Microsoft has a new artificial intelligence bot named Taylor that tries to hold conversations on Twitter, Kik, and GroupMe. And she makes me feel terribly old and out of touch. Tay, as she calls herself, is a chatbot that's targeted at 18 to 24 year-olds in the US. Just tweet at her or message her and she responds with words and occasionally meme pictures. She's meant to be able to learn a few things about you--basic details like nickname, favorite food, relationship status--and is supposed to be able to have engaging conversations.

It's easy to make too much or too little of an event that took place earlier this month. A computer program called AlphaGo played a five-game match of the Japanese board game of go against South Korean grandmaster Lee Sedol. AlphaGo won easily, 4 games to 1. It's been nearly two decades since the Deep Blue computer program beat Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997 to claim superiority in that game. Go had been considered much more difficult for artificial intelligence (AI) to master (for one thing, chess is played on a board with an 8-by-8 grid producing 64 squares; the go grid is 19-by-19). AlphaGo succeeded by combining two powerful computational approaches.

Everyday virtual assistants – like Siri, or Google Now's voice feature – are well-trained to respond to your queries about weather, directions and other basic information. Now a new crop of artificial intelligence assistants with names like Tara and Amy are jockeying for a job at your company. San Francisco-based TARA, created by Iba Masood and Syed Ahmad as part of Y Combinator, is a chatbot designed to help startups and small businesses offload the work of sourcing, contacting and hiring freelancers to build and redesign websites and applications. "Our customers do not have to be technical," adds Masood, noting that the assistant has helped non-technical business owners to add functionality like apps of payments to their existing products. "Through simple commands such as'build me a VR app for Android,' TARA assigns the contractor and helps build the entire platform."

Images leaked online this week give the first good look at what is claimed to be a controller for the highly anticipated Nintendo NX. The device pictured in the post by Reddit user perkele37 supports rumours that the new controller will have an elliptical shape and a touchscreen covering its entire surface. Apart from the touchscreen, the rumoured controller has just two'nubs' and a headphone jack. Images leaked online this week give the first good look at what is claimed to be a controller for the highly anticipated Nintendo NX. The images were revealed on Wednesday, just days after a similar leak showed blurry photos of a device claimed to be the controller.

Not all Muslims speak Arabic." For example, Ismail said, the world's largest Muslim nation is Indonesia, which is not anywhere near the Middle East. "People just don't realize that." It's not just the portrayal of Muslims that is problematic. In several video games, images of the Arab and Muslim world are often inaccurate.

The Google Chrome extension is similar to a spell check function, except instead of flagging misspelled words, it identifies insults and hateful messages and then prompts the user to write something else. That's from the website for Reword, a new Google Chrome extension designed to combat cyberbullying. The tool identifies insulting words in online posts and messages, and then crosses them out with a red line. Developed in Australia by Headspace, which is Australia's National Youth Mental Health Foundation, and ad agency Leo Burnett Melbourne, Reword aims to address online abuse by preventing hateful messages before they're even posted. "Sadly, online bullying is endemic," Headspace CEO Chris Tanti said in a news release.

SAN FRANCISCO -- The days of free spending appear to be waning as Alphabet gets serious about subsidiary companies becoming more disciplined and accountable. "The fiscal discipline era has now descended upon everything," Tony Fadell, the CEO of smart device subsidiary Nest, told The Information in an interview. Google bought Fadell's company for 3.2 billion in 2014. We're going to hold you to those numbers," Fadell said. Last week Bloomberg reported that Alphabet is trying to sell Boston Dynamics, the robotics start-up it bought in late 2013, because it's unlikely to release a marketable product in the next few years. "There is increasingly a new level of financial discipline being injected into how Alphabet allocates capital," said S&P Global Market Intelligence analyst Scott Kessler. He and other analysts see the influence of chief financial officer Ruth Porat, who has shown a greater willingness to keep costs in check while still aggressively pursuing revenue growth. "From an investor's perspective, you want Alphabet and Google out there taking risks and making big bets.

Established companies are waking to the import of The Internet of Things and starting to extend their businesses to leverage it for new ways to reach consumers. At OMMA SXSW over the weekend, Coca-Cola's Derek Myers, group director of strategy and commercialization, described to attendees how the company's vending machines capture more than 100 data points a second. Until now, those data points have been returning daily inventory and payment info to headquarters. But in true IoT fashion, Coke is going to be able to deliver personal messages to a consumer via the screen on the front of the machine. Connected vending machines, also in the works from other brands and being deployed around the world, are but one example of the extent of coming connected objects.

In an announcement made on Wednesday at its GCP Next conference in San Francisco, tech giant Google said that it is rolling out the private beta of a new Cloud Machine Learning service which will enable businesses to create a custom machine learning model for predicting the future of their ventures. According to the details shared by Google, the Cloud Machine Learning service has the capability to handle data ingestion and training, and subsequently make use of the resultant machine-learning model to make predictions for a business' future. Google said that for building a custom machine learning model that can make future predictions for the future of a business, users of the Cloud Machine Learning service need to work with data which they have stored in Google's other cloud services. In a demonstration of the creation of a custom machine learning model for predicting the future of a business, Jeff Dean -- the chief of Google's Brain deep-learning research project -- showed how the Cloud Machine Learning service could build a model which predicts a click by a consumer on an advertisement. The model demonstrated by Dean, to show how the Cloud Machine Learning service works, was based on marketing software firm Criteo's anonymized data pertaining to consumers' chances of clicking on an advertisement.

The Defense Department has decided to make a game out of the problem of spectrum crowding. The Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2), the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency's newest Grand Challenge, will reward teams that develop systems that collaboratively (as opposed to competitively) adapt in real time to changes in congested electromagnetic spectrum, DARPA said in a release. SC2's primary goal is to imbue radios with advanced machine-learning capabilities to collectively develop strategies for optimizing use of the wireless spectrum that aren't possible today due to the intrinsically inefficient approach of pre-allocating exclusive access to designated frequencies. Making more efficient use of the finite spectrum environment has become a DOD priority as the spectrum becomes ever more crowded, and DOD has to comply with a presidential order to free up 500 MHz of its spectrum for commercial use by 2020. "I think today we're in a good spot…We did well with the last auction and the money is there to change where DOD can move and share spectrum," DOD CIO Terry Halvorsen said on March 22.