Remember what you were doing back in 2011? Maybe you had heard the term Big Data, but did you ever hear of Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Machine Learning? In the past five years, three things came together that make AI possible at commercial scale that's caused a big stir in 2016: Today I'm humbled to welcome Tim Llewellynn to the MakerZone! Tim is CEO and co-Founder at nViso (www.nviso.ch), To many people the whole "AI" thing came as kind of a surprise in 2016, but not to Tim and his team. The team at nViso are a commercial entity but have their roots in L'cole Polytechnique Federale Lausanne (EPFL).

Have you noticed anything interesting the last time you uploaded a picture on Facebook? Perhaps you picked up on the fact that sometimes Facebook tries to tag your friends and family for you. Welcome to DeepFace, Facebook's facial recognition system. If you're wondering why it's called DeepFace, it's because at its core, the system is based on a type of Artificial Intelligence (AI) called Deep Learning. AI is here, and it's changing the way that we interact with technology on a daily basis.

The first of the digital GP services to face a CQC inspection has been given a provisional clean bill of health, with the service provided via a mobile app deemed "safe". A draft Care Quality Commission inspection report on Salford Quays, Manchester, also known as Dr Now, has been released by the company. The draft report found the service provided "safe care in accordance with the relevant regulations". Dr Now is one of two private digital healthcare providers, along with Babylon Health, that the CQC has inspected as part of an "independent health" pilot. As reported by Digital Health News earlier this week, by April next year the CQC plans to roll out a more focused regulatory regime for the growing number of digital healthcare services, many of them run by companies charging for private access to NHS doctors.

Her name is JiLL and she is here to assist you as the new receptionist and concierge at the company's facilities management division in Sydney. Chris Hunt, Australasian Head, Integrated Facilities Management at JLL shows JiLL a 57cm tall NAO robot. JiLL joins the team as the firm's corporate front of house admin team for it's new offices at 50 Carrington Street She is 57cm tall humanoid NAO robot and part of the agent's next step in what it calls its workplace strategy. Having robots in warehouses is not a new idea, but creating one to be the front of house administrator shows where automation could lead in the white collar office sector. The idea is that some tasks can now be done by robots, leaving employees to focus on more in-depth "tactical activities".

This is the year of artificial intelligence, when the technology came into its own for mainstream businesses. Many well-known names have committed to adding AI solutions to their product mix – General Electric is pushing its AI business called Predix, IBM runs ads featuring its Watson technology talking with Bob Dylan, and just recently CRM giant Saleforce announced it would be adding AI to it products. Its system, called Einstein, promises to provide insights into what sales leads to follow and what products to make next. These moves represent years of development and billions in investment. There are big pushes for AI in manufacturing, agriculture, healthcare and many other industry sectors.

Pete Skomoroch and Jon Bruner will be hosting O'Reilly Bot Day October 19, 2016, in San Francisco. Subscribe to the O'Reilly Bots Podcast to learn about advances in conversational user interfaces, artificial intelligence, and messaging that are revolutionizing the way we interact with software. Find us on Stitcher, iTunes, SoundCloud and RSS. Something remarkable is happening in the world of artificial intelligence. At the O'Reilly AI Conference in New York, people weren't just talking about AI as a far-off dream; they were talking about AI as something that exists in real products today.

If you want to get something done with a computer, it turns out, there are better ways to do it than laboriously type out conversational sentences to be read by a programme with a shaky grasp of the language and a gratingly affected sense of humour. So I'm as surprised as anyone that for the past week, I've started every morning with a 10 minute conversation with a chatbot. The bot is the creation of Pittsburgh-based language-learning startup Duolingo, and it's the first major change for the company's app since it launched four years ago. In that time, the service has gained 150 million users, and stuck stubbornly to the top of the educational app charts on every platform it's available on. If you haven't used Duolingo, the premise is simple: five to 20 minutes of interactive training a day is enough to learn a language.

Companies are increasingly using software robots to perform routine business processes by mimicking the ways in which people interact with software applications. And the rapidly growing market for robot process automation (RPA) is already showing signs of an important emerging trend: Enterprises are beginning to employ RPA together with cognitive technologies such as speech recognition, natural language processing, and machine learning to automate perceptual and judgment-based tasks once reserved for humans. The integration of cognitive technologies and RPA is extending automation to new areas and can help companies become more efficient and agile as they move down the path of becoming fully digital businesses. RPA software automates repetitive, rules-based processes usually performed by people sitting in front of computers. By interacting with applications just as a human would, software robots can open email attachments, complete e-forms, record and re-key data, and perform other tasks that mimic human action.

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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has identified machine learning as the firm's key focus as cloud computing usage becomes more widespread. It is an area that is fast becoming the battleground for the big cloud providers. Google and Amazon Web Services both offer a range of tools that make it easier for developers to create'intelligent' applications, while the likes of Salesforce are keen to incorporate artificial intelligence into their software services. Speaking at an event in London's Canary Wharf financial district, Nadella's sales pitch placed emphasis on the role of machine learning across Microsoft's range of cloud products – from infrastructure and platform as a service offerings in Azure, to its Dynamics and Office365 cloud software. First he highlighted how Azure Iaas will support "the next generation of applications". He said: "Whenever you think about the infrastructure layer in computing, you are always driven by the applications of the future: what are developers writing, not just today, but what is going to be the core currency of the applications of the future?"