By 2021, robots will have eliminated 6% of all jobs in the US, starting with customer service representatives and eventually truck and taxi drivers. That's just one cheery takeaway from a report released by market research company Forrester this week. These robots, or intelligent agents, represent a set of AI-powered systems that can understand human behavior and make decisions on our behalf. Current technologies in this field include virtual assistants like Alexa, Cortana, Siri and Google Now as well as chatbots and automated robotic systems. For now, they are quite simple, but over the next five years they will become much better at making decisions on our behalf in more complex scenarios, which will enable mass adoption of breakthroughs like self-driving cars.

Today Etsy announced it's buying Blackbird Technologies, a startup that developed search and recommendation tech for ecommerce companies using machine learning and artificial intelligence. Reached by VentureBeat, an Etsy spokesperson declined to share how much the company paid for Blackbird. This Blackbird Technologies is not related to a surveillance company of the same name, which U.S. defense contractor Raytheon acquired in 2014. In a press release, Etsy said Blackbird's team will join the company to "accelerate our efforts to further optimize the search experience," adding that "there may be opportunities to deploy Blackbird's Artificial Intelligence technology in areas beyond search that will help strengthen our markets and seller services platform." Blackbird will shut down in the coming months following the deal, a person familiar with the matter told VentureBeat.

It all started with a conversational interface, and then bots just took over the debate. Even in this great piece, while Dan Grover mentioned the ubiquity of chat, he also highlighted the fact that we should recognize the limitations of pure text-based input method. Looking at the history of bots, I struggle to see bots overtaking the streamlined GUI experience even now -- here's one recent subpar experience out of many. There's a good reason why we accepted the web and made it part of our everyday lives. It's very naive and sometimes bordering funny to think that bots will be panacea to everything we do in life and will take over humanity one day.

It's not just gigantic search engines that are looking to acquire tech and talent around emerging areas like speech recognition. Even design and craft marketplaces can use a little machine learning and artificial intelligence to make their wheels turn a little better. Today, the popular handmade-goods site Etsy announced it has acquired a startup called Blackbird Technologies, which has developed algorithms that can help Etsy develop better and more advanced search with features like natural language processing, image recognition and analytics. Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but we're asking and will update if we learn more. The company's employees -- it appears there were around 10 -- will all be joining Etsy.

It's not just gigantic search engines that are looking to acquire tech and talent around emerging areas like speech recognition. Even design and craft marketplaces can use a little machine learning and artificial intelligence to make their wheels turn a little better. Today, the popular handmade goods site Etsy announced that it has acquired a startup called Blackbird Technologies, which has developed algorithms that can help Etsy develop better and more advanced search with features like natural language processing, image recognition and analytics. Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but we're asking and will update if we learn more. The company's employees -- it appears there were around 10 -- will all be joining Etsy.

BOULDER, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today Tractica announced the launch of its new Artificial Intelligence Advisory Service, a subscription-based market research and analysis suite that provides independent and objective market intelligence and strategy insights for companies engaged in the rapidly evolving artificial intelligence (AI) market. As part of the service, Tractica's global industry analyst team provides strategic and quantitative analysis focused on the market opportunity for AI technologies in enterprise, consumer, and government markets. Research reports include an in-depth examination of AI business models, use cases, technology issues, and key industry players in addition to detailed market sizing, segmentation, and forecasts. Tractica's Artificial Intelligence Advisory Service examines use cases and business models for the application of artificial intelligence technologies in enterprise, consumer, and government markets.

BOULDER, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today Tractica announced the launch of its new Artificial Intelligence Advisory Service, a subscription-based market research and analysis suite that provides independent and objective market intelligence and strategy insights for companies engaged in the rapidly evolving artificial intelligence (AI) market. As part of the service, Tractica's global industry analyst team provides strategic and quantitative analysis focused on the market opportunity for AI technologies in enterprise, consumer, and government markets. "Artificial intelligence technologies are already beginning to have a disruptive effect on established business models across virtually every industry, while simultaneously enabling new business processes that were not previously possible," says managing director Clint Wheelock. "Rapid advances in AI technologies like deep learning, machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing (NLP) are being enabled by more powerful hardware, sophisticated algorithms, and a virtually limitless ocean of data to analyze and interpret." As part of its Artificial Intelligence service, Tractica's industry analysts offer timely and actionable market insights, covering specific technology and industry sectors as well as overall market conditions and trends.

Researchers at Uppsala University have used computer modelling to study how brain tumours arise. The study, which is published today in the journal EBioMedicine, illustrated how researchers in the future will be able to use large-scale data to find new disease mechanisms and identify new treatment targets. The last ten years' progress in molecular biology has drastically changed how cancer researchers work. Instead of almost exclusively using different biological models, like cells, today large-scale statistical analyses are increasingly used to understand tumour diseases and find new therapies. Researchers at Uppsala University, together with colleagues at the University of Gothenburg, Chalmers University of Technology and University of Freiburg, have developed a new algorithm, aSICS, that uses large amounts of data to suggest hypotheses about "what causes what" in a cancer cell.

Google took a shot at Facebook's chatbot-building services on Monday with its acquisition of API.ai, a company that helps developers build and improve conversational interfaces for their services. API.ai has more than 60,000 developers using its platform to create conversational user interfaces for apps like Slack, Facebook Messenger and Kik. Its tools make it easier for programs to parse human language and translate it into action. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The company offers a vast suite of capabilities for natural language understanding, including pre-defined knowledge packages known as Domains, which make it easier for assistants to understand a variety of common requests any additional coding.

In the consumer universe, artificial intelligence is best known as a nice-to-have if stealthy feature that can suggest movies or book rides. But AI's greater worth could well be in the money-making enterprise arena, where sales, service and marketing initiatives stand to be streamlined by the data-crunching deductive power of machine learning. That's certainly the bet customer relationship management giant Salesforce is making by unveiling Einstein, the no-brainer name given to a suite of advanced AI capabilities. With Einstein, salespeople can focus on leads that statistically show the most promise of becoming clients, and customer service reps may be better prepared to answer a rainbow of consumer queries. "The strongest aspect of Einstein is that it is deeply embedded in the platform, it's just working automatically," says Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, whose company officially rolled out the base product Sunday.