkit, Caffe2, and PyTorch will all be supporting ONNX. Microsoft and Facebook co-developed ONNX as an open source project, and we hope the community will help us evolve it.

TORONTO, January 25, 2017 - Today NextAI announced major partnerships with several leading Canadian companies to help fund and support the program and its participants. NextAI is a global innovation program for artificial intelligence-related ventures, and talented teams from around the world are invited to Canada to leverage the nation's leadership in AI and are provided with capital, mentorship, education and networking opportunities. The concept for NextAI was born out of an innovation brainstorming session sponsored by RBC and Magna during the summer of 2016, and joining RBC and Magna as founding corporate partners are BDC Capital and Scotiabank. To date, the funding provided by all corporate partners totals $5.15 million. NextAI has also formed technology partnerships with IBM Canada, Google and NVIDIA, who have committed millions in hardware, access to technology, and services.

The BBC has unveiled a new project designed especially for Alexa and Google Home smart speakers called'The Inspection Chamber'. The show includes chunks of story followed by a decision taken by the listener - meaning users can take an active role in the story. Creators hope this format will help people feel like they are genuinely interacting with the characters in the story. The show includes chunks of story followed by a decision taken by the listener - meaning users can take an active role. Pictured is someone listening with Amazon's Alexa home speaker The show includes chunks of story followed by a decision taken by the listener - meaning users can take an active role in the story. Creators hope this format will help people feel like they are genuinely interactive with the characters in the story.

Imagine being trapped in a building overrun with alien humanoids. Your task is to shoot your way out. As you're fighting for your life in this fantastical world, in the background are seemingly out-of-place graphic health warnings. "Don't drink and drive", reads a poster riddled with gun shots. "I'm just buzzed", says another, depicting yellow caution tape draped across the scene of a car accident.

The first time Alex Acero saw Her, he watched it like a normal person. The second time, he didn't watch the movie at all. Acero, the Apple executive in charge of the tech behind Siri, sat there with his eyes closed, listening to how Scarlett Johansson voiced her artificially intelligent character Samantha. He paid attention to how she talked to Theodore Twombly, played by Joaquin Phoenix, and how Twombly talked back. Acero was trying to discern what about Samantha could make someone fall in love without ever seeing her.

A unit of Google dedicated to policy and ideas is pushing forward with a plan to tame toxic comments on the Internet--even as critics warn that its technology, which relies on AI-powered algorithms, can promote the sort of sexism and racism Google is trying to diminish. On Thursday, the unit known as Jigsaw announced a new community page where developers can contribute "hacks" to build out its comment-moderation tool. That tool, which is used by the likes of the New York Times and the Guardian, helps publishers moderate Internet comments at scale. The system, which depends on artificial intelligence, allowed the Times to expand the scope of its reader comments tenfold while still maintaining a civil discussion. Now, Jigsaw is posting code and reams of data on its new community page on the site GitHub in the hopes programmers will use it to build new features for its comment project.