Google may have finally taken control of its hardware with the new Pixel phones, but the company's still focusing on software. The AI-powered Assistant is an integral part of its new phones, Allo messaging app and smart speaker, making for a more uniform and useful experience across all of Google's (and other brands') devices. If that sounds familiar, it's because Apple brought Siri to multiple platforms first. Assistant brings voice control to the new Google Home smart speaker, in addition to the new Pixels, and lets you control your Chromecast playback with your voice. The goal, said the company's CEO Sundar Pichai, is to make Assistant "universally available."

Salesforce partners headed to the Dreamforce mega-conference taking place this week in San Francisco are eagerly awaiting their introduction to Einstein, a broad set of artificial intelligence capabilities that will be infused into almost all of the CRM leader's products. Dreamforce will be Einstein's coming-out party after months of Salesforce teasing an array of cognitive capabilities, such as machine learning and deep learning, that assist users in developing and maintaining relationships with their customers. The AI technology will be offered as native enhancements to apps like the Sales, Service, Marketing, IoT and Analytics clouds, as well as a stand-alone development platform partners can leverage to customize intelligent solutions. As is often the case with the introduction of cutting-edge technologies into established product lines, however, it will be incumbent on the channel to figure out how to monetize Einstein by putting it in the hands of customers. "Ideally, we'll be able to create entirely new enhancements to sales, service and marketing processes using Einstein as a toolset that ultimately drives better user decision-making," Glenn Weinstein, CIO of Indianapolis-based Salesforce partner Appirio, told CRN.

After a several-month trial in which staff used the AI internally, while they dealt with business clients, RBS will let Luvo talk directly to the outside world by the end of 2016. Luvo functions as a chatbot – a program that opens when you access the bank's website – that you can ask typical customer service questions, concerning lost PINs and credit cards that need to be replaced. At first glance, this is nothing extraordinary, and chatbots have become a frequent feature for websites dealing with a large flow of individual queries. But RBS and IBM, which spent millions developing the program together, say that it is revolutionary, with a nuanced understanding of human speech, a "unique" personality, and an ability to learn on the job. "To be helpful it has to understand dialogue," the bank's managing director of digitization, Chris Popple, explained in a presentation earlier this year.

When commercial-scale crops in First World countries get diseases, lab-equipped experts are typically called in to identify the affliction and advise treatment. Such resources aren't always available to smallhold farmers in developing nations, however, who may lose entire crops without ever knowing what was wrong with them. That's why scientists are now creating software that could be incorporated into an app that identifies crop diseases, based on user-supplied smartphone photos.

What are the best practices for creating artificial intelligence? It's a question posed by the "partnership on AI" formed by major American technology firms. The goal of the partnership, which includes Google, IBM, Microsoft and Facebook, is to "conduct research, recommend best practices, and publish research under an open license (sic) in areas such as ethics, fairness and inclusivity; transparency, privacy, and interoperability; collaboration between people and AI systems; and the trustworthiness, reliability and robustness of the technology." Now, a clarification of terms: AI and robots are different. I should know: I wrote a series of novels about self-replicating humanoid robots.

Google has revealed its new own-built smartphone, Pixel, which the tech giant says has been built with artificial intelligence at its centre. The Pixel has Google Assistant built into its software, the firm's artificial intelligence program that is designed to understand context and help with tasks. The new phone was unveiled at an event in San Francisco, and comes in both a 5in and 5.5in size. Google's range of new products including its new own-built smartphone, Pixel (centre), which the tech giant says has been built with artificial intelligence at its centre It has been billed by Google as housing the "best smartphone camera ever made" and the first device to be built to work with Google's new Daydream virtual reality platform. Users will be able to access the Assistant AI program from any screen on the device, and it will be able to understand context.

We are in the middle of a technological revolution. Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to fundamentally transform the world around us -- the way we communicate, work, and conduct our daily lives. While artificial intelligence has made significant advances in recent years, its inception goes back more than six decades. Put simply, "Artificial intelligence is the activity devoted to making machines intelligent, and intelligence is that quality which enables an entity to function appropriately with foresight in its environment." Artificial intelligence encompasses deep learning, computer vision, robotics, collaborative systems, machine learning and natural learning process among other things.

CCF Artificial intelligence will make the tech channel a happier place by removing much of the tedious grinding interaction that poisons relationships between vendors, distributors and partners, Lenovo's boss claimed today. Lenovo COO Gianfranco Lanci told the audience at Canalys Channels Forum that the firm was examining how to use emerging technologies to change the way it does business. "We are working on lot of things - big data and analytics, AI." "You can think about how to run the company in a different way." Pressed as to what he meant, Lanci said the organisation was already shifting to chat, away from email, although this was not always possible, with some customers wedded to fusty old email. Further ahead, he said, AI could start taking over some of the workaday, grinding tedious tasks that occupy much channel time – such as handling financing issues.

When heavy August rain flooded Louisiana neighborhoods, residents self-organized in online communities to reach out for help. For federal service providers, the problem was taking all that information and using it to provide assistance. "The difficulty was how do you take that data and make it A) digestible and B) actionable in a way, or even to be able to spot trends before they happen," said Justin Herman, SocialGov community leader at the General Services Administration. "This isn't just like an outreach thing, this isn't just a chatbot thing, this is being able to look at where to provide lifesaving food, water, shelter into areas." Register for the Ask the CIO Chat with Andy Ozment of the Homeland Security Department on Oct. 11, at 1:30 p.m.