But how do we evolve the chat experience? Our current choices for mobile chat apps leave a range of expression untapped. In the rush to create chat bots to "personalize" the experiences we have with brands, we somehow forgot to give users the ability to personalize 1:1 and group chat. Most chat apps are still operating in a Helvetica (or San Francisco - nod to iOS) universe. We've been given very few tools within these apps to express ourselves.

A Japanese insurance company has decided to get rid of 34 jobs and instead get artificial intelligence to take over assessing medical insurance claims over the phone. Starting from January 2017, Tokyo-based Fukoku Life Insurance Mutual Company is handing over the roles of 34 human insurance agents to IBM Watson Explorer, which is a cognitive search and content analysis platform that uses machine learning and language processing to analyse data for trends and patterns. According to a press release, Fukoku Life is using IBM Watson Explorer to classify and categorise diseases, injuries and surgical procedures. When insurance policy holders call the company's hotline to make an insurance claim, the IBM Watson supercomputer is able to analyse the customer's voice and detect keywords. As part of making the claim, the policyholder has to submit a medical certificate showing what condition they have, and IBM Watson can detect the name of the injury or disease listed, as well as dates such as the hospital admission date and surgery date.

Health care doesn't have a big data problem. It has a big data opportunity, thanks to artificial intelligence. Think about the number of inefficiencies in your daily life -- long lines, traffic jams, a reliance on "snail mail" for certain bills or communications. Those inefficiencies are inconvenient and annoying, yes, but they are usually not a matter of life and death. The need for productivity in health care is different.

And this may just be the next evolution of the operating system. Cognitive computing services might include everything from predictive maintenance to customer experience and medical diagnoses. According to a recent report from Allied Market Research, the cognitive computing market is expected to generate revenue of $13.7 billion by 2020. On top of that, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty recently told CNBC that Watson would reach more than 1 billion consumers by the end of 2017. The cognitive computing market is growing in size and complexity--and quickly.

KHARAGPUR: Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Thursday said his organisation is "betting big" on advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in the coming years. Asked on the next big thing at Google, Pichai said: "I can't quite tell exactly but advances in AI and machine learning, we are making a big bet on that. Advances in machine learning will bring a difference in many many fields." He was interacting with students at his alma mater IIT - Kharagpur. Pichai earned his degree in Metallurgical Engineering from IIT-Kharagpur.

Three big themes at CES in Las Vegas for enterprises to watch look to be big data, connected devices or the Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence (AI), and sometimes the combination of all three. CES is one of the largest and most popular technology trade shows offering the latest gadgets for both consumers and IT business professionals and the 2017 edition opens to the public Jan. 5. This year, enterprise IT department specialists can expect to see the continued reign of data collection, connected devices and artificial intelligence (AI) – and combinations of all three. IBM Corp., for example, has placed a special focus on encouraging companies to become what it calls a "cognitive business" through using its Watson AI system to understand, reason, learn and make sense of collected data. IBM says this will allow companies to "improve business outcomes and increase revenue."

Not a day goes by when we don't hear of something related to artificial intelligence in the news. But AI (sometimes confused with machine learning, which is simply a technique within AI) wouldn't be where it is today if it weren't for one seminal event in 2016: AlphaGo beating Lee Sedol. In March last year, an AI program that trained itself to play the ancient game of Go beat the 18-time world champion. The reason it was such a feat for AI, was because Go is about feel, strategic judgment and winning multiple battles across the board – and a computer cannot simply memorise all possible combinations of board pieces, assess the situation, construct and execute a strategy to win, like chess. So the programmers of AlphaGo, from Google DeepMind, set up the basic heuristics of the game, allowed AlphaGo to analyse previous games and then split its brain so it could play itself millions of times.

NEVADA – Toyota Motor Corp. has unveiled a concept car with built-in artificial intelligence and autonomous driving technology designed to interact with the driver. The Wednesday unveiling of the Concept-i, which the automaker says can read its driver's personality and emotions, came ahead of the opening Thursday of the Consumer Electronics Show, an annual global trade show held in Las Vegas. By learning about the driver through "chats" using its AI system and monitoring facial expressions, the car will engage in conversations on topics that suit the driver's taste and propose driving routes that include their favorite areas, the carmaker said. The car will also flash lights if it detects a certain level of driver fatigue, play relaxing music to reduce tension and shift to autonomous driving if the driver is at risk. Toyota is aiming to build an experimental vehicle that features some aspects of the Concept-i within the next several years and test its performance in Japan.

Amazon's Alexa and Google's virtual assistant have already made their way into our living rooms, but Chinese tech giant Baidu is betting that verbal answers may not always be enough. The company is launching a new home-centric computer that includes a screen for displaying helpful information in response to voice commands. Baidu is teaming up with Chinese consumer tech company Ainemo to launch the device, called Little Fish, which is being positioned as a voice-centric home robot. Ainemo created the hardware, while Baidu created the operating system that powers it. The computer, about the size of a lamp, is designed to handle many of the same tasks one might expect from such a device: managing calendars, answering questions, getting news updates, and ordering food, among other tasks.

Wearables are ubiquitous; everyone worth their salt is jumping on the Internet of Things (IoT) bandwagon; and Augmented Reality (AR) is here to stay. These are the current favorite trends in the industry; and based on what we've seen in the recent years, we think it'll be mostly how businesses apply these trends that will drive the growth of these technologies, not the end users. And here is why - the data generated by these three technologies is incredibly voluminous, we all know that. It might not be of much use to an individual user, but in large volumes can be incredibly useful to businesses. If we can handle its relentless onslaught, this data can especially provide us deep real-time analytical insights that can help brands understand their consumers far better and make data-driven decisions. Data-converging platforms that will converge the influx of all connected data will rise in 2017, fuelled by the demand to tame this massive data.