"I don't know what you mean - how about a web search for it?" If you want the latest football scores, to add meetings to your calendar or launch an app, today's virtual assistants are relatively good at understanding your voice and doing what's asked. But try to have the type of natural conversation seen in sci-fi movies featuring artificial intelligence systems - from HAL in 2001 to the sultry-voiced operating system Samantha in Spike Jonze's Her - and you'll find your device about as smart as a waterproof teabag. "Google and Apple are painfully aware that their systems are not getting better fast enough because right now Siri and Google Now and the other personal assistant type applications are all programmed by hand," says Steve Young, professor of information engineering at the University of Cambridge. "If you speak to Siri about baseball it seems relatively intelligent, but if you ask it something much less common it doesn't really do anything except for a web search. "That's an indication that the programmers have been busy trying to anticipate what people want to ask about baseball but haven't thought about people who ask about, for example, GPU chips because you don't get many queries about that." Microsoft doesn't yet have a virtual assistant on its Windows Phone platform, but the company is experimenting with AI in lifts and reception desks at its headquarters. Eric Horvitz, managing director of Microsoft's research unit, believes part of the solution involves allowing computers to look beyond questions posed. "The ability of a system to understand more broadly what the overall context of a communication is turns out to be very important," he told the BBC. "There are some critical signals in context.

Michael Schmidt recently wrote in TechCrunch, "Artificial intelligence. But despite all the talk around AI, no one seems to really understand what it is or how companies can use it… Many people think of AI as the blending of humans and machines. They're not far off, but AI is an incredibly broad term -- more of an umbrella term, really -- that simply means making computers act intelligently. It is one of the major fields of study in computer science and encompasses subfields such as robotics, machine learning, expert systems, general intelligence and natural language processing." Schmidt goes on, "Apple's Siri, Google's self-driving cars and Facebook's image recognition software are standard examples of AI. While these applications are all powered very differently and achieve different goals, they all roll up into the umbrella term of artificial intelligence."

If Google is right about the future, there are troubling signs to suggest Apple could meet the same fate as BlackBerry, according to top Apple follower Marco Arment. In a blog post, Arment argues that BlackBerry was great at creating phones and dominated the market before Apple released the iPhone. The problem was that the iPhone release didn't just create a better smartphone -- it changed what people used them for entirely. BlackBerry was great at creating at a device for email and phone calls, but Apple unleashed the App Store and now there's an app for everything. It fundamentally changed the definition for a smartphone, and BlackBerry couldn't ever play catch-up.

Google is unveiling more and more about their revolutionary software, including the innovations behind the search Search and Street View functions. However, they haven't been as forthcoming in terms of their hardware. Google just unveiled one of its hardware brainchilds: the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU). The TPU is a custom ASIC created specifically for Google's open source software library for machine learning, TensorFlow. We've been running TPUs inside our data centers for more than a year, and have found them to deliver an order of magnitude better-optimized performance per watt for machine learning.

What was once just a figment of the imagination of some our most famous science fiction writers, artificial intelligence (AI) is taking root in our everyday lives. We're still a few years away from having robots at our beck and call, but AI has already had a profound impact in more subtle ways. Weather forecasts, email spam filtering, Google's search predictions, and voice recognition, such Apple's Siri, are all examples. What these technologies have in common are machine-learning algorithms that enable them to react and respond in real time. There will be growing pains as AI technology evolves, but the positive effect it will have on society in terms of efficiency is immeasurable.

Discovery on Pinterest is all about finding things you love, even if you don't know at first what you're looking for. The Visual Discovery engineering team at Pinterest is tasked with building technology that will help people to continue to do just that, by building technology that understands the objects in a Pin's image to get an idea of what a Pinner is looking for. Over the last year we've been building a large-scale, cost-effective machine vision pipeline and stack with widely available tools with just a few engineers. Today we're sharing some new technologies we're experimenting with, as well as a white paper, accepted for publication at KDD 2015, that details our system architecture and insights from these experiments and makes the following contributions: It used to be that if a Pin had never before been saved on Pinterest, we weren't able to provide Related Pins recommendations. This is because Related Pins were primarily generated from traversing the local "curation graph," the tripartite user-board-image graph evolved organically through human curation.

As if the communication and messaging apps ecosystem wasn't already bursting at its seams, Google has added three more--Spaces, Allo and Duo. Spaces can be downloaded on Android and iOS devices now, while Allo and Duo will be "available this summer". But wait, what's so different with Allo, in a world that has Whatsapp, Facebook's Messenger, Apple's iMessage and not to forget, Google's own Hangouts app? Allo is essentially designed to be a smarter instant messaging app and offer features which no rival does, yet. And most of those are based on the integration of machine learning, also known as artificial intelligence. What Allo does is it pre-empts what your response to a particular message might be, with some suggestions that show up as you are about to respond.

Washington: The world's first artificial intelligence lawyer has been employed by a law firm in the US, which will use the robot to assist its various teams in legal research. The robot called'ROSS' is built upon Watson, IBM's cognitive computer. With the support of Watson's cognitive computing and natural language processing capabilities, lawyers can ask ROSS their research question and the robot reads through the law, gathers evidence, draws inferences and returns highly relevant, evidence-based answers. ROSS also monitors the law around the clock to notify users of new court decisions that can affect a case. The programme continually learns from the lawyers who use it to bring back better results each time.

The University of Washington will be hosting the first of four White House Office of Science and Technology Policy workshops on artificial intelligence. The session in Seattle on Tuesday, involving the UW School of Law and the UW Tech Policy Lab, will focus on legal and policy issues around artificial intelligence. Speakers include UW professors, White House staff and the chief executive officer of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Oren Etzioni, who is also a UW computer science and engineering professor, will provide an overview on the current state of artificial intelligence, followed by two panel discussions. The first will examine issues around making decisions in the private or public sector using artificial intelligence.

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