Keeping users around is not. Since Facebook Messenger bots launched at F8 in April 2016, over 30,000 bots have been created. Major brands like ESPN, Star Wars, and Yelp have released apps on Apple's iMessage. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have all heavily invested in platforms for bots and conversational and voice experiences. Pandorabots, one of the oldest chatbot platforms, boasts over 285,000 bots made by over 225,000 developers.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has already transformed our lives--from the autonomous cars on the roads to the robotic vacuums and smart thermostats in our homes. Over the next 15 years, AI technologies will continue to make inroads in nearly every area of our lives, from education to entertainment, health care to security. The question is, are we ready? Do we have the answers to the legal and ethical quandaries that will certainly arise from the increasing integration of AI into our daily lives? Are we even asking the right questions? Now, a panel of academics and industry thinkers has looked ahead to 2030 to forecast how advances in AI might affect life in a typical North American city and spark discussion about how to ensure the safe, fair, and beneficial development of these rapidly developing technologies.

Latest technologies in artificial intelligence, chip, virtual reality and smart communities were the highlights of the Shanghai International Popular Science Products Expo, which closes today. A Shanghai-based startup has developed a chip system with an artificial intelligence feature that works in a high performance and energy efficiency manner. Developed by Shanghai Westwell, it can be used both in the home and by industrial sectors, such as ports requiring artificial intelligence to recognize product category. During an on-site demo at the expo, Westwell's chip system recognized and classified 1,000 pictures within one second with an accuracy rate of almost 100 percent, compared with traditional methods with an accuracy rate of 86 percent. Smart Rider, a car-sized virtual reality experience device, attracted long queues during the expo.

Xinhua News Media Holdings Ltd. said Monday it is seeking to raise up to 42.9 million Hong Kong dollars via a share placement and will use the net proceeds for general working capital. Macau Legend Development Ltd., which operates casino and hotels, said Monday Laurence Yuen resigned as executive vice president and chief financial officer effective immediately. Salesforce.com Inc. said it would embed artificial intelligence technology into its software for salespeople, making it the latest in a gaggle of companies racing to enhance workplace tools with human-like abilities. The company will demonstrate the new software at its annual user conference next month in San Francisco. Newcrest Mining Ltd. said it has agreed to sell its 50% stake in a Papua New Guinea gold operation to partner Harmony Gold Mining Co. Ltd. .

Salesforce.com Inc. CRM -0.95 % said it would embed artificial intelligence technology into its software for salespeople, making it the latest in a gaggle of companies racing to enhance workplace tools with human-like abilities. The company will demonstrate the new software at its annual user conference next month in San Francisco. Called Einstein, the new offering is a set of online AI services designed to automate tasks, predict behavior and spotlight relevant information. Einstein is the latest in a long line of AI products branded with human-sounding names including Alexa from Amazon.com Inc., Cortana from Microsoft Corp. MSFT 0.10 % Siri from Apple Inc., and Watson from International Business Machines Corp. IBM -1.17 % IBM and Microsoft, in particular, have spearheaded a push to offer AI services aimed at corporate users.

Blizzard Entertainment was hit with a denial-of-service attack on Sunday that knocked its Battle.net Cybersecurity for kids: 'The earlier we teach this, the better specialists we'll have' A school in Estonia has started a pilot project to teach the basics of cybersecurity to teenagers. "We are currently monitoring a DDOS attack against network providers which is affecting latency/connections to our games," Blizzard wrote in a tweet. Gamers took to social media with frustration, as VentureBeat points out it was the third time Blizzard's servers have gone down in a week. Poodle Corp, a splinter organization of Lizard Squad that specializes in taking down servers of large companies, is claiming responsibility for the attack.

The MNIST handwritten digit images transformed into a data set for sequence learning. This data set contains pen stroke sequences based on the original MNIST images. The data set aims to provide a consistent set of sequences, meaning that similar images should result in similar sequences. The choices made by the algorithm will sometimes differ from the choices made by humans who write digits; the figure '4' above is an example. After the downward and rightward stroke, the TSP algorithm prefers to continue with the downward stroke, and then draw the remaining upper part of the rightmost line in the upward direction.

With the imminent release of Salesforce Einstein, you no longer have to be a data scientist to build artificial intelligence (AI) -- or at least the machine learning (ML) variety of it -- into your CRM applications. Einstein will allow Salesforce administrators and business users, as well as developers, to bring features such as smart image identification or policy automation to applications. In building these capabilities directly into its applications, Salesforce has gone further than other vendors' AI services, including those from Microsoft, IBM, Google and Amazon, which target developers and data scientists. By packaging up AI so that it can be harnessed using "clicks not code," Salesforce aims to "democratize AI just as we democratized CRM," says John Ball, Salesforce senior vice president and general manager of Einstein: There aren't enough data scientists in the world to build predictive models for every company. So [Einstein] is built right into the [Salesforce] platform.

Salesforce has unveiled Einstein, a platform upgrade that adds artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to its core products -- just two hours before Oracle's big annual event OpenWorld is set to kick off.