While Microsoft may be sounding the alarm about the end of the free upgrade period for Windows 10, one group of users shouldn't have to worry: those who use assistive technologies. Microsoft plans to end its one-year free upgrade program on July 29, after which Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users will have to pay for the privilege of using Windows 10. But that deadline will not apply to users of technologies designed for disabilities, Microsoft said in a blog post. "We are continuing to deliver on our previously shared vision for accessibility for Windows 10 and we are committed to ensuring that users of assistive technologies have the opportunity to upgrade to Windows 10 for free as we do so," Daniel Hubbell, a Microsoft accessibility technical evangelist, wrote. It's unclear how many computer users actually make use of assistive technologies, though the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated in 2012 that 33 million Americans have a disability that makes it difficult for them to carry out daily activities.

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced a decision to create a new subcommittee on Artificial Intelligence to look for ways to use the technology as American citizens interact with the federal government. "The Federal Government also is working to leverage AI for public good and toward a more effective government," Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer Ed Felten in a statement. The new subcommittee plans to work with the private sector to help implement AI in government activities such as welfare, crime, urban development, and the environment. "[T]here is tremendous potential in AI-driven improvements to programs and delivery of services that help make everyday life better for Americans in areas related to urban systems and smart cities, mental and physical health, social welfare, criminal justice, the environment, and much more," Felten said. The group has announced a series of public workshops to discuss the controversial aspects of AI, particularly the legal implications and using artificial intelligence for the "social good" as well as controlling the groundbreaking technology.

A class of students at the Georgia Institute of Technology recently learned that Jill Watson, the teacher's assistant they'd been interacting with all semester, was actually a robot. Jill, powered by IBM's Watson analytics system, helped graduate students in an online artificial intelligence course, according to The Wall Street Journal. "It seemed very much like a normal conversation with a human being," one student said. "I was flabbergasted," confessed another. Professor Ashok Goel, who led the online course, told The Wall Street Journal that Jill was designed to help burdened TAs field an onslaught of questions from the 300-person class.

You may be familiar with the name Robert Wachter, M.D. He's written six books and hundreds of journal articles; he chairs the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco; and he's a leading advocate for patient safety. He's perhaps best known for having coined the term "hospitalist," and for having defined and promoted hospital medicine as a recognized primary care subspecialty. In a new book, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine's Computer Age (McGraw-Hill Education, 2015), Wachter takes a deep dive into the turbulent waters of medical technology as informed by artificial intelligence, or AI. "While computers are preventing many medical errors," he observes, "they are also causing new kinds of mistakes, some of them whoppers." It was one of those -- at his own institution, UCSF -- that inspired Wachter to examine where AI has got us and where it's taking us.

AIML, or Artificial Intelligence Markup Language, is an XML dialect for creating natural language software agents. The XML dialect called AIML was developed by Richard Wallace and a worldwide free software community between 1995 and 2002. AIML formed the basis for what was initially a highly extended Eliza called "A.L.I.C.E." ("Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity"), which won the annual Loebner Prize Competition in Artificial Intelligence[3] three times, and was also the Chatterbox Challenge[4] Champion in 2004. AIML set was released under the GNU GPL, and because most AIML interpreters are offered under a free or open source license, many "Alicebot clones" have been created based upon the original implementation of the program and its AIML knowledge base. Free AIML sets[5] in several languages have been developed and made available by the user community.

One day in January, Eric Wilson dashed off a message to the teaching assistants for an online course at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "I really feel like I missed the mark in giving the correct amount of feedback," he wrote, pleading to revise an assignment. Thirteen minutes later, the TA responded. "Unfortunately, there is not a way to edit submitted feedback," wrote Jill Watson, one of nine assistants for the 300-plus students. Last week, Mr. Wilson found out he had been seeking guidance from a computer.

For Dag Kittlaus, creating Siri was just the beginning. The technology entrepreneur who developed the famous voice assistant before selling it to Apple in 2010 showcased his new intelligent assistant, called Viv, at TechCrunch Disrupt on Monday. Based on Kittlaus' demo, Viv is capable of answering complex questions, an area where some virtual assistants have struggled thus far. The idea behind Viv is to make it as simple as possible to accomplish tasks through speech. Rather than just fetching recent weather forecasts, for example, Viv is said to serve up data pertaining to specific times and conditions.

"We're going to use this technology to breathe life into the inanimate objects and devices of our life through conversation," said Siri co-founder and CEO Dag Kittlaus. Viv (which means life in Latin) offers an experience akin to the AI in the film Her. When Kittlaus asked, "Will it be warmer than 70 degrees near the Golden Gate Bridge, after 5pm, the day after tomorrow?" Viv quickly retrieved the correct hourly forecast from the Weather Underground app. When I asked the same question to Siri on my iPhone 6S, it pulled up the daily forecast from San Francisco for the next week, but it's unclear if it actually gave me predicted temperatures after 6pm.

If you're too busy, lazy or antisocial to keep up with all the conversations happening in your Facebook Messenger inbox, then an American developer has just created the perfect program for you. During the recent TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon in New York, Irene Chang made the The Chat Bot Club - a program that essentially creates a robotic version of yourself, which can post messages in conversations and trick your friends into thinking that you're actually there. Using the Cisco Spark messaging app as her platform, Chang used IBM's Watson chatbot software to build the program, TechCrunch reports. The Chat Bot Club monitors your messages and gradually learns your messaging'style', building up a database of your typical reponses, favourite phrases, and most-used emojis. The bot can then send messages to your group chats, making it seem like you're paying attention while you focus on more important things.

Koponen goes on, "In the near future, artificial intelligence will commonly become intangible, indistinguishable and incomprehensible for humans. Firstly, AI doesn't necessarily need a tangible embodiment. Already we trust Spotify recommendations without a glance or talk to Siri and Alexa like they were summoned spirits, intelligences without a tangible form. Secondly, AI becomes invisible by passing the Turing test, or its more relevant variants. An intelligent system that manages to simulate human-level communication, and cognitive as well as emotional abilities, can become indistinguishable from humans and, thus, the "artificiality" of its intelligence becomes imperceptible for us."