You can call it a Virtual Personal Assistant, an Intelligent Agent, an Intelligent Interface or whatever you wish. The era of the assistant that began with Siri will eventually dominate the way people interact with mobile devices, computers, cars, wearables, appliances and every other piece of technology that requires complex human-machine interaction. Nearly all of the large Internet players have now launched or are working on some effort to win this next-generation paradigm and it's the earliest of days. Despite the massive uptake of assistants spurred by Apple's Siri, Google Now, and Microsoft Cortana, the market and technologies for this paradigm remain in their adolescence. Siri was the first chapter in a much longer, larger story that reminds me of the original iPhone launch in 2007.

If artificial intelligence has its way, discounting could disappear, thanks to software that tells retailers exactly what and how many products to buy, and when to put them on sale to sell them at full price. Online shopping could become a conversation, where the shopper describes the dress of their dreams, and, in seconds, an AI-powered search engine tracks down the closest match. Designers, merchandisers and buyers could all work alongside AI, to predict what customers want to wear, before they even know themselves. In the last few years, a trifecta of cheap, ubiquitous, powerful computing; big data; and the development of deep learning have triggered a revolution in artificial intelligence. The computing devices that now fill our everyday lives generate large data sets, which "deep learning" algorithms analyse to find trends, make predictions and perform specific tasks, such as identifying specific objects in an image.

After serving the tech giant Google for 15 years, Singhal retired in February this year. While speaking to ET, Singhal revealed that he had also invested in the Vishal Gondal-founded firm as an angel investor in 2014. Being the master head of Google's ranking algorithm, he expected to use his experience and expertise in building artificial intelligence and machine learning of GOQii. Jhansi-born Singhal added that he hopes to bring a lot of learning from his past work at Google which included deploying artificial intelligence and machine learning to make search better and faster, reports ET. Elaborating on the idea, he said, "The idea that is most intriguing about GOQii is having a human being working with artificial intelligence to motivate the user. It is not just some bit of learning but there will be a lot of artificial intelligence going in the background. The interface to these things has not evolved to a point where a human being is fully comfortable with it, especially in an area like health and wellness so a lot of science has to be worked upon. The world needs good health and it needs to be motivated about it."

Turns out a "useless" humanities degree can get you a job in Silicon Valley, thanks to the rise of artificial intelligence. The brains behind Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, and Microsoft's Cortana realized that to make their AIs sound more like people, they needed to hire workers whose creativity was less digital and more personal. According to the Washington Post, the teams behind many everyday AIs are made up of poets, writers, and comedians, who help give the robots more personality. Now, we're not saying that Silicon Valley's tech community is full of sociopaths or psychos, but software companies seem to have realized that hiring engineers from fields outside their own can help make their AI's more personable, and it's a much easier way to teach computers to think than turning them loose on the internet, which inevitably turns them into racists. Some companies are taking artificial assistants one step further.

The recent feat achieved by AlphaGo was a marvel of striking progress in artificial intelligence (AI) technology. AlphaGo, an AI-based computer program developed by a British corporation under the umbrella of Google Inc. of the United States, has won against the world's top Go player, South Korea's Lee Se Dol, 4-1. Previously, AI programs had defeated skilled human players in the fields of chess and shogi. However, it was said that it would take 10 years to see an AI system win against human players in the world of Go. It was cited as a high hurdle that the surface of a Go board is broad, and that there are an immeasurable number of choices for moves to be made in playing a match.

The history of artificial intelligence (AI) dates back into antiquity – intelligent robots appear in the myths of many ancient societies, including Greek, Arabic, Egyptian and Chinese. Today, the field of artificial intelligence is more vibrant than ever and some believe that we're on the threshold of discoveries that could change human society irreversibly, for better or worse. Humans tend to think in straight lines, but every aspect of technological progress is actually accelerating – including AI. Futurist Ray Kurzweil calls this the "Law of Accelerating Returns", and presents evidence that an amount of progress equal to the entire 20th century's gains was attained between 2000 and 2014. He also argues that the same amount will happen again before 2021. Understanding the exponential nature of progress and ignoring the inner tendency to think things will keep improving at the same rate is key to getting to grips with how fast we'll make scientific advances in the future.

Having close access to ultra-successful people can yield some pretty incredible information about who they really are, what makes them tick, and, most importantly, what makes them so successful and productive. Kevin Kruse is one such person. He recently interviewed over 200 ultra-successful people, including 7 billionaires, 13 Olympians, and a host of accomplished entrepreneurs. In analyzing their responses, Kruse coded the answers to yield some fascinating suggestions. What follows are some of my favorites from Kevin's findings.

Over the course of the last weeks and months you couldn't escape news and stories about messaging platforms going after B2C use cases à la "order me some food", "book me a hotel room" or "I need a ride downtown in 30 minutes". Pioneered and taken to huge success in Asia by platforms like Weixin/WeChat, LINE and Kakao, especially Facebook with its two behemoth platforms Messenger and WhatsApp is taking decisive actions to bring businesses and consumers together on their platforms. Kik is even faster, having just launched such a botstore for brands. In their launch line-up are 18 well-known brands such as Sephora, H&M or The Weather Channel. And with these moves, communications platforms will tap into significant revenue streams in the form of rev shares and commissions for being the facilitator between businesses and consumers in everyday Transactions.

Deploy and start monitoring in less than an hour. MetaMind, a startup focused on deep learning, this week announced that it has been acquired by Salesforce. The company's expertise is in natural language processing -- letting computers analyze relationships between words. "With MetaMind and Salesforce coming together, we'll be able to offer customers real AI solutions with breakthrough capabilities that further automate and personalize customer support, marketing automation, and many other business processes," MetaMind CEO Richard Socher said. The acquisition will see MetaMind, whose backers included Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, embed deep learning within the Salesforce platform.

The company's expertise is in natural language processing -- letting computers analyze relationships between words. "With MetaMind and Salesforce coming together, we'll be able to offer customers real AI solutions with breakthrough capabilities that further automate and personalize customer support, marketing automation, and many other business processes," MetaMind CEO Richard Socher said. The acquisition will see MetaMind, whose backers included Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, embed deep learning within the Salesforce platform. Meanwhile, Microsoft Dynamics CRM got AI-powered predictive marketing capabilities in March through integration with EverString's platform.