There are a surprising number of chatbots already available that promise something vital to all human beings: companionship. Taking inspiration from the film'Her' (pictured), they will be available to talk whenever you need to. Mitsuku is one such example. She learns by experience (the more you talk to her, the smarter she becomes) and is friendly but will argue back. Unsurprisingly, most chatbot companions available at the moment are female.

While the technology industry is abuzz with new opportunities created by advances in artificial intelligence -- from intelligent web search to voice recognition -- book publishing has yet to feel the full impact of AI. Neil Balthaser intends to change that through his machine learning software Intellogo. Intellogo uses technology that can analyze and understand the contents of a book in order to provide better book recommendations to readers. The technology can also identify reader behavior trends that can inform book publishers' content creation strategy. In the following interview, Balthaser explains how Intellogo's software can help publishers streamline book discovery and how AI will transform the reading experience into a conversation between the reader and the book.

Starship Technologies of Greenwich in London has built a robot that is starting trials delivering meals, groceries and parcels. Four firms in Britain and Germany are involved. But will the robots be able to navigate safely between business and customer?

At a competition in China to see who is better at recognizing faces, man or machine, Wang Yuheng, representing the humans, emerged victorious. Wang is famous in China for his photographic memory. He successfully identified a specific glass of water out of 520 seemingly identical ones in a Chinese reality TV show. He also reportedly helped police crack a case by extracting "hidden clues" from surveillance camera footage, thanks to his exceptional observational skills. But Wang's competitor, "Mark," is no less smart.

NEW YORK, July 6, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Thanks to his business acumen, poster boy looks, and relentless activism for freedom of the internet, Reddit's co-founder Alexis Ohanian has become one of the most high-profile residents of Brooklyn. A startup based in Armenia and San Francisco named 1AI Solutions has recently launched a working AI-based version of Alexis Ohanian named Avedis Ohanian. Additionally they used 3-D printing to replicate the body of Alexis Ohanian, infusing it with their proprietary Artificial Intelligence engine. "There's a lack of qualified IT professionals here in Armenia", said Dr. J.P. Hagopian, the CEO of 1AI Solutions. "We need to hire people, but we simply can't find enough good candidates. At some point our HR manager said that we should clone one of the high-performing Silicon Valley guys. She was kidding, but the idea stuck."

The makers of a new trend-forecasting platform claim they predicted the Rainbow Bagel before it was a thing. Santa Monica, California-based Tilofy is currently in a private, invitation-only beta of its new platform, which it says is the first automated trend forecaster. Unlike services that, say, spot current trends in social media, Tilofy utilizes machine learning, artificial intelligence and machine vision of imagery to forecast trends weeks or months before they become mainstream. "There's a bagel store in Brooklyn that was doing something interesting, tapping into the LGBT community" by creating a rainbow-colored bagel, CEO and founder Ali Khoshgozaran told me. He recalled that Tilofy predicted the future mainstream popularity of the Rainbow Bagel in November of last year. In February, The Wall Street Journal wrote an article about it, and now The Bagel Store is restructuring around its hit product.

Machine learning is a branch of artificial intelligence concerned with the design of data-driven programs which autonomously demonstrate intelligent behavior in a variety of domains. Machine learning systems are all around us. When you deposit a check, scan your fingerprint, or post a picture on social media, autonomous algorithms are deployed on the spot to sift through and make sense of your constant interactions with our technology. Machine learning silently underpins the fabric of our digital infrastructure, discriminating spam e-mail and banking fraud, making light-speed transactions in the global financial market, recommending music and films for customers to buy, deciding what search results are relevant to your queries, and countless more of the daily interactions with electronic media that we take for granted. Machine learning is the backbone that powers self-driving cars, content recommendation in social media, face identification in digital forensics, and countless other high-level tasks.

We're only at the beginning of the development of AI technology and the potential is enormous. AI has become integral to the inner workings of most industries and it's undeniable that it's evolving at an alarming rate. It's been adopted within the mechanics of everyday life and whilst simulating human intelligence is probably not all that far off – will AI ever harness true anthropomorphic traits like the capacity to be creative? Creativity is how we express our experiences. It relies on originality, imagination and the ability to make something not done before.

When Amazon first launched the Fire TV Stick in late 2014, it almost seemed too good to be true. The thumb-sized device promised more power than the latest Roku box and a better app selection than Apple TV at less than half the price of either. It was only a little pricier than Google's Chromecast dongle, yet it managed to include a proper remote control and on-screen interface. Despite some early launch bugs and quirks, it was a great way to make your TV smarter on the cheap. Cut to 2016, and the competition has gotten tougher.

In last month's blog I talked about keeping your team innovative. One of the key tenets of an innovative team is the concept of moonshots or "10x Thinking" or audacious goals. In a "moonshot economy," while a breakthrough can mean the start of a new industry leader, it can also mean the death of an industry stalwart. First, let's take a look at some previous moonshots and how they've impacted various industries and the world. The first is, of course, the great Space Race.