Tucked within Google's unremarkable Allo messaging app is a real treasure: Google Assistant, which injects Google Now with an eager-to-please personality that finally provides the give-and-take other digital assistants lack. We've always talked about Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, and Google Now as the three digital assistants from the top smartphone platforms. But the truth is that Google Now was little more than a series of informative cards, while Siri and Cortana preferred a text-based approach with a bit of sass. Google Assistant retains its visual approach, but within a messaging context that really nails it in how you interact with the app itself. Google announced Google Assistant this past May, and the preview version of it is live in Allo, which itself can be used on Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) on up.

NEW YORK – Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Japan's aging, shrinking population was not a burden, but an incentive to boost productivity through innovations like robots, wireless sensors and artificial intelligence. Abe's comments on Wednesday came days after official data showed that Japan has 34.6 million people aged 65 and older, or 27.3 percent of the population -- the highest proportion among advanced nations. "I have absolutely no worries about Japan's demography," Abe said in a prepared speech at a Reuters Newsmaker event, noting that nominal gross domestic product had grown despite losing 3 million working-age people over the last three years. Japan may be losing its population. But these are incentives for us," he said. Because we will continue to be motivated to grow our productivity," Abe added, citing robots, wireless sensors, and Artificial Intelligence as among the tools to do so.

This is the first in a series of posts exploring Compositional Pattern-Producing Networks in TensorFlow. I made the code available on a github repo for reference. It may seem overkill to implement CPPNs with TensorFlow when numpy would do the job, but we will build onto this work later on. In recent neural network based image generation techniques, typically the generator network will attempt to draw the entire image at once. For example, if the desired resolution of an output image is 256x256, then the final layer of the neural network will have 65536 values for a black and white image.

Salesforce Einstein is artificial intelligence (AI) built into the core of the Salesforce Platform, where it powers the world's smartest CRM. It delivers advanced AI capabilities to sales, service, and marketing -- and enables anyone to use clicks or code to build AI-powered apps that get smarter with every interaction. Now, everyone in every role and industry can use AI to be their best.

What are the implications for the digital marketing industry, and what methods can digital marketers use when creating scripts for their own brand's bot? Digital marketing'bots' and'AI's are just scripts, integrated into an app interface. They rapidly scan the user's text input and deliver a response, pre-designed and pre-loaded by their creators. Bots and AIs have typically performed a customer service role, answering queries and directing users to helpful contacts and resources. Now, increasingly, they are also used to participate in or even initiate sales conversations.

Salesforce has officially unveiled Einstein, a set of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities it says will help users of its platform serve their customers better. Billing the technology as "AI for everyone", Salesforce is putting Einstein's capabilities into all its clouds, bringing machine learning, deep learning, predictive analytics, and natural language processing into each piece of its customer relationship management platform. In Salesforce's Sales Cloud, for instance, machine learning will power predictive lead scoring, a new tool that can analyse all data related to leads -- including standard and custom fields, activity data from sales reps, and behavioural activity from prospects -- to generate a predictive score for each lead. The models will continuously improve over time by learning from signals like lead source, industry, job title, Web clicks and emails. Another tool will analyse CRM data combined with customer interactions such as inbound emails from prospects to identify buying signals earlier in the sales process and recommend next steps to increase the sales rep's ability to close a deal.

Artificial intelligence and big data are shaping up to have the biggest impact on the healthcare industry, and most of that money will be coming from venture capital funds, according to a new survey of digital health executives and investors. Silicon Valley Bank surveyed 122 founders, executives and investors in health technology, asking about the biggest opportunities and threats for the industry in the next year. The survey was conducted during Silicon Valley Bank's HealthTech NYC event and was attended by such companies and investment firms as Celmatix, Aledad and Andreesen Horowitz. Almost half of respondents say big data, followed by artificial intelligence (35 percent) are the most promising technologies in terms of impact on investment. "Big data has been integral to our work at Celmatix. It has empowered physicians to be able to counsel women about their chances of having a baby, based on their relevant personal metrics, and not just their age," Dr. Piraye Yurttas Beim, Chief Executive Officer of Celmatix said in a statement.

DeepMind, founded in the UK in 2010, created the first computer program to ever beat a professional at the game of Go (AlphaGo), created a DeepRL system to play Atari games at beyond human level performance (DQN), and is engaged in various research projects with the NHS to apply machine learning to radiotherapy planning for head and neck cancers and identification of conditions like age related macular degeneration in optical coherence tomography scans.

How will artificial intelligence systems change the way we live? This is a tough question: on one hand, AI tools are producing compelling advances in complex tasks, with dramatic improvements in energy consumption, audio processing, and leukemia detection. There is extraordinary potential to do much more in the future. On the other hand, AI systems are already making problematic judgements that are producing significant social, cultural, and economic impacts in people's everyday lives. AI and decision-support systems are embedded in a wide array of social institutions, from influencing who is released from jail to shaping the news we see.

A number of companies are proving that, by incorporating some key user experience principles, creators can ensure that people will continue to use bots in 2017. For instance, The Horoscope Bot description (right) explains exactly what the bot has to offer. Copa Airlines' Ana bot is a virtual assistant that, "lets you ask questions using everyday language." Once a person sets up an Amazon Echo (via an app), they are presented with interesting and useful "skills" (Alexa's voice-activated versions of apps).