Microsoft is taking another shot at giving users a friendly AI-driven bot conversation partner. On Monday, the company released Zo, a chatbot that users can converse with on Kik, the popular messaging platform. Zo is a follow-up to Tay, the tech giant's first foray into friendly, English-speaking chatbots. It's clear that the company has learned from its first attempt, when the friendly chatbot was turned into a font of white supremacist propaganda by malicious users. In contrast, Zo adamantly refuses to discuss political matters.

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Improving artificial intelligence (AI) technology and the proliferation of messaging apps -- which enable users and businesses to interact through a variety of mediums, including text, voice, image, video, and file sharing -- are fueling the popularity of chatbots. These software programs use messaging as an interface through which to carry out various tasks, like checking the weather or scheduling a meeting. Bots are still nascent and monetization models have yet to be established for the tech, but there are a number of existing strategies -- like "as-a-service" or affiliate marketing -- that will likely prove successful for bots used as a tool within messaging apps. Chatbots can also provide brands with value adds -- services that don't directly generate revenue, but help increase the ability of brands and businesses to better target and serve customers, and increase productivity. These include bots used for research, lead generation, and customer service.

Amazon on Monday revealed that it will open a brick-and-mortar grocery store called Amazon Go, an ambitious bid by the once online-only retailer to gobble up more of Americans' shopping dollars by taking the fight more directly to traditional supermarkets and big-box stores. The store will be powered by a web of technology that allows customers to fill their shopping bags and walk out without going through a checkout process, a concept that has long been discussed in the retail industry but that has not been implemented at any major U.S. stores. The idea is that it will shave time off the shopping experience. Here's how Amazon Go will work: Customers download an app and then swipe their smartphones as they walk through the store's entrance. Then they just start picking up groceries.

San Francisco (AFP) - Uber announced Monday it was buying the artificial intelligence group Geometric Intelligence, to form the core of the ride-sharing giant's own research center. The move signals a stepped-up effort in artificial intelligence, helping research efforts to bring self-driving car technology into the mainstream. The acquisition, terms of which were not announced, will allow the 15 employees of the New York startup to form the base of Uber's artificial intelligence efforts. "Uber is in the business of using technology to move people and things in the real world. With all of its complexity and uncertainty, negotiating the real world is a high-order intelligence problem," Uber's Jeff Holden said in a blog post.

Few industries are as competitive as ecommerce. Not only are online retailers competing with other online stores and brick-and-mortar locations, but also the overall noise that is the Internet. We live in a world where consumer attention span is getting shorter and shorter: 40 percent of people abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load, and the average shopping cart is abandoned more than 68 percent of the time. I'm hard pressed to find an ecommerce site that is not constantly scrambling to engage more and drive more sales. Technology is finally helping with those efforts in a big way.

Cecila Malmstrom publicly speaks of torture. On October 4, when the European politician stood up in parliament to give her support for laws banning the export of items used for implementing the death penalty, there should have been little controversy. But when footage of her speech was posted online, nobody saw it. YouTube removed the video, which had been uploaded by fellow MEP Marietje Schaake. "I did not know whether this decision was made by a human or whether this was the result of an automated decision," the Dutch politician told WIRED.

Amazon announced three new products to bring its artificial intelligence expertise to customers of Amazon Web Services. The new services Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, and Amazon Rekognition make AI broadly accessible by offering Amazon's deep learning algorithms and technologies as fully managed services that any developer can access through an API call or a few clicks in the AWS Management Console. This covers a range of functions, such as natural language understanding, speech recognition, text-to-speech, and image analysis technologies, available at any scale, for any app or device.

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While artificial intelligence is a loaded term that for some may conjure up images of a malicious Skynet system from the Terminator movie franchise, the reality is not as ominous. And when Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, argued during the U.S. Congress' first AI hearing -- dubbed "The Dawn of Artificial Intelligence" -- that it is already at work in the United States, improving the efficiency and productivity of systems across the map, he was right. "Artificial intelligence is already seeping into our daily lives," said Cruz, who is chairman of the Senate subcommittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness. The hearing, which included representatives from Microsoft, Carnegie Mellon University and NASA, among others, focused on the potential implications machine learning will have on the country's labor market, national security and transportation. One of the largest areas for growth through artificial intelligence is smart city planning and smart infrastructure.