"When in Rome, do as the Romans do," the proverb says. But what if you're only in the Italian capital for just one day and you're keen to fit in as much of its history and culture as possible? Sure, you could take a few hours out to plan your trip or you could try to book a tour guide to take you round "The Eternal City." But now there's a third option: Tourism apps, websites and chatbots that use artificial intelligence to tailor itineraries for the user based on their preferences and time. They're rapidly popping up, so NBC News decided to put three of them to the test.

Let's start at the beginning. The term "artificial intelligence" gets tossed around a lot to describe robots, self-driving cars, facial recognition technology and almost anything else that seems vaguely futuristic. A group of academics coined the term in the late 1950s as they set out to build a machine that could do anything the human brain could do -- skills like reasoning, problem-solving, learning new tasks and communicating using natural language. Progress was relatively slow until around 2012, when a single idea shifted the entire field. It was called a neural network.

Microsoft's Bing chatbot is offering replies in three different tones as it seeks to address some criticisms of the service. The search engine's chatbot, powered by the same technology behind ChatGPT, will now give users options for three types of response: creative ("creating surprise and entertainment"), balanced ("reasonable and coherent") or precise ("concise, prioritising accuracy"). The new-look Bing is being rolled out gradually but generated wild responses in some interactions shortly after its launch last month, including declaring its love for a New York Times journalist. This prompted Microsoft to add some restrictions, which resulted in Bing's chatbot refusing to answer some queries. Microsoft's head of web services, Mikhail Parakhin, said the updated Bing should now make fewer refusals and "hallucinations", or false replies. Referring to the tone options, Parakhin said he preferred the "creative" tone, although "precise" was "much more factual".

The Bing chatbot is powered by a kind of artificial intelligence called a neural network. That may sound like a computerized brain, but the term is misleading. A neural network is just a mathematical system that learns skills by analyzing vast amounts of digital data. As a neural network examines thousands of cat photos, for instance, it can learn to recognize a cat. Most people use neural networks every day. It's the technology that identifies people, pets and other objects in images posted to internet services like Google Photos.

Microsoft's often-overlooked search engine, Bing, is mounting a comeback with ChatGPT, the suddenly ubiquitous chatbot capable of composing song lyrics, writing academic essays and answering all manner of questions. The new version of Bing was released to a limited group of users on Tuesday. The revamped product is part of Microsoft's $13 billion investment in OpenAI, the artificial intelligence lab behind ChatGPT that Microsoft is betting on to stay competitive with its big tech rivals like Google, Apple and Meta. But those companies are also racing to incorporate the new technology into their own software. A day before the unveiling of the new Bing, Google announced that it would soon release an experimental chatbot called Bard for its own search engine, which is much more widely used than Bing.

"That's a very manual intensive job, and one that's not well-liked by many," says Sally Miller, global digital transformation officer for DHL Supply Chain, the world's largest third-party logistics company. Facing a labor shortage and high turnover in these kinds of warehouse jobs, DHL Supply Chain turned to robot maker Boston Dynamics to come up with a solution. In development for several years, the first two Stretch robots have just been deployed at an apparel company, which DHL Supply Chain declined to name, and about six more will be sent to other warehouse sites over the next three or four months. Stretch is the first robot that Boston Dynamics has purpose-built for a specific set of applications, according to Kevin Blankespoor, the company's senior vice president and general manager of warehouse robotics. His is a title that lays bare the potential Boston Dynamics sees in logistics.

Next month, AI will enter the courtroom, and the US legal system may never be the same. An artificial intelligence chatbot, technology programmed to respond to questions and hold a conversation, is expected to advise two individuals fighting speeding tickets in courtrooms in undisclosed cities. The two will wear a wireless headphone, which will relay what the judge says to the chatbot being run by DoNotPay, a company that typically helps people fight traffic tickets through the mail. The headphone will then play the chatbot's suggested responses to the judge's questions, which the individuals can then choose to repeat in court. But it also has the potential to change how people interact with the law, and to bring many more changes over time.

On a recent afternoon Jonas Thiel, a socioeconomics major at a college in northern Germany, spent more than an hour chatting online with some of the left-wing political philosophers he had been studying. These were not the actual philosophers but virtual recreations, brought to conversation, if not quite life, by sophisticated chatbots on a website called Character.AI. Mr. Thiel's favorite was a bot that imitated Karl Kautsky, a Czech-Austrian socialist who died before World War Two. When Mr. Thiel asked Kautsky's digital avatar to provide some advice for modern-day socialists struggling to rebuild the worker's movement in Germany, Kautsky-bot suggested that they launch a newspaper. "They can use it not only as a means of spreading socialist propaganda, which is in short supply in Germany for the time being, but also to organize working class people," the bot said. Kautsky-bot went on to argue that the working classes would eventually "come to their senses" and embrace a modern-day Marxist revolution.

On a bluff south of San Francisco overlooking the Pacific Ocean, an electric motor whips a drone built by startup Zipline off a catapult launch ramp beside me and into the air on a test flight. The aircraft, with a fixed-wing design resembling that of a conventional airplane, pilots itself north, plans its approach based on the wind direction, makes a sweeping turn and drops a box of Band-Aids, Advil and Tums by parachute onto the grass a few yards in front of me. Drone deliveries could be dropping into your life, too, as the technology involved matures and expands beyond isolated test projects. In 2023, drones could replace vans and your own trip to the store when you need medicine, takeout dinners, cordless drill batteries or dishwasher soap. Today, Alphabet Wing drones reach hundreds of thousands of people in Australia, Finland and Texas and will expand its service in 2023, according to Jonathan Bass, who runs marketing for the business.

A robot called Golfi is the first to be able to autonomously spot and travel to a golf ball anywhere on a green and sink a putt. Golf-playing robots have been developed before, but they have needed humans to set them up in front of a ball and program them to make the correct swing. The most famous is LDRIC, a robot that hit a lengthy hole-in-one at Arizona's TPC Scottsdale golf course in 2016. In contrast, Golfi, engineered by Annika Junker at Paderborn University in Germany and her colleagues, can find golf balls and wheel itself into place thanks to input from a 3D camera that looks down on a green from above. The camera scans the green and an algorithm then approximates the surface before simulating 3000 golf swings towards the hole from random points, taking into account factors such as the speed and weight of the ball and the friction of the green, which are described by physics-based equations.