MindMeld, a pioneer in conversational AI technology, is today releasing the MindMeld for TV platform, which the company bills as the first solution designed for television and over-the-top content providers -- like Netflix and Hulu -- to deliver best in class discovery through a conversational interface. That company boasts investors and customers like Google, Samsung, Intel, Telefonica, IDG, Spotify, and other major global brands. Since MindMeld provides data services and the underlying tech-for-voice interface, the company couldn't explain exactly which products in market are 100 percent powered by their technology. But the company's voice platform is fast, alarmingly accurate, and likely baked into tons of products we interact with in some form or another. MindMeld was founded in 2011 and is backed by over 15 million in funding.

In December 2015 Leman Solicitors hosted the Future of Law event for 100 corporate counsel. We spoke about IBM's Watson which is being used to build A.I. applications in several sectors, notably ROSS in law. It's part of a disruption that we say is going to fundamentally change the way legal services are delivered. Another article in today's Business Insider UK reports: "Ask ROSS to look up an obscure court ruling from 13 years ago, and ROSS will not only search for the case in an instant -- without contest or complaint -- but it'll offer opinions in plain language about the old ruling's relevance to the case at hand." The article can be found here.

Google Inc.'s latest technological marvels point to a future where you'll never need to visit websites, write a term paper or stress over what to buy for your mother's birthday. For consumers seeking convenience and speed, it all sounds great. But how will any of it make Google money? The Mountain View, Calif., company's apparent transition from go-to search engine to omnipresent virtual assistant probably will require rethinking its advertising business. By tracking Web browsing, emails, chats and more, Google has become a dominant force in digital ads.

Robots can paint, but when it comes to writing, they shouldn't quit their day jobs. That's the combined conclusion from results of two contests announced this week. On the upside, artificial intelligence created some pretty impressive works for RobotArt.org's The contest challenged artists and engineers to create a robot that painted like a real artist. Essentially, the aim was to get "as many teams as possible to set up a robot that can do any sort of painting," the contest site explains.

Grace Peters recently wrote in HPCwire, "Thanks to machine learning, the page you see when you log-on to Amazon.com is likely very different from the one I see. Advertising, product recommendations, and special deals are all tailored to our unique customer profiles based on historical browsing trends and buying behavior. Online retailers like Amazon were among the first users of customer data collection and analysis for improving services and personalizing the shopping experience, and they've become so skilled some sites might even be able to predict what we will purchase before we even know what we're looking for." Peters goes on, "Advancements in digital technologies have driven a paradigm shift in the way businesses interact with their customers, with touchpoints increasingly moving to digital mediums. Because of the limited opportunities to satisfy customers on a person-to-person level, machine learning is now in widespread use by a variety of modern enterprises as a way to enrich customer experiences, create more personalized and customer-centric interactions, and offer seamless omnichannel communications."

Alphabet Inc.'s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Google is reputed as having one of the most intelligent artificial intelligence infrastructure globally. Its wide reach via its Chrome browser and Android mobile operating system means its influence runs deep. The main issue is whether the company can really find the right mix to convert these enviable advantages into the next in-demand product. This is the question most attendees at the company's annual I/O developer conference. This question was partly answered by Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

If yesterday's Google I/O keynote was anything to go by, it's abundantly clear that Artificial Intelligence is here to stay. Many of the mobile apps and services we use each day already have some level of AI powering their internals, but these days it's become so seamless that we hardly ever notice. I frankly don't talk to my phone too often, but when I do--from asking Google Now to ask for information about the new city I've landed in, to querying Google Photos to show me all photos of my daughter laughing, it's fascinating (and sometimes scary) to see these tools in surprisingly accurate action. Many of these advancements are thanks to rapid developments in the fields of machine learning and artificial intelligence, developments that now enable computing devices to understand our voice, or recognize features in photos. Coupled with cloud-based services and cellular connectivity, all of this'intelligence' is suddenly available to billions of smartphones, from mega-metropolises to humble villages.

You might ask what the difference is between most artificial intelligence (AI) companies and SparkCognition. Here it is: while at other firms, humans build models; SparkCognition puts them together with algorithms. Rather than roughing out one model and then doing a bunch of testing, SparkCognition continually tests and fits models to data accumulating in real time, an architecture that allows it to deal with big data. Without foregone conclusions about what might be happening, SparkCognition algorithms keep probing for relationships and possible explanations without any a priori idea of what's going on. This fantastic flexibility, along with the speed of computer technology, allows SparkCognition to come to conclusions fast enough for real-time intervention.

Artificial intelligence has been around since 1956 and has made some giant leaps in that time: beating the best human at chess, the best human at US gameshow Jeopardy and recently beating the best human at complex strategy game Go. Brands have only recently started adopting artificial intelligence for core consumer services. Google's voice recognition technology now claims 98% accuracy and Facebook's DeepFace is said to recognise faces with a 97% success rate. IBM's Watson, which uses artificial intelligence to perform its question-answering function, is 2,400% "smarter" today than when it achieved the Jeopardy victory five years ago. There is no doubt that the relationship between men and machines is changing, and brands are on the cusp of making artificial intelligence an everyday element of their customer offerings.

If you control the code, you control the world,