Car maker Honda is teaming up with electronics giant Softbank to work on artificial intelligence (AI). The pair have confirmed they will develop an innovative range of products, which use sensors and cameras to improve the breadth and depth of communication possible between car and driver. Soft bank's pionerering Pepper robot was designed to live with humans and the company will now work with Honda through its robotics unit – Cocoro SB – to create products that give drivers a feeling of'friendship' with their cars. Honda is opening a new AI laboratory in Tokyo in September as it continues its investment in the future of robotics.

SoftBank said its robotics unit Cocoro SB, which is researching cloud-based artificial intelligence, will work with Honda on research that seeks to harmonize mobility with people, so that drivers can feel a kind of friendship with their vehicles.

Last month, in collaboration with the folks behind the fantastic Burner app, my company Voxable launched our latest chatbot project, Ghostbot for Burner. Ghostbot runs on top of Burner's "open" phone numbers as an agent inside your text message inbox, allowing you to "ghost" away from fleeting relationships by responding to unwanted or creepy texters on your behalf. Since the launch, Ghostbot has been covered in over one hundred media outlets. Chris Messina was also kind enough to post it to Product Hunt, calling it "the first bot-as-personal-firewall" he had seen. The opportunity to break new ground in the coming era of bot-mediated communication was what initially both excited and terrified us about the project.

The definition of artificial intelligence (AI) is a bit fuzzy, so when AT&T claims that it has been using AI for more than 20 years, it should be kept in mind that the AI of 1996 is a lot different from the AI of 2016. The bigger point is that the newer version is doing a lot for the carrier. AT&T is settling on an AI platform that can be used for different things instead of developing "one-off" solutions every time a task requiring the predictive capabilities and massive number-crunching abilities of AI presents itself. AI can be leveraged to anticipate rather than simply react to events, as less sophisticated AI platforms have done in the past. The driver is software-defined networks (SDNs), according to Computerworld.

ITEM: A researcher at Telenor Group Research says he has developed a machine learning algorithm that uses mobile phone call records to determine literacy rates in developing markets by location. According to MIT Technology Review, researcher Pål Sundsøy says he started with a regular survey – conducted by a professional agency for a mobile operator – covering 76,000 mobile users in Asia that collected the user's mobile number and asked them if they could read. Sundsøy matched that data against the mobile operator's call data records, which enabled him to work out where each user was, who they called, for how long, etc. Then he crunched 75% of the correlated data to detect patterns with illiterate users, and used the remaining 25% to see if those patterns could identify illiterate people and areas where there is a higher proportion of illiterate people. All in all, he says, his machine learning algorithm can spot illiterate individuals with surprising accuracy.

Today, Pål Sundsøy at Telenor Group Research in Fornebu, Norway, says he's worked out how to determine literacy rates using mobile phone call records. He starts with a standard household survey of 76,000 mobile phone users living in an unidentified developing country in Asia. Sundsøy then matches this data set with call data records from the mobile phone company. "By deriving economic, social, and mobility features for each mobile user we predict individual illiteracy status with 70 percent accuracy," he says, pointing out that this allows areas with low literacy rates to be mapped.

One of the millennium development goals of the United Nations is to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030. That's a complex task, since poverty has many contributing factors. But one of the more significant is the 750 million people around the world who are unable to read and write, two-thirds of which are women. There are plenty of organizations that can help, provided they know where to place their resources. So identifying areas where literacy rates are low is an important challenge.

It's time to get over your Comcast X1 envy, Dish Network subscribers. Now you can stop changing channels with your finger like a sucker and start using voice commands instead, as Dish recently announced that 30 Voice Remote accessory is now available. The new remote only works with Hopper 3 DVRs and 4K Joey mini set-top boxes. The handheld unit can be used to control navigation, search, and content selection, as well as basic channel changes and DVR recordings. And you don't need to bark bizarre, stilted commands into the thing; Dish says you can use natural language when you search with the remote.

Last year, mobile operators lost 38 billion ( 28bn) of their revenue to fraud, according to the Communications Fraud Control Association's 2015 survey. International crime rings are successfully and profitably using highly sophisticated techniques to bulldoze through phone companies' anti-fraud defences. However, emerging big data machine learning applications are beginning to turn the tide. Padraig Stapleton, vice president of engineering at Argyle Data provides insights on how mobile operators are deploying big data and AI to protect themselves and their consumers. Mobile operators face an increasingly complex battle against sophisticated global cybercriminals.

We've all been there: That moment when your cellphone call drops out, or your mobile webpage stops loading, because you've hit a dead zone in coverage. To address that issue, AT&T says it someday intends to launch aerial drones that can provide signal where it's otherwise lacking, or where crowds are putting a great deal of strain on the existing cell network. The drones would add extra capacity, freeing up your phone to access the Web and in some cases make voice calls. The idea is like a more-localized version of what Google and Facebook have been dreaming of doing for the rest of the world: beaming Internet access down to the ground from hovering platforms in the sky above. Although LTE coverage is already plentiful in most cities, drone-based data connections could also play a role in responding to emergencies and natural disasters.