Some of the time they haven't been a bother; other times you've hated them. They're those little boxes that pop up on websites that demand you type in a distorted alphanumeric string or solve a simple puzzle before they let you access the site. They're called CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) and Google's latest version has gone stealth. It may be there, but the only time you'll see it is if Google thinks you're a bot. Google has worked to make reCAPTCHA, their world-leading CAPTCHA utility, as easy for the website user as possible.

Wetherspoon might have killed off the traditional pub and heralded the rise of the robots. Or it might just have saved it. The company has unleashed into the world its Order & Pay app – specifically made so that nobody will ever have to queue at the bar again. The way it works is simple enough: you tell it what your table you're at, what food or drink you want, and pay for it. Seconds or minutes later your request will arrive, served by one of the bar staff. But what it actually means isn't simple at all.

Less clear was how a new IBM partnership will change Salesforce AI plans. What's the state of Salesforce Einstein, the portfolio of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities announced last fall? Salesforce generated plenty of media coverage this week with two big announcements. Here's my take on the realities of a partnership with IBM and what we have yet to understand about the packaging and pricing of Einstein. The first announcement from Salesforce this week was the unexpected bombshell on a new partnership with IBM that headlines simplified as "Watson meets Einstein."

This post is a simple yet illustrative application of K-means clustering technique. Using K-means clustering, we will perform quantization of colours present in the image which will further help in compressing the image. In a coloured image, each pixel is of size 3 bytes (RGB), where each colour can have intensity values from 0 to 255. Following combinatorics, the total number of colours which can be represented are 256*256*256. Practically, we are able to visualize only a few colours in an image.

Stephen Hawking is concerned about the rise of artificial intelligence. Physicist Stephen Hawking may be a proponent of artificial intelligence, but he has also been outspoken about the potential challenges it creates. In a recent interview, he sounded a similar tone, and offered a solution that conservatives may find hard to accept. Speaking to The Times of London to commemorate being awarded the Honorary Freedom of the City of London, a title that was conferred on him on Monday, Professor Hawking expressed optimism for the future. He added, however, that he is concerned about artificial intelligence (AI), as well as other global threats.

The significant factor driving the shift towards chatbots is couched in Moore's law. Today, processing of heavy applications can be enabled through cheaper computing, which was considered prohibitively expensive earlier. Chatbots are integrated with messaging apps. Cloud computing and integration is making this possible as powerful integration techniques can be leveraged to ensure synchronization of apps with API. The emergence of conversational interfaces is turning chatbot into an independent and universal entity, adapt to the tone and subject used as per context.

If news, polls and investment figures are any indication, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning will soon become an inherent part of everything we do in our daily lives. Backing up the argument are a slew of innovations and breakthroughs that have brought the power and efficiency of AI into various fields including medicine, shopping, finance, news, fighting crime and more. We're covering the weird and wonderful tech at SXSW, join us in the fun. But the explosion of AI has also highlighted the fact that while machines will plug some of the holes human-led efforts leave behind, they will bring disruptive changes and give rise to new problems that can challenge the economical, legal and ethical fabric of our societies. Here are four issues that need Artificial Intelligence companies need to address as the technology evolves and invades even more domains.

IBM this week said its speech recognition system set an industry record of 5.5% word error rate, a percentage that lets a computer understand human conversation almost as well as the average person does. According to IBM human parity was considered a 5.9% word error rate but IBM who partnered with Appen, a speech and technology service provider, reassessed the industry benchmark and determined that human parity is lower than what anyone has yet achieved: 5.1%. "Reaching human parity – meaning an error rate on par with that of two humans speaking – has long been the ultimate industry goal. Others in the industry are chasing this milestone alongside us, and some have recently claimed reaching 5.9% as equivalent to human parity…but we're not popping the champagne yet. As part of our process in reaching today's milestone, we determined human parity is actually lower than what anyone has yet achieved -- at 5.1%," wrote George Saon principal research scientist with IBM in a blog post on the subject. That reassessment however might ruffle some feathers as in October Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research group said its speech recognition system had attained "human parity" and made fewer errors than a human professional transcriptionist.

AI has begun to take hold in the everyday, in the form of Siri, Alexa and autonomous vehicles. But if identifying the nearest Korean BBQ and driving me there is all that the future of AI promises, well that's a damn shame. It's time that we become a lot more ambitious about the future of AI. There's a broad perception that the best that AI has to offer will be in the consumer world. This is not the case, and it demonstrates a severe lack of imagination.

As people seek affirmation of their political beliefs in an increasingly polarized nation with accusations of fake news from both sides, smart device AI (artificial intelligence) is more than happy to comply. Concise, loaded questions tend to yield loaded results when querying Google Assistant, the voice-activated AI technology that comes with Google Pixel phones and Google Home – the latter a voice-activated speaker. When I asked Google Assistant, "Is Donald Trump a racist?" And if your question is rephrased in less-raw, accusatory terms such as, "Is President Trump racially insensitive?" the top results are, again, the Huffington Post story and stories like Vox's "Trump's win is a reminder of the incredible, unbeatable power of racism." Jump the political divide and former President Barack Obama doesn't get off that easy either but top results don't tend to be from large media organizations, which have been accused of being softer on the former president than the current commander-in-chief.