The acquisition joins Google's fleet of similar investments in the area could prove to greatly improve upon API.AI's capabilities. Just last year, Google opened up its open beta access to Google Cloud Natural Language API. API.AI's CEO is positive that the acquisition will give the company the capacity to continue pioneering the space, "With Google's knowledge, infrastructure and support, we can make sure you get access to the best available technologies and developments in AI and machine learning."

Oracle dived into the rapidly heating market for artificially intelligent business solutions Monday with the release of extensions infusing several traditional enterprise applications with machine-learning capabilities. The new Adaptive Intelligent Applications, enhancements of several Oracle Software-as-a-Service products, expose the data they generate, in concert with external data sets, to machine-learning algorithms that derive insight for optimizing those business processes. Oracle simultaneously enhanced its Analytics Cloud, a platform for advanced data processing that buttresses the self-learning apps with back-end cloud infrastructure, libraries of machine-learning algorithms, big data frameworks and a massive trove of data sets. "We're putting machine learning into core business processes," Rich Clayton, Oracle's vice president of business analytics, told CRN. "This is an evolution of what we currently do. We have business intelligence embedded in those processes, but we're putting more intelligence into it through machine learning."

The Musk-founded Tesla Motors is investing heavily in artificial intelligence, which is already at work in its vehicles. Teslas can now drive themselves on the highway, park themselves, and understand certain voice commands. Tesla is currently hiring for the role of computer vision scientist, someone who will help the company develop "full scene understanding, general object detection and classification," and "human intention direction." While there was a fatal May accident involving a driver using Tesla's Autopilot self-driving mode, Tesla's autonomous technology is still pretty good – it was the first Autopilot fatality in 130 million miles.

Just about the only real innovation happening in phones right now surrounds smart digital assistants - the likes of Google Now, Siri and Cortana - who gather up as much information about us as they can and then try and predict what it is we need next. And amidst all the talk of new cameras and extra storage, it's likely that the artificial intelligence powering our mobile phones is going to make the biggest impact on our lives in the years ahead. Here's what we can imagine coming in the not-too-distant future... We're already seeing basic versions of this on some phones, where your most-used apps appear at the top of the screen, but imagine that idea made much more intelligent: a phone that knows you so well, it launches Instagram before you're able to tap the icon. In the future there's no reason why Google Now couldn't use what it knows about you, how you use your phone, and past behaviour to work out when you're going to call home, or launch a maps app, or even take a photo (if you're near a famous landmark, say). There would be no need for an app drawer and no need to meticulously arrange your home screens, because every time you unlocked your phone, the app you were thinking about (plus some useful context-aware information) would be displayed on the display.

Technology is a strange beast. Everyone is trying to build smaller, faster and quicker, but technology also has the power to transform huge swathes of the human experience. Many companies develop for a niche market, but the world is a big place with big problems. Tiny applets and world-changing technology revolutions come from the same tech community. Who is asking the big questions?

The U.S. government has issued its first rules for automated vehicles. They include a 15-point set of "safety assessment" guidelines for self-driving systems. These cover issues such as cybersecurity, black box recordings to aid crash investigations, and how a car would deal with potential ethical conundrums on the road. The new policy will play a central role in shaping how autonomous vehicles proceed toward commercial use. Many automotive and technology companies are testing self-driving vehicles, and ride-hailing company Uber even lets customers in Pittsburgh order rides in prototypes (see "My Self Driving Uber Needed Human Help").

Even a year ago, the idea of autonomous cars roaming American streets seemed farfetched, and automakers were claiming to be focused on "stepping stone," incremental technology. Carmakers are deploying robots, and federal regulators in charge of how humans drive are finally catching up. Today, US Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx announced guidelines that define a new approach to regulating--and encouraging--self-driving cars. In an op-ed in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, President Obama wrote, "Government sometimes gets it wrong when it comes to rapidly changing technologies. That's why this new policy is flexible and designed to evolve with new advances."

The Obama administration is weighing in on self-driving cars with a new set of rules for car and tech companies that are expected to bring federal regulations up to date with technology. The U.S. Department of Transportation is set to release a new set of guidelines for driverless cars that will dictate how car companies and others build, test and deploy such vehicles. While the full guidelines won't be released until Tuesday, the policy will include a 15-point "safety assessment" that manufacturers and others making self-driving cars must address during their vehicle production. This encompasses testing methods, registration requirements, privacy protections, cybersecurity as well as the complicated ethical considerations of driverless cars. While the bulk of the policy is meant for fully autonomous cars, the department noted that some portions may apply to other assistive technology that is already used by car companies.

Google on Monday said that it's acquiring the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based startup API.AI, continuing its investment in machine learning technologies that enable natural language interfaces. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. "API.AI has a proven track record for helping developers design, build and continuously improve their conversational interfaces," Google vice president of engineering Scott Huffman wrote in a blog post. More than 60,000 developers are using API.AI to build conversational experiences for Slack, Facebook Messenger, Kik and other environments, he noted. API.AI also created Assistant, its own leading conversational assistant app with more than 20 million users.

I've never heard this one, usually it takes quite a bit of preexisting knowledge to even begin to use machine learning. I have yet to see a highly successful automatic feature extraction algorithm.