Many travel agencies are working to better integrate mobile messaging into the travel booking process for clients. But a new service from online travel veterans is looking to take a technology-first approach to providing concierge-like service in the online travel booking space. Lola launches today on the Apple App Store, combining augmented chat with artificial intelligence and a staff of travel agents and customer service specialists to book travel for users. An Android-compatible version will follow before the end of the year. Kayak co-founder Paul English's newest project pairs deep-learning artificial intelligence technology with travel agents and customer service experts in order to present users with a more organic travel booking experience than has previously been available to both leisure and business travelers.

The first job after law school can be horrendous--not simply because of the intense workload and long hours, but also the drudgery. A huge amount of legal work given to those on the lowest rung of the ladder consists of reading through hundreds of pages of notes, articles, and case precedents, to provide senior lawyers with legal details that can help build their case. Fortunately, artificial intelligence is up to the task. So much so that century-old law firm BakerHostetler has formally hired its first "digital attorney," ROSS, as an artificially intelligent legal researcher. ROSS is working with BakerHostetler's bankruptcy team as part of a partnership first announced last month, at Vanderbilt Law School's "Watson, Esq." conference on law and artificial intelligence.

"i want to talk to you." "i want to be with you." "i don't want to be with you." i don't want to be with you. What reads like bad teen poetry is actually supposed to help Google sound more human. Researchers from the company's deep learning arm, Google Brain, is hoping to find ways to make its search and apps understand and adapt to the way people actually speak--in part by feeding 2,865 romance novels to an AI system. The unpublished paper was presented at the International Conference on Learning Representations on May 3. It shows how the team of linguists and computer scientists poured 11,000 yet unpublished books--including nearly 3,000 romance and 1,500 fantasy novels--into a neural network model, which is meant to mimic how the human brain works. Next, the researchers presented the system with two sentences from the books and asked it to generate sentences that could create a meaningful progression between the two.

Muttering "OK Google" may soon become useful all around your house, as Google reportedly preps an Amazon Echo rival dubbed "Chirp" that will extend the company's voice and search capabilities into the home. Following up on earlier rumors about a Google-powered Echo clone, Recode claims that Google will showcase voice search and intelligent assistant capabilities at its I/O conference next week, with Chirp itself expected to debut later this year. The surprising part isn't that Google may be creating an Echo rival but rather that it's taken so long to do so. Google has big smart home ambitions, the power of Google Now and search, top-notch voice recognition technology, and even an appropriate form factor with the OnHub router (pictured above)--which Recode says Chirp's design will mimic. Google also owns Nest and its line of smart home products.

Every child gets a vision and hearing check in school on a regular basis. Dr. Moshe Fried, an Israeli plastic surgeon, believes an annual skin check is necessary as well, starting in the teens. This is why he agreed to be the medical consultant for Emerald Medical Applications' DermaCompare, a free smartphone app that can detect changes in marks and moles over time. The app alerts the user to changes that ought to be screened for cancer. "The skin is the biggest organ in the body," said Fried.

Meet Jill Watson, a first-time teaching assistant at Georgia Tech assigned to moderate an online forum for a computer science class. Jill was 1 of 9 TAs assigned to help answer questions about coursework and projects from the 300 students enrolled in the advanced course. During the first few weeks in January, Jill really struggled. This was Knowledge-Based Artificial Intelligence, after all, a course with the goal to "build AI agents capable of human-level intelligence and gain insights into human cognition." It was also a requirement for graduate students to earn their master's degree.

They're all the rage: Kik has them, Facebook wants them, and it seems like every computer coder wants to make them. And why is every company suddenly hot on this new A.I. trend? Bots are simple artificial intelligence systems that you interact with via text. Those interactions can be straightforward, like asking a bot to give you a weather report, or more complex, like having one troubleshoot a problem with your internet service. A lot of factors have come together to make this explosion of bots possible.

According to The Information, one of the last remaining members of Siri's original team, Darren Haas, has quit Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) for General Electric (GE). His move comes only a few weeks after Steve D'Aurora resigned from his position at Apple to join GE. Both of the former Apple employees are reportedly working on a similar cloud service platform at GE. The primary reason behind the departures seems to be the political infighting within Apple's engineering team. These clashes ensued after the tech giant decided to extend the software platform built by Siri's team, to its other Internet services such as iTunes and iCloud.

Marketing software provider Marketo has gained new predictive scoring and content marketing features, thanks to two new integrations announced Monday. Marketo email marketers can now deliver quality content in a shorter period of time because of the company's partnership with Radius, a predictive marketing platform, and NewsCred, a content marketing solution. Marketo marketers now benefit from Radius' new predictive scoring program that ranks inbound leads by interest and likelihood of conversion. The SaaS solution is now integrated with Marketo's Engagement Marketing Platform, allowing marketers to segment marketing communication to prioritize prospects that are most likely to result in a sales victory. Additional features include segmentation based on ideal customer profiles, firmographics, social presence and trigger events such as indications to purchase.

Kristian Hammond, Chief Scientist of Narrative Science, will speak on May 23rd about the reemergence of AI, how the proliferation of data is fostering a new era of AI successes and the role of Advanced NLG as a communication layer between people and intelligent systems. Other speakers at the conference include Andrew Ng, Chief Scientist of Baidu, Tye Brady, Chief Technologist of Amazon Robotics, Joaquin Candela, the Director of Applied Machine Learning at Facebook, and Peter Norvig, the Director of Research at Google. "The opportunities for AI are numerous. At EmTech Digital, we invite speakers from organizations that are making unique progress. Bringing together thought leaders from diverse industries helps form a more holistic view of the ecosystem and identifies places to layer in AI technologies to drive business goals," said Jason Pontin, editor in chief and publisher of MIT Technology Review.