Lately, there's been a rumble pretty much everywhere about artificial intelligence, digital personal assistants, the Internet of Things, wearables and apps for everything. I've even written about what the rise of digital assistants means to search. There are some who claim that these new technologies will render search obsolete, passed over for the convenience and joy of an always-available digital world. I think they are wrong. Instead of looking at a search engine as an ad platform, we need to remember what it actually does for people.

Accenture has chosen an artificial intelligence-powered virtual agent called Amelia, to push cognitive machine learning towards businesses like banks and insurance companies. Amelia, developed by IT automation provider IPsoft, is a self-learning cognitive agent you can actually talk with in natural language. In other words, she can hold a back and forth conversation and, as well as answering questions, she can manage processes for you. For instance, in banking, she could open up an account for you. Edwin van Bommel, chief cognitive officer at IPsoft told IBTimes UK: "Amelia will answer your questions in natural language. It will all be very conversational, as opposed to AI-based services like Siri where each utterance is recognised as a new separate question."

Engineers fed the model's neural network thousands of novels to teach it the art of conversation, and then asked it to generate poetry after being fed two sentences from each title. Showcasing how it is just as capable of conjuring up bleak imagery as humans, the AI penned a series of dreary poems, including the below.

TOKYO, May 16, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- UBIC, Inc. (Nasdaq:UBIC) (TSE:2158), a leading provider of international litigation support and big-data analysis services, and Hearts United Group Co., Ltd. announced today that on June 1, they will launch DH-AI, a next-generation system designed to detect potential signs of risk contained in comments and other content posted on the Internet using UBIC's KIBIT artificial intelligence (AI) engine. Since UBIC started engaging in joint research with Hearts United Group in October 2015, both companies set out to develop cutting-edge debugging technologies and services using AI. By leveraging their technical expertise, the companies have made steady progress researching AI-based debugging and are now preparing the service for commercialization. In recent years, many firms have launched community and blog websites as a channel to communicate with end users, so as to promote their products and services. Increasingly, malicious comments have been posted on such websites, which often serve to incite hostile exchanges or mislead customers about products and services, resulting in damage to the companies' public images.

ROSS Intelligence cofounder and licensed attorney Andrew Arruda reportedly believes artificial intelligence is the future of the legal system. Have you ever heard about an artificial intelligence-driven attorney? Well, global law firm BakerHostetler recently announced the employment of a non-human lawyer created by ROSS Intelligence. Artificial intelligence has indeed proved its many uses to mankind despite its reported looming existential threats. Recently, the hottest technology of AI has invaded the legal system.

This article, co-authored by Harvey Lewis, research director at Deloitte UK, unveils the possibilities presented by artificial intelligence. In the 2015 film, "Ex Machina", the character Nathan Bateman, an archetypal eccentric billionaire, suggests that "one day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Africa. An upright ape living in dust with crude language and tools, all set for extinction." Given the surge of interest in artificial intelligence (AI) in recent years, fueled by big data and ever more sophisticated algorithms and hardware, it should come as no surprise that famous entrepreneurs and even eminent scientists in the real world are asking whether computers could one day threaten the survival of humankind. Governments and businesses around the world are continuing to invest billions of pounds in the technology.

The big news this week was STAR, a robot that outperformed surgeons. Initially, the robots were designed to look and work like humans. This was the image from popular comics when I was growing up. However, now that robots have become mainstream, most robots are very unlike humans, and that is their strength. Let us explore this thought.

In a bid to integrate machine learning-based solutions on its platform, Snapdeal, has acquired Gurgaon-based predictive marketing technology startup TargetingMantra for an undisclosed amount. It is a boutique technology company that has been working on the field of personalising shopping experience for customers on ecommerce platforms. Founded by Saurabh Nangia and Rahul Singh in March 2013, TargetingMantra, has offices in Palo Alto and Gurgaon. The company provides a unified platform to manage customers life cycle through personalisation, targeting and big data analytics. In 2014, TargetingMantra had raised 1.1 Mn in seed funding led by 500 Startups, Nexus Venture Partners, and One97 Mobility Fund.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence have gained notoriety among the general public through applications such as Siri, Alexa or Google Now. But, beyond consumer applications, these new hot areas of innovation are bringing unbelievable benefits to the different components of IT infrastructure that enable it, said David Meyer, Chairman of the Board at OpenDaylight, a Collaborative Project at The Linux Foundation, in his presentation at the DevOps Networking Forum last month. This is most evident in compute technology, which grew more and more powerful to make machine learning and AI happen. It's less obvious how networking contributes to and benefits from AI, he said. "I've never seen a technology this powerful that's moving as fast or is as cool," Meyer said.

Google is training its deep learning technology to come up with "rather dramatic" short stories based on sentences that researchers give it. Quartz spotted a paper published by Google researchers that includes examples of the work produced by Google Brain. It works using a type of artificial intelligence that examines existing works of fiction and uses that knowledge to come up with new examples. In order to teach its AI how to come up with new sentences, Quartz reports that Google provided it with 11,000 unpublished books. Researchers gave Google Brain a start sentence and an end sentence and left it to fill in the lines in between.