AI or Artificial Intelligence recently made global news when an AI program beat a human opponent at GO (a Chinese board game). This win underscores the significant progress made in machine learning and the ability of a computer to model human logic. The game is so complex that up until this point experts had thought that it would take ten more years before a computer could beat humans at GO. Unbeknownst to many, Google is behind DeepMind, the company which built the AlphaGo computer program that won the game. Google is very public about their devotion to using machine learning in their products and services. With access to vast resources of data to draw upon, Google has become one of the biggest corporate sponsors of AI, investing heavily in it for videos, speech, translation and search.

Microsoft today announced that its Microsoft Translator app for iOS devices can now translate text and images from one language to another even when you're offline. The app already supported this functionality on Android, and the competing Google Translate for Android could work offline, too. But in this case, Microsoft has beat Google to the punch -- Google Translate currently works offline only on Android. "Until now, iPhone users needed an Internet connection if they wanted to translate on their mobile devices. Now, by downloading the Microsoft Translator app and the needed offline language packs, iOS users can get near online-quality translations even when they are not connected to the Internet. This means no expensive roaming charges or not being able to communicate when a data connection is spotty or unavailable," the Microsoft Translator team wrote in a blog post.

Microsoft today announced that its Microsoft Translator app for iOS devices can now translate text and images from one language to another even when you're offline. The app already supported this functionality on Android, and the competing Google Translate for Android could work offline, too. But in this case, Microsoft has beat Google to the punch -- Google Translate currently works offline only on Android. "Until now, iPhone users needed an Internet connection if they wanted to translate on their mobile devices. Now, by downloading the Microsoft Translator app and the needed offline language packs, iOS users can get near online-quality translations even when they are not connected to the Internet. This means no expensive roaming charges or not being able to communicate when a data connection is spotty or unavailable," the Microsoft Translator team wrote in a blog post.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced the Messenger Platform at the F8 summit in San Francisco last year. This year he's expected to announce a "chat bot" store on Messenger. That is the question on many lips ahead of Facebook's annual software developer conference next week in San Francisco. Analysts expect Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to open up Messenger's platform to "chatbots" and launch an online store for them. TechCrunch reported Thursday that Facebook will help software developers build "chatbots."

Over the past several months I've spent a great deal of my time learning about a topic know as support vector machines. It is one of those topics that only a math or computer science person would ever care to study. That's because SVM is a specific type of machine learning algorithm. One of its main uses is to classify data points into various categories. Given a set of attributes the algorithm is able to make its best guess as to what category a specific data point fits into.

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WIRED Health 2016 takes place on 29 April in London. IBM's Watson supercomputer is perhaps best known for winning the gameshow Jeopardy, but its expertise is now being applied to healthcare Kyu Rhee will be speaking at WIRED Health 2016 on 29 April in London. From helping humans live longer to understanding the brain, WIRED Health will hear from the innovators transforming this critical sector. You might know IBM's Watson best for its victory on US game show Jeopardy!, or perhaps for its cookery prowess, or even the campaign to elect it to the US presidency. But IBM hopes that its supercomputer can also change the way doctors diagnose their patients, putting vast quantities of data at a physician's fingertips.

If you're the kind of person who really likes chatting with the mail carrier, Dispatch won't be your favorite startup. That's because the four-person South San Francisco company is working on technology that could replace postal workers, Instacart couriers, UPS and FedEx drivers, or anyone else who gets paid to bring you stuff. Instead, you might be dealing with a 3-foot-tall, 150-pound, battery-powered roving robot that looks like a little dumpster on wheels. Called Carry, the device uses artificial intelligence, five cameras and a laser to navigate on sidewalks around pedestrians, flaming hoverboards and any other obstacles to get packages to your door. The only places you'll find Carry today are on two California college campuses, where it's still being tested.

Chatbots, also called Conversational Agents or Dialog Systems, are a hot topic. Microsoft is making big bets on chatbots, and so are companies like Facebook (M), Apple (Siri), Google, WeChat, and Slack. There is a new wave of startups trying to change how consumers interact with services by building consumer apps like Operator or x.ai, bot platforms like Chatfuel, and bot libraries like Howdy's Botkit. Microsoft recently released their own bot developer framework. Many companies are hoping to develop bots to have natural conversations indistinguishable from human ones, and many are claiming to be using NLP and Deep Learning techniques to make this possible. But with all the hype around AI it's sometimes difficult to tell fact from fiction.

There's already plenty of angst out there about the prospect of jobs lost to artificial intelligence, but this week, artists got a fresh reason to be concerned. A new "Rembrandt" painting unveiled in Amsterdam is not the work of the Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn at all, but rather the creation of a combination of technologies including facial recognition, AI, and 3D printing. Essentially, a deep-learning algorithm was trained on Rembrandt's 346 known paintings and then asked to produce a brand-new one replicating the artist's subject matter and style. Dubbed "The Next Rembrandt," the result is a portrait of a caucasian male, and it looks uncannily like the real thing. One particularly interesting detail about The Next Rembrandt project, which was a collaboration among several organizations including Dutch bank ING and Microsoft, is how the algorithm chose the subject for its painting, since it had to be entirely new.