Facebook is expected to announce chatbots, among other things, at its annual F8 developer conference in San Francisco this week, in pursuit of its continuing goal of luring back younger users. Chatbots are programs that largely use artificial intelligence to simulate conversations with humans; the technology will likely be included in the company's Messenger app. The goal is to change the way we communicate with businesses, and with each other, on the Internet. "Bots are conversational so they are a natural extension of how we like to communicate and what we like to do," said Julie Ask, an analyst with Forrester. You can chat with the bot, ask the bot to do things for you, like order take-out or get a new lipstick." Since F8 is a developer conference, Facebook will also likely show off API tools so enterprises and third-party developers can build chatbots and Live Chat plug-ins for business users. These announcements are not getting as much buzz as the chatbots at this point. Think of chatbots as digital assistants that could help enterprises do away with 1-800 numbers, by taking customer questions, helping users find products and even handling problems. "Bots will give consumers, who are more comfortable chatting with someone, the ability to buy products and services and get customer service," said Patrick Moorhead, an analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy. "I personally don't like getting on the phone and would love for Messenger to be able to validate my identity and provide information I need.

Artificial intelligence has come a long way, but it's still a work in progress. We can find instances of AI from video games to robots, the goal being to mimic the human mind. One Canadian company, Maluuba, is working on a algorithm that will read texts to see if the program can understand what was read. Their goal is "building systems that replicate how human beings learn to read, understand, and reason using state-of-the-art deep learning techniques." Hey, maybe we can finally know what is in the Terms and Conditions we always pass over.

In this way the network architecture is able to respond to an utterance with an response. Last year this concept was generalized to including a dialog encoder layer on top of the standard encoder. This might further enhance the architecture to keep track of previous utterances in a full dialog. The Sequence-To-Sequence architectures as every machine learning system has to undergo a certain training process. Here, the encoder and the decoder are trained together by presenting corresponding sequence pairs to them.

For two straight quarters, deal activity in artificial intelligence has hit record highs. Dennis Mortensen is one of the biggest winners in all the craze. His startup x.ai is the creator of Amy Ingram, an AI-driven personal assistant that can schedule meetings for you. After testing Amy in beta for two years, Mortensen announced last week 23 million in Series B funding to bring Amy to market. Dennis Mortensen: AI used to be for academia only and decades-long research.

At this point, it's a bit of an open secret that Facebook will announce the arrival of chatbots for Messenger at F8, its annual developer conference. Well, the latest Messenger update all but confirms it. If you were to do a search in the latest version of Facebook's chat app, you'll find a new category heading called "Bots and Businesses." Prior to the update, this would simply read "Businesses," which was a listing of companies that you could message for customer support and general inquiries. Messaging businesses typically involves speaking to a human, however, while talking to chatbots would likely be a more automated experience -- sort of like chatting to the equivalent of a phone tree.

A recent study by researchers at Oxford University and consultants Deloitte may have given finance professionals pause for thought. It found that, based on the nature of their work and the expected advance of machine intelligence, it is 95% likely that charted accountants will be replaced by some form of automation over the next 20 years. That is a startling figure, but it should come as no surprise that the work of the finance department is ripe for automation. Since 2004 the median number of full-time employees working in the function at big companies has declined by 40% to about 71 people for every US 1bn of revenue, down from 119 people, according to Hackett Group, a consulting firm. This is due, in part at least, to the increased use of automation within the finance department, the researchers say.

HealthBox retails for 400 and comes with connected wrist band, weight scale and heart rate monitor devices.

Even the savviest city residents get lost sometimes. According to one estimate, 33% of New Yorkers have no idea which way is north at any given time. And anyone who has used Google Maps knows that GPS can be wildly unreliable. Could there be a better way to find your place on a map than by relying on satellite positioning and Wi-Fi triangulation? As highlighted on Prosthetic Knowledge, researchers at the University of Cambridge have created a promising neural network called PoseNet. From a single snapshot from wherever you stand, it can localize your position in just 5ms--that's about 60 times faster than it takes you to blink.

Major players in the tech industry including Google and Microsoft have bet big money on the rise of internet bots as a form of communication between man and machine. While not the eerily humanoid robots in sci-fi movies (yet), the advancement and refinement of the bots' mechanical psyche parallel to the development of robotic parts is one step closer to merging the two. That is if it hasn't happened already. Isaac Asimov was a prolific sci-fi writer and Professor of Biochemistry at Boston University and is regarded by many as the father of robotics. "The Three Laws of Robotics 1: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; 2: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; 3: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law; The Zeroth Law: A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm."?

Growing up in a small village in Vietnam, Quoc Le had no electricity till he was nine. A little over 20 years later he has helped design artificial intelligence used by millions everyday. The 32-year-old helps lead the Google Brain team, a specialised unit that attempts to give computers the kind of profound neural networks that human beings possess, or at least helps them simulate it. It is Google's attempt to build an artificial brain. It may not be humanoid-like machine that can think for itself that many will have in mind, but "intelligence" has already been integrated into Google products, the kinds of technology that Mr Le could only imagine as a child.