The history of technology is the history of human interaction with machines. Millions of years ago, we started with SOUND (voice), and soon came the WORD (text). The touchscreen made redundant the mechanical keyboard. However, 90% of human communication still happens through voice because it is natural. Unfortunately, technology progress took the time to catch up with it.

That burrito in your hands--so warm, so gooey, the richness cut by cilantro and red-hot spice. Before you take a bite, you'd better take a picture. Multiply that impulse by tens of thousands and you get Yelp's database of images, drawn from burrito joints, cocktail bars, and more. Until recently, Yelp was dependent on users to tag their images with search-friendly metadata. But now, using the kind of deep learning techniques that are transforming the field of AI, Yelp is starting to see the business benefits of using software intelligence to power its listing pages and user recommendations.

Professor Fei Fei Li invests her time researching computer sciences at the Stanford University. She is Director of the Stanford AI Lab, Researcher in AI, computer vision, machine learning and cognitive neuroscience. We particularly loved her latest appearance on this TED Talks event about how systems learn how physical objects look and wanted to share this with you. YouTube: "Fei Fei Li: How we're teaching computers to understand pictures" by TED Talks

The ortho giant's purchase of French surgical robotics firm Medtech could give competitor Mazor Robotics a run for its money, according to one analyst. Zimmer Biomet has officially entered the surgical robotics market with its acquisition of a majority of shares in the French firm Medtech, maker of a robotics platform for neurological and spine procedures. The Warsaw, IN-based company, a leader in the musculoskeletal space, announced July 18 that it had purchased almost 59% of shares in Medtech and also intends to mount an all-cash simplified tender offer to acquire the remaining shares. Zimmer Biomet will continue to operate Medtech out of its current headquarters in Montepellier, France, which will also serve as a "center of excellence" for Zimmer Biomet's surgical robotics development efforts, according to a joint press release from the companies. With the Medtech acquisition, Zimmer Biomet gains the Rosa platform, which is currently used in 20 hospitals in Europe, North America, Asia, and the Middle East, according to the company's website.

BAE Systems Information and Electronic Systems Integration, Technology Solutions-Advanced Information Technologies, Burlington, Massachusetts, has been awarded a 9,402,650 cost-plus-fixed-fee contract for software and reports. The contractor will provide development and integration of the latest advancements in machine learning that benefit this effort as well as architectural enhancements that increase the flexibility and agility of applying analytics to solve space situational awareness problems and take full advantage of high-performance computing capabilities and multiple forms of visualization of the reasoning performed by the analytics involved in this effort. This includes demonstration of new capabilities over three-year spirals that progressively demonstrate detection of increasingly complex scenarios and improved detection and prediction capabilities. Work will be performed in Burlington, Massachusetts, and Arlington, Virginia, and is expected to be complete by July 15, 2019. This award is the result of a competitive acquisition, with two offers received.

Not many people understand how these unwanted messages are separated from wanted messages. You can't simply filter based on sender address, as new spam addresses can easily be created. The second reason is that spam is often sent from legitimate email accounts hijacked by third parties. The best way to separate spam is to look at the content of the email messages. The most effective techniques to do this are based on machine learning.

There are lots of great tools out there for building machine learning models and data processing pipelines. Most of these tools, like R, scikit-learn, spark.ml At CrowdFlower, we use many of these resources to varying degrees. However, we also recognize that many people will prefer to approach model building and deployment in a hands-on integrated environment supported by a graphical interface. To this end, we are pleased to showcase an end-to-end model construction process in Microsoft's Azure Machine Learning Studio.

BuddyGuard, a Berlin-based Smart Home start-up company, has started selling its Flare home security system that uses face and voice recognition to authenticate visitors. Flare uses artificial intelligence (AI) in order to bring an additional layer of home security and will send police to a residence on its own without a user's approval. The Smart Home security system uses a software called AudioIntel that distinguishes normal noise from suspicious sounds, allowing the system to take action on its own. However homeowners will still be informed through notifications, BuddyGuard says. The saucer-like security system Flare is able to distinguish normal noise from suspicious sounds and will take actions on its own.

This annual gathering sees robotics experts from all over the planet fielding teams of battling soccerbots in a bid for robot football supremacy. In this CNET special feature, we take you inside the tournament, revealing the goals, dives and cutting-edge technology deployed in this quirky footie-fest. This year's tournament took place in Leipzig, Germany, where robots across both humanoid and non-humanoid leagues went head-to-head. Meet the Australian team out to defend their title, see why a change to the regulation ball has scores of robots baffled, and enjoy the sight of extremely adorable robots falling over -- then hopping right back up again. Hit play on the video above to check it out, and see more videos from RoboCup below. The pace of artificial intelligence is relentless, so it's not surprising that robot competitors are frequently retired from the game.

IBM has given its investors a sign that Big Blue may finally be turning things around. Revenue increased for the first time in a key unit -- cognitive solutions, including its Watson artificial intelligence platform -- that the company has been touting as crucial to future growth. The results may signal that Chief Executive Officer Ginni Rometty is making good on her promise to shift IBM's software and services offerings to match customers' increasing appetite for cloud-based solutions. It's been an uphill battle. Overall, sales have declined for 17 quarters in a row, while margins have also narrowed.