You can now chat with Kim Kardashian, well sort of. Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, the reality TV star and Kimoji creator's mobile game, now has the addition of a Kim Kardashian bot. The bot is on Facebook Messenger, so you can even use it if you don't play the game or have the app downloaded. If you've played the game, you probably won't notice much of a difference between conversations with Kim in the app and conversations with her bot on Facebook. On Thursday Kardashian tweeted out to her more than 50 million followers that she was a bot now, and said "let's chat." When I tried out the bot Kim started the conversation by asking "How's it going?"

LAS VEGAS: Adobe and Microsoft are jointly working on artificial intelligence (AI) to offer better products and provide customers more automated, intelligence-based experiences, a top Adobe official said here. Brad Rencher, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Marketing, of Adobe said the two tech giants were working on standard data models and sharing of core libraries between Adobe's Sensei and Microsoft's Cortana, both based on artificial intelligence. Cortana is a search tool which can verbally provide answers to search queries and Sensei - a set of intelligent services from Adobe - integrates the advertising, marketing and analytics products offered on Cloud with back up of creatives and documentation. Rencher, who was talking to a group of journalists here at the Adobe's annual Summit, said the joint research and development would combine the specific domain capabilities of Sensei with the wider core data platform of Cortana, thus building a service. Adobe products can now use data from Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power BI and Microsoft Azure into Sensei for intelligent machine learning.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to Accenture's Second Quarter Fiscal 2017 Earnings Conference Call. During today's conference all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. Instructions will be given at that time. I would now like to turn the conference over to Managing Director, Head of Investor Relations, Angie Park. Thank you, Shannon and thanks everyone for joining us today on our second quarter fiscal 2017 earnings announcement. As Shannon just mentioned, I'm Angie Park, Managing Director, Head of Investor Relations. With me today are Pierre Nanterme, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and David Rowland, our Chief Financial Officer. We hope you've had an opportunity to review the News Release we issued a short time ago. Let me quickly outline the agenda for today's call. Pierre will begin with an overview of our results. David will take you through the financial details, including the income statement and balance sheet for the second quarter. Pierre will then provide a brief update on our market positioning before David provides our business outlook for the third quarter and full fiscal year 2017. We will then take your questions before Pierre provides a wrap up at the end of the call. As a reminder, when we discuss revenues during today's call, we're talking about revenues before reimbursements or net revenues. Some of the matters we'll discuss on the call, including our business outlook are forward-looking and as such, are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties, including but not limited to those factors set forth in today's News Release and discussed in our Annual Report on Form 10-K and Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and other SEC filings. These risks and uncertainties could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed on this call.

Researchers at Adobe have collaborated with the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology to develop a new system, based on deep convolutional neural networks, which can extract foreground content from its background intelligently and accurately – and with no need for the blue/green-screen techniques which have dominated cinema for nearly a century. The paper Deep Image Matting outlines the process of evaluating the object which needs to be'clipped' out of its background, which involved the generation of a novel dataset containing 49300 training images intended to accustom algorithms with the challenges of distinguishing backgrounds and eliminating them. Traditional methods of extracting actors or elements from backgrounds, so that they can be inserted into other footage, have always centred around recording the elements (actors, miniatures, etc.) to be extracted in front of a flat field of colour, and relying on photochemical or (later) digital procedures to remove the background. In earlier times, film production workflows generally used blue as a key colour to remove, though Walt Disney studios (which famously took on visual effects work for Alfred Hitchcock's chiller The Birds) used a sodium-based process which keyed on yellow – however, its greater accuracy was offset by the complexity and weight of the equipment required, and the sodium process never gained widespread industry popularity. In the last 15-20 years, green has been adopted as a drop-out colour, since it was proved to be present in less foreground material than blue (for the filming of Superman in the late 1970s, it proved necessary to shoot title actor Christopher Reeve in a costume which was nearer violet than the traditional blue of the man of steel, and to tweak the costume's colour chemically later, so that Reeve did not completely disappear when extracted from a blue background).

British and Irish TV watchers with the latest version of set-top box from satellite program provider Sky have just had a complimentary upgrade. The box is called Sky Q and has many features including the capability to watch programs on your iPad, upstairs TV and so on. It also provides access to a massive collection of 4K UHD content, including movies, programs and live sport of any UK provider. The remote control has a touch-sensitive pad on it and from day one this has had a discreet microphone button on its edge. There is also a more basic remote without a touchpad but this doesn't have the microphone built in.

Maybe he is just biased, but Chris Pratt already believes "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. The actor, who plays Peter Quill, a.k.a. Star Lord, in James Gunn's upcoming film, drummed up hype for the film when he posted the IMAX poster for the upcoming film on Facebook. He said the movie has already gotten a surprisingly high rating from Rotten Tomatoes, and he suspects it will win every award there is to be won, including medals at the Olympics. One of the most exciting things about the new movie has to be the introduction of Star Lord's father, Ego (Kurt Russell). Gunn earlier revealed during an interview with Complex that he's made certain changes to the comic book character and made him into a "normal person." "Ego is a living planet who is able to manifest himself in different ways he's been alone for millions of years and he's learned how to control the molecules around him in such a way as to create avatars of themselves, such as Kurt Russell," Gunn said. "I think Ego was a very lonely character out there by himself and went off in search of love and perhaps found it in Quill's mother." Despite being another movie from Marvel, Gunn also said that he is not pressured to connect "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.

Like a child learning about its parents, artificial intelligence has begun to study the human condition. An A.I. system created by a Boulder, Colorado-based company CaliberMind can form analytical judgments about how people think and communicate, with a text input of only 100 words. CaliberMind's software can rank someone on a spectrum of emotional versus analytical decision-making, then draw conclusions about their character traits. Culling these details into a snapshot of someone's personality, the software then makes recommendations on how to best communicate with that person. It's nothing less than an artificially intelligent effort to peer into a person's heart and mind.

SpaceX fans are excited about what is likely the first clear image of a robot that could be used on the company's autonomous spaceport drone ships. SpaceX's Of Course I Still Love You Drone Ship is seen at Port Canaveral on Monday, March 20, 2017. In the lower-right is what is believed to be a Falcon 9 first stage securing vehicle. CAPE CANAVERAL -- Stephen Marr had his suspicions when he photographed a mysterious piece of equipment atop SpaceX's drone ship at Port Canaveral on Monday. "I knew there was something different there," Marr, 34, said. So he did what any lover of space and social media would do: He posted it online.

ICYMI: watch an extended clip from #GhostintheShell from the beginning of the movie. Ghost in the Shell isn't opening for another week and a half, but when it does you can rest assured they'll waste no time cutting right to the action. Paramount has just shared the first five minutes of the sci-fi actioner, which sees the crime-fighting cyborg Major (Scarlett Johansson) kicking robot butt. While Johansson's definitely got action chops to spare, her casting has proven controversial, with many fans criticizing the decision to whitewash this uniquely Japanese property.

It a known fact that customers expect personalised and relevant information. This is because of their awareness of new developments in tech. They start to get higher expectations. This can be a real challenge for companies. They want good service on all platforms, indirectly or directly.