Sharp Corp. has announced the launch of a small humanoid smartphone that responds to voice commands and can project movies on a wall. Debuting May 26, RoBoHon resembles a robot and has a screen that reflects its cellphone ancestry. It is priced at 198,000 with an additional monthly usage fee, the Osaka-based firm said. "Sharp has a new vision of adding artificial intelligence to electronics products," said Yoshisuke Hasegawa, a Sharp executive. He said this merging of artificial intelligence with consumer products will be an ongoing project, dubbed "Kokoro" ("heart").

Google's TensorFlow machine learning system can now be distributed across multiple machines in an update, TensorFlow 0.8. The machine learning software is already distributed across hundreds of machines to speed up the learning process. Google Updates TensorFlow To Version 0.8, Makes It Distributed Google has launched a brand new version of its TensorFlow machine learning system with the aim of improving machine learning and reducing the time consumed while running programs. Last November, Google opened up its in-house machine learning software TensorFlow, making the program that powers its translation services and photo analytics (among many other things) open-source and free to download. Announcing TensorFlow 0.8 – now with distributed computing support!

But on the whole it's pretty damn impressive and when it does go wrong you can kind of see how it got confused. The tool joins a growing suite of apps created by Microsoft's research team, that can do things like guess your age or emotion from a single photograph.

The Apttus Intelligent Cloud extends the capabilities of the Apttus Quote-to-Cash suit by combining it with promotions, incentive compensation, and rebates capabilities, as well as the company's X-Author solution. It features an Intelligence Layer component that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to determine the best actions for improving the revenue process, and it aims to go beyond descriptive analytics--such as simply measuring sales cycle times--to prescriptive analytics that deliver insights into accomplishing business goals. The Cloud also aims to devise strategies and incentives that motivate better selling behavior, and to update these strategies in real time to assist sales teams.

Instead, what captured viewers attention most was Alibaba Group's artificial intelligence program, which made its global debut on the program to predict the series finalists and winner. Named "Ai," the system got every one of its algorithm-induced guesses right. I Am Singer, broadcast by Hunan TV, has been one of China's top-rated shows since its debut in 2013. During the show's four-hour season finale on Friday, Alibaba's Ai analyzed various factors in real time, such as the popularity of the songs contestants performed, their pitch and energy on stage, lyrical content and audience feedback. Meanwhile, the show's in-house audience of 500, whose vote determined the real winner, deliberated separately.

Peter Singer raises the questions of ethics, given new developments in AI. Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google's parent company, the owner of AlphaGo, is enthusiastic about what artificial intelligence (AI) means for humanity. Speaking before the match between Lee and AlphaGo, he said that humanity would be the winner, whatever the outcome, because advances in AI will make every human being smarter, more capable, and "just better human beings." Around the same time as AlphaGo's triumph, Microsoft's "chatbot" – software named Taylor that was designed to respond to messages from people aged 18-24 – was having a chastening experience. "Tay" as she called herself, was supposed to be able to learn from the messages she received and gradually improve her ability to conduct engaging conversations.

According to DailyDot, CaptionBot is powered by Microsoft Cognitive Services, which gives developers the power to create apps that use machine-based intelligence. Cognitive Services gave rise to other image-based Microsoft tools that can guess your age, gauge how much you look like another person and tell you what breed you are if you were a dog. The Services' Natural Language capability, on the other hand, powered its failed chatbot project Tay. We've captured and compiled some of our attempts in the gallery above. Overall, it didn't do too bad -- and it certainly knows its corporate overlords.

Machine Learning algorithms are already playing a part in many every day technologies, including the speech recognition by Apple's Siri and Facebook's controversial facial recognition technology. They are also the key technology behind Google's self-driving cars. The major tech companies are all investing heavily in machine learning as part of their various AI drives. Google CEO Sundar Pichai says that, 'Machine learning is a core, transformative way by which we're re-thinking about how we're doing everything. We are thoughtfully applying it across all our products, be it search, ads, YouTube, or Play.

Using machine learning technology deployed on the Microsoft Azure cloud, Microsoft researchers have provided a new image processing service that helps conservationists with one of the largest individual-based demographic studies of large mammals ever undertaken. Scientists from the Wild Nature Institute must photograph thousands of giraffes to study the reproduction, survival and movements of the giraffe population. The analysis process is very manually intensive and time-consuming, as many thousands of photos have to be processed each year, and for every photo the giraffe body in the image has to be manually cropped. Using an object detection algorithm, the Microsoft team trained a software model to recognize giraffe torsos using the existing annotated giraffe data. The system identified new, difficult-to-predict images and showed its predictions on these images to a human who could quickly verify or correct the results.

This year, Facebook AI Research (FAIR) unveiled their neural net at the GPU Technology Conference. At the event, they showed off the tech's ability to create virtual images based on written descriptions. At the presentation, the team demonstrated the neural net by typing in the word "beach," which the AI used to generate an image of painted beach underneath a sky of clouds. FAIR then typed the words "beach – clouds" which was quickly followed by a similar image except without the clouds this time. To top off the presentation they input the words "sunset beach – clouds" and the AI generated an image of a setting sun along a beach and clear skies.