When Google-parent Alphabet Inc. reported eye-popping earnings last week its executives couldn't stop talking up the company's investments in machine learning and artificial intelligence. For any other company that would be a wonky distraction from its core business. At Google, the two are intertwined. Artificial intelligence sits at the extreme end of machine learning, which sees people create software that can learn about the world. Google has been one of the biggest corporate sponsors of AI, and has invested heavily in it for videos, speech, translation and, recently, search.

As the automated, intelligent conversation settles into its role as a major marketing channel, a variety of chatbot authoring platforms have made their entrance. This week, a new one promises to be "the most complete conversational computing platform available." The PullString Platform, based on technology previously employed for Call of Duty's Lt. Reyes chatbot on Facebook Messenger and Mattel's Hello Barbie doll, is now open to the public after five years of development. The company, formerly called ToyTalk, was founded in 2011. About a quarter of the 40-person staff for the San Francisco-based company came from the animation studio Pixar, and the intent is to provide a platform that goes beyond chatbots.

UK-based legal AI company RAVN Systems has formally launched a new application to review documents for legal professional privilege (LPP) using its cognitive engine. The new service will be branded the'LPP Robot' and will be offered alongside RAVN's other AI capabilities. The system reduces the time taken in such reviews by over 80% and greatly reduces the level of manpower needed to conduct such a task. Accuracy levels are also improved. This is an important step as the ability to spot LPP documents is of critical importance to lawyers, especially where investigations of large company data sets are involved or when part of a wider discovery process due to litigation. It matters because LPP material represents communications between a lawyer and their client, which could also include privileged material between an inhouse lawyer and an executive in their company.

It's unavoidable: the Internet of Things will kill many jobs. Self-driving cars alone could put millions out of work. And the manufacturing sector, already reeling from decades of job losses, could see millions of more jobs replaced by machines. The convergence of IoT and cognitive computing could also threaten many prestigious jobs as computers learn to perform thinking tasks rather than solely mechanical ones. "We will soon be looking at hordes of citizens of zero economic value," write venture investor William H. Davidow and technology writer Michael S. Malone in Harvard Business Review. "Figuring out how to deal with the impacts of this development will be the greatest challenge facing free market economies in this century."

Amazon has a new annual competition targeted at university students. The "Alexa Prize" challenges students to build a chatbot for Alexa, the company's artificial intelligence engine. Amazon this year wants the chat bot to be able to converse coherently for 20 minutes about pop culture and recent events. Up for grabs is a grand prize of up to 1.5 million and total prizes worth 2.5 million. Amazon this week joined Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and IBM to found a partnership on advancing AI in society.

Microsoft is adding the commercial version of the Docker Engine into Windows Server 2016, continuing the company's efforts to reach out to include Linux in its plans. The announcement, made this morning at the Microsoft Ignite conference in Atlanta, coincides with the official launch of Windows Server 2016, which is due to reach general availability in October. It means that Docker will now run on Windows, but in a way, it's also a step in Microsoft's efforts to keep Azure open. Under CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft has not only embraced the cloud but has also accepted the importance of Linux there. Windows could have continued with its own form of containers, but it's now embraced Docker.

Artificial Intelligence has been the holy grail of Computer Science for over a hundred years and we are finally starting to scratch the first layer of this incredibly complex system. Currently, all the major players in the Technology business are investing heavily in the R&D of AI systems, but it would seem we are still very far away from the development of a true AI. To truly get a good grasp on where the industry stood in its quest for intelligent machines, we sat down with John Giannandrea, the former Head of Machine Learning and currently the SVP Search at Google, for a one-on-one. From the conversation, it became clear that we have had the latest developments in automation all wrong, and here is the real picture. John was quick to clarify that there are three distinct levels of Machine Intelligence; Machine Learning, Machine Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence.

With all of the advancements made in artificial intelligence and machine learning today, there seems to be an influx of tools and solutions that are starting to leverage cognitive capabilities. But do these tools and solutions actually reflect the true meaning of AI? According to Jonas Nwuke, platform manager for IBM Watson, AI (or cognitive computing) is "intended to help people make better decisions. The system learns at scale, gets better through experience, and interacts with humans in a more natural way." The problem in today's software development industry is that because AI is such a big umbrella term, it often gets misused or overused, according to Todd Anglin, chief evangelist at Progress.

It was an accidental discovery. Miami based start up, Premonition, was set up to do legal analytics. They assembled the World's largest litigation database and trained an artificial intelligence system to read it. While primarily focused on finding the performance of individual lawyers before specific judges to determine potential relationships, they noticed that a particularly prolific foreclosure attorney produced an 83% win rate for one of his bank clients, while another was only winning 16% of their foreclosures, essentially the same case types. "We couldn't figure it out and had all kinds of foolish theories why," Premonition co-founder and inventor, Toby Unwin confides.

On Thursday Amazon announced the Alexa Prize, a 1 million award for the creation of a conversational artificial intelligence that can talk to people "coherently and engagingly" for a third of an hour. To aid the endeavor, up to ten teams will get a 100,000 stipend from Amazon along with Alexa-enabled devices, free cloud computing and support from Amazon's Alexa team. The push comes as Amazon's digital assistant Alexa is coming to multiple platforms beyond its original home on Amazon's Echo speaker, and as artificial intelligence is anticipated to become the cutting edge of tech companies' interfaces with their customers. The Alexa Prize announcement comes the same day several of the world's largest tech companies announced the formation of a consortium aimed at fostering the promise of artificial intelligence.