This story was delivered to BI Intelligence Apps and Platforms Briefing subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here. Facebook Messenger's new service is a hit with developers. Messenger Platform, the company's new chatbot service, is attracting developers in droves, head of product Stan Chudnovsky said at TechCrunch Disrupt on Tuesday. There are now "tens of thousands" of developers creating chatbots for Messenger, an impressive statistic because the platform has only been operation for one month. The first new initiative announced at Facebook's F8 developer conference in April was Messenger Platform, which includes a variety of tools designed to assist businesses with the creation of bots for the messaging app.

Google is beginning to look beyond search to tap into some of the most lucrative and promising businesses in the tech industry: artificial intelligence and cloud computing. The company, the largest and most significant part of Alphabet Inc., has grown to mammoth proportions off the back of its search-based advertising division. But those revenues are starting to slow. The cloud allows companies to manage and sell server space and software that lives inside its data centers, like AI, to other large companies. That type of service-based business is fast becoming the new way to reap profits in the tech industry. "We've always been doing cloud, it's just that we've been consuming it all internally at Google," CEO Sundar Pichai said on an earnings call with investors today.

Through natural language understanding, we designed the app to feel like you are talking to a person next to you in the car. A simple hand gesture (a high five) wakes up the app to initiate voice-driven text exchange. To eliminate errors, the app reads your text back before sending. It automatically informs you of incoming texts, and you decide if you'd like to listen, respond or cancel without ever looking at or touching your phone. Depending on the streaming music app you use, you can also request specific artists, songs, playlists, or genres, and give commands like "pause" and "skip."

Firaxis is offering the first peek at "Civilization VI," the next chapter in the decades-old franchise that lets you play your way to global domination -- and it's coming with a major new twist. The game, in which players take on the roles of historical figures to build and expand empires, has always been densely packed -- particularly when it comes to building cities. Players have been able to stack their cities with specialty buildings like universities and monuments, but buildings have been packed together in a single tile. This adds a different dimension to creating your cities, giving players a sense of city layout and a chance to craft the character of a metropolis much more easily. With the luxury of space, you will be able to do much more focused city management, by setting up specialized districts within your city walls. You can set up a downtown, or an education district, for example.

To help with his class this spring, a Georgia Tech professor hired Jill Watson, a teaching assistant unlike any other in the world. Throughout the semester, she answered questions online for students, relieving the professor's overworked teaching staff. But, in fact, Jill Watson was an artificial intelligence bot. Ashok Goel, a computer science professor, did not reveal Watson's true identity to students until after they'd turned in their final exams. "I feel like I am part of history because of Jill and this class!"

Search giant Google announced Wednesday that it would cut payday loan providers from its advertising platforms, citing the potentially damaging effects to borrowers of short-term, high-interest cash loans. "Research has shown that these loans can result in unaffordable payment and high default rates for users so we will be updating our policies globally to reflect that," Google's head of global product policy, David Graf,f said in an announcement posted to the company's blog. The average payday loan borrower spends five months of the year in debt, paying more in fees than originally received, according to research compiled by the Pew Charitable Trusts. "Our hope is that fewer people will be exposed to misleading or harmful products," Graff said. The policy change, which follows a similar move by Facebook, won plaudits from advocacy groups concerned with the impact of payday loans on low-income borrowers.

It is also being used to identify the drugs that particular patients are more likely to respond to, most recently with Berg, who are hoping to identify the biological makeup of cancer patients who are likely to respond best to their drugs. Berg CEO and co-founder Niven Narain is confident of its success - 'With use of Berg's Interrogative Biology platform, we will be applying our precision medicine approach where output from this trial will allow us to match patients to this given combination based on their biological profile.'

The annual March Machine Learning Mania competition sponsored by SAP challenged Kagglers to predict the outcomes of every possible match-up in the 2016 men's NCAA basketball tournament. Nearly 600 teams competed, but only the first place forecasts were robust enough against upsets to top this year's bracket. In this blog post, Miguel Alomar describes how calculating the offensive and defensive efficiency played into his winning strategy. I earned a Master's Degree in Computer Science from UIB in Mallorca, Spain. For nearly 20 years, I have been involved in software development, business intelligence and data warehousing.

Our next Healthcare focused events include the Women in Machine Intelligence & Healthcare Dinner in London on 12 Oct and the Deep Learning in Healthcare Summit in Boston on 11 & 12 May 2017.

The Deep Learning Summit is the next revolution in artificial intelligence. How can multiple levels of representation and abstraction help to make sense of data such as images, sound, and text.