After all, a lot about design is telling a good story, and building a robot is an even purer version of that. It's probably rather empty, but it already has some familiar controls on it: an options menu, a settings button, a big button for starting something new. It's easy to assume our robot is operating inside a pure messaging or voice platform, but increasingly this is not the case: Amazon Echo is controlled by voice, but has a companion app. As users become more familiar with chat robots, they will form expectations about how these things should work and behave.

With Watson, IBM seemed to have a whole year's head start on the new cognitive computing wave of technologies, as seemingly the only company with a solution ready to those who want to stay ahead of the big data curve. It looks like that monopoly could be coming to an end. Hewlett Packard Enterprise has announced its own version cognitive computing offering – the company prefers the term "machine learning-as-a-service" and is meant to give developers tools to building data-rich applications. HPE Haven OnDemand is now commercially available, and is a Microsoft Azure-based cloud platform with machine learning APIs and services targeting developers, starups and enterprises. The platform is able to perform analytics on data including text, audio, image, social, web and video.

Vinith Misra is one of the funnier people in tech. As a consultant for the hit HBO show Silicon Valley, he's best known for having crafted a mathematically complex dick joke. At IBM, where he works full-time on Watson, part of his job is to figure out how to give a robot a sense of humor. AI "is not about replacing humans, but interacting with them," Misra told me. "That's where humor is super valuable." We're going to be interacting with machines more and more, as robots and smart devices enter our homes, offices, cars, schools, hospitals and workplaces.

We're witnessing an explosion of applications that no longer have a graphical user interface (GUI). They've actually been around for a while, but they've only recently started spreading into the mainstream. They are called bots, virtual assistants, invisible apps. They can run on Slack, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, plain SMS, or Amazon Echo. They can be entirely driven by artificial intelligence, or there can be a human behind the curtain.

Google is planning to compete with Nuance and other voice recognition companies head on by opening up its speech recognition API to third-party developers. To attract developers, the app will be free at launch with pricing to be introduced at a later date. We'd been hearing murmurs about this service developing for weeks now. The company formally announced the service today during its NEXT cloud user conference, where it also unveiled a raft of other machine learning developments and updates, most significantly a new machine learning platform. The Google Cloud Speech API, which will cover over 80 languages and will work with any application in real-time streaming or batch mode, will offer full set of APIs for applications to "see, hear and translate," Google says. It is based on the same neural network tech that powers Google's voice search in the Google app and voice typing in Google's Keyboard.

Artificial intelligence may seem like a long way away, but powerful machine learning is already in our pockets, helping smartphones understand our queries and organising our photos for us. Bigger goals are on the horizon, but the machines will need humans like Quoc Le, a researcher in Google's "deep learning" unit, to get there. He talked to the BBC's Saira Asher during a visit to Singapore.

New lip-reading technology could help solve crimes by deciphering what people caught on CCTV are saying, researchers have claimed. The visual speech recognition technology developed by the University of East Anglia in Norwich can be used to determine what people are saying in situations where audio is not good enough to hear - such as on security camera footage. Helen Bear, from the university's school of computing science, said the technology could be applied to a wide range of situations from criminal investigations to entertainment. She added: "Lip-reading has been used to pinpoint words footballers have shouted in heated moments on the pitch, but is likely to be of most practical use in situations where there are high levels of noise, such as in cars or aircraft cockpits. "Crucially, whilst there are still improvements to be made, such a system could be adapted for use for a range of purposes - for example, for people with hearing or speech impairments."

New lip-reading technology developed at the University of East Anglia (UEA) could help in solving crimes and provide communication assistance for people with hearing and speech impairments. The visual speech recognition technology, created by Dr Helen L. Bear and Prof Richard Harvey of UEA's School of Computing Sciences, can be applied "any place where the audio isn't good enough to determine what people are saying," Dr Bear said. Dr Bear, whose findings will be presented at the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) in Shanghai on March 25, said unique problems with determining speech arise when sound isn't available - such as on CCTV footage - or if the audio is inadequate and there aren't clues to give the context of a conversation. The sounds '/p/,' '/b/,' and '/m/' all look similar on the lips, but now the machine lip-reading classification technology can differentiate between the sounds for a more accurate translation. Dr Bear said: "We are still learning the science of visual speech and what it is people need to know to create a fool-proof recognition model for lip-reading, but this classification system improves upon previous lip-reading methods by using a novel training method for the classifiers. "Potentially, a robust lip-reading system could be applied in a number of situations, from criminal investigations to entertainment.

FILE - This July 3, 2014, file photo, shows the Microsoft Corp. logo outside the Microsoft Visitor Center in Redmond, Wash. Artificial-intelligence software designed by Microsoft to tweet like a teenage girl has been suspended after it began spouting offensive remarks, according to the company Thursday, March 24, 2016. Microsoft said it is making adjustments to the Twitter chatbot after users found a way to manipulate it to tweet racist and sexist remarks and made a reference to Hitler.

OMG! Did you hear about the artificial intelligence program that Microsoft designed to chat like a teenage girl? It was totally yanked offline in less than a day, after it began spouting racist, sexist and otherwise offensive remarks. Microsoft said it was all the fault of some really mean people, who launched a "co-ordinated effort" to make the chatbot known as Tay "respond in inappropriate ways." To which one artificial intelligence expert responded: Duh! Well, he didn't really say that.