A.I (artificial intelligence) seems to be everywhere nowadays, from Hollywood movies, to regular news stories to thought-provoking features. The debate over just how far A.I will progress, and the related moral ramifications, rages on. But what's certain is that, right now, A.I is making consumers' lives easier by the day. This is happening not just through the development work of big tech companies, but also through the creativity of tech startups. The startup industry is booming around the world, with a staggering 50 million new startups being formed each year. An increasing number of these are exploring the possibilities of A.I, and working out how to bring new technology to the masses. We've delved into this exhilarating world to bring you 25 of the most interesting A.I startups worth keeping an eye on in 2017.

Microsoft is taking another shot at giving users a friendly AI-driven bot conversation partner. On Monday, the company released Zo, a chatbot that users can converse with on Kik, the popular messaging platform. Zo is a follow-up to Tay, the tech giant's first foray into friendly, English-speaking chatbots. It's clear that the company has learned from its first attempt, when the friendly chatbot was turned into a font of white supremacist propaganda by malicious users. In contrast, Zo adamantly refuses to discuss political matters.

For a movie based on a video game franchise, Assassin's Creed has plenty of moral complexity. "Basically for the audience, they can't sit back and go, 'OK, well we know this is the good camp and this is the bad camp," Michael Fassbender told Mashable. This time, the actor, who has played Steve Jobs, Macbeth and Magneto, takes on the role of a 15th-century assassin. The material is also taken seriously by Australian director Justin Kurzel, who shunned green screens and shot on-location as often as possible to give it a realistic feel. SEE ALSO: Assassin's Creed VR experience gives us a taste of cinema to come Using the original game as a springboard for the film's premise, Assassin's Creed centres on the centuries-old battle between a secret sect of assassins, who honour free will, and the Knights Templar, who seek to control the human race.

Cecila Malmstrom publicly speaks of torture. On October 4, when the European politician stood up in parliament to give her support for laws banning the export of items used for implementing the death penalty, there should have been little controversy. But when footage of her speech was posted online, nobody saw it. YouTube removed the video, which had been uploaded by fellow MEP Marietje Schaake. "I did not know whether this decision was made by a human or whether this was the result of an automated decision," the Dutch politician told WIRED.

Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) of "Westworld" met a surprising end during the season finale of the sci-fi show. After launching the new narrative he painstakingly created -- even at the cost of several lives -- Ford seemingly allowed Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood) to kill him the same way his former partner, Arnold Weber (Jeffrey Wright), asked her to end him many years ago. When Entertainment Weekly asked Hopkins what drove Ford to do so, he said he has no clue. He's obviously a very proud man fascinated by human intelligence, the nature of intelligence, the history of the human being, the nature of consciousness, and the theory that human consciousness – as we know it today – started very recently," he said. Hopkins loves that his character has a cryptic morality, and he believes it's part of his overall allure. "He wants to create a pure dystopia or utopia, but he begins to realize somewhere in there that he's lost track of it.

When Amazon first coined the strapline "Ask Alexa" for its virtual assistant, it couldn't have predicted the X-rated nature of some of the requests. "She" may boast an encyclopaedic knowledge, but research by consumer behaviour analysts Canvas 8 reveals that some users are more interested in a virtual hook-up than fact finding. And she's not the only target: the equally smooth voice of Microsoft's Cortana is getting customers just as hot under the collar apparently. From perma-smiling avatars in traditionally female support roles, to hyper-sexualised "fembots" pandering to male fantasies, the female form is everywhere in techno-world - attractive, servile and at your command. A little more conservative, but just as eager to please, is virtual personal assistant Amy Ingram, the brainchild of New York start-up X.ai.

The pizzeria vowed on Monday to stay open despite a shooting incident sparked by a fake news report that it was fronting a child sex ring run by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. On Sunday afternoon, a 28-year-old man walked into a Washington, D.C. ping-pong bar and pizzeria. He was carrying an AR-15 assault rifle – hardly standard-issue hardware for a round of table tennis. He fired one or more shots, as people fled Comet Ping Pong, before surrendering to police officers. Edgar Maddison Welch told police he had traveled from his home in Salisbury, N.C. to the nation's capital to investigate a pre-election conspiracy theory, wherein Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton allegedly led a child-trafficking ring out of Comet Ping Pong.

There is a time in our life when we mostly learn. Then over the time we learn less and use our knowledge more. And very often it's not just one-way process but more like a cycle which ends and starts from beginning. For me now is the moment when a new cycle is slowly starting. My professional career is all about mobile. Most of my time I spend coding and making sure that everyone is happy -- engineers with challenging problems to solve, business with fulfilled deadlines, company with more opportunities from research and the most important -- users, satisfied with our product.

Digital models of humans can be uncannily accurate these days, but there's at least one area where they fall short: teeth. Unless you're willing to scan the inside of someone's mouth, you aren't going to get a very faithful representation of someone's pearly whites. Disney Research and ETH Zurich, however, have a far easier solution. They've just developed a technique to digitally recreate teeth beyond the gum line using little more than source data and everyday imagery. The team used 86 3D scans to create a model for an "average" set of teeth, and wrote an algorithm that adapts that model based on what it sees in the contours of teeth in photos and videos.