IBM Watson gained global fame as a "Jeopardy!" While Watson is no longer dominating the game circuit, IBM has put the computer system to use in a wide range of applications from tennis to weather. Now Watson is also powering a modified version of "Minecraft" that makes learning about the human body as fun as crafting a house. "Medical Minecraft," as its called, was created by high school educators to teach students about infectious diseases. Normally, that would be a topic that would completely bore teens or to be too complex to the point of alienation.

IBM Watson, the distributed natural language processing platform, isn't the only advanced system available, but it's the highest-profile and arguably the most sophisticated. It's also important to recognize how shrewdly Watson is being marketed. Even before Watson was Watson, IBM was adept at generating publicity for its futuristic computing activities. Most famously, Big Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. Four years later, Watson, in a form far more rudimentary than today's commercialized version, beat Ken Jennings, the human Jeopardy!

Firstly, AI is an incredibly vibrant field. We're discovering ways of evolving the technology and applying it to solve profound social and business problems – problems where previous generations of computing systems were not able to provide much benefit. It has a tremendous ability to amplify our own cognitive strengths – it contributes to my ability to make better decisions, to see the world through a lens I would have otherwise been blind to. There are tremendous opportunities and we are only at the threshold of what is possible. Watson is being developed as a tool that can help build and grow businesses – what do you see as the potential for AI in this field? Watson is transforming the way businesses approach their operations and fuelling their growth with tools that help them understand, reason, learn and interact in a way that has clear and obvious benefits to the human condition.

Since I noted Timothy Tuttle of Mindmeld's LSA16 comments about the sudden increase in the volume of voice search queries, I've noticed an increasing number of articles on the subject. If the attention being given voice search is an indication of its anticipated impact on the marketplace, then it's going to be a big deal. The potential for voice search to become a major search medium is well illustrated by the number of slides Mary Meeker devotes to the topic in her annual Internet Trends report that was just released this month. Out of 213 slides, Mary included 23 slides on voice search. And while the numbers on voice search growth vary quite widely, they all agree on one trend: explosive growth.

That dream of universal expertise is what IBM says its Watson question-answering, machine-learning system makes possible. Watson can be trained to answer questions on any subject you choose. The system uses natural language processing to read huge numbers of documents, extracts and organises information about a particular topic and then refines its understanding of that subject based on human feedback. But how useful are the answers given by Watson and how difficult is it to train? One person who's well-placed to talk about using the Jeopardy!-winning

What happened to the IBM Watson X Prize? The IBM Watson AI XPRIZE ... was announced on the TED Stage on Feb 17, 2016. It is a 5 million competition.... Complete rules and guidelines will be made available in May.

We get asked a lot of questions about how to start building with Watson, so we decided to compile our top 4 Frequently Asked Questions. You can use this as a guide to learn more about the technology, receive inspiration from use cases, get valuable resources, and ultimately begin building with the technology. Cognitive technology's strength lies in its ability to draw insights from unstructured data sets. Structured data is found in a spreadsheet, whereas unstructured data is text such as tweets, medical journals, etc. Today 80% of data is unstructured, so tools such as cognitive computing are becoming more important in helping humans understand what's inside that data.

IBM has teamed up with an electric vehicle company to put its Watson artificial intelligence into a driverless electric bus. Dubbed Olli, the autonomous vehicle will be used to take passengers around Washington DC, and is the brainchild of Local Motors, the Arizona-based automaker. It said its bus is the first vehicle to use IBM Watson's car-focused cognitive learning platform, Watson Internet of Things (IoT) for Automotive. Local Motors unveiled the bus at its new facility in National Harbor, Maryland, 12 miles from the US capital. The bus itself is 3D-printed and can carry up to 12 people and is powered by an electric motor.

Local Motors, well known for the crowdsourced Rally Fighter off-road coupe, has been diversifying lately. After starting some 3D-printed projects, it has gone in yet another direction, announcing the Olli, an electric minibus that looks like a large phonebooth that's been tipped on its side. Local Motors refers to the vehicle as a shuttle it will transport up to 12 people from location to location along a pre-set route. The plan is to allow an Olli to be summoned using an app or a kiosk. It uses lidar, cameras, and GPS to move along its route, making adjustments as needed to avoid collisions.

Olli will be exclusive to DC these next few months, but Miami and Las Vegas will get their own in late 2016. Local Motors is also in talks to test the bus in cities outside the US, including Berlin, Copenhagen and Canberra. It's unclear if anyone can get the chance to ride one, since these are merely trial runs, but you can ask local authorities if the EV makes its way to your city. If and when the time comes that driverless public vehicles can legally shuttle passengers, you'll be able to summon an Olli through an app, just like Uber. And if Local Motors' plans pan out, a lot of people around the globe will be using that app: Company co-founder John Rogers envisions building hundreds of micro-factories all over the world that can 3D print an Olli within 10 hours and assemble it one.