When I was a teenager, I used to enjoy watching a weekly television programme called "Lost in Space". In this science fiction series, a robot having a male identity was used as one of the main characters. He spoke perfect English but his speech sounded monotonic and dull – devoid of inflexions, and variations of volume and tone. This depiction of robots as sounding devoid of human emotions was not uncommon at that time – perhaps film producers felt the need to reinforce the differences between humans and machines. However, in a recent film called Her (released in 2014), the main character, named Theodore, uses an AI operating system that speaks conversational language.

One woman set up a Tinder date with dozens of men to have them battle for her heart. The Tinder user who duped hundreds of men into showing up at Union Square for a phony date Sunday was actually a stunt for a "viral marketing agency" -- the same one that famously recorded hidden-camera footage of a woman being catcalled as she walked around New York City. "We will be releasing a video Thursday that explains the entire project and story," marketer Rob Bliss of Rob Bliss Creative told The Post. Bliss, whose company "specializes in making viral video campaigns," created the widely-shared "10 hours of walking in NYC as a woman" clip for an anti-harassment non-profit in 2014. In his latest production, a model and actress named Natasha Aponte invited unwitting men she met on Tinder to the public square on Sunday for what they thought was a hot date.

One woman set up a Tinder date with dozens of men to have them battle for her heart. Dozens of dudes showed up to Union Square for Tinder dates on Sunday -- only to learn they were all there to meet the same woman, and she wanted them to battle it out "Hunger Games"-style for her heart. One Twitter user recounting his version of events says he met a woman named Natasha through the hookup app and she invited him to meet her at the public space to watch her friend DJ -- but he arrived to a totally surreal scene. "I make my way to Union Square. Eat a hot dog and look over by this open lot by 17th Ave and there is a stage and a DJ and about 100 ppl and cameras and sh-t and I think well this is some random ass Manhattan sh-t," wrote @bvdhai.

Microsoft and Amazon will bring Alexa and Cortana to all Echo speakers and Windows 10 users in the U.S. today. As part of a partnership between the Seattle-area tech giants, you can say "Hey Cortana, open Alexa" to Windows 10 PCs and "Alexa, open Cortana" to a range of Echo smart speakers. The public preview bringing the most popular AI assistant on PCs together with the smart speaker with the largest U.S. market share will be available to most people today but will be rolled out to all users in the country over the course of the next week, a Microsoft spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email. Each of the assistants brings unique features to the table. Cortana, for example, can schedule a meeting with Outlook, create location-based reminders, or draw on LinkedIn to tell you about people in your next meeting.

Modern day web app development is increasingly focused on building a customer-facing front-end presence with the use of Artificial Intelligence. In this post, we look at five key areas, illustrated by real-world examples, where web apps are employing Artificial intelligence to automate some part of their system. Curating content based on the user's context is one of the most widely used AI features in web apps. Amazon, for instance, uses item-based collaborative filtering for product classification. Amazon's recommendation system uses a combination of goods-based recommendation (users are recommended for those similar to what they liked in the past) and buddy-based recommendation (users are recommended things which their Facebook friends like.) Not just for their recommendation system, Amazon has been using AI for multiple tasks.

Some of us remember Will Robinson's loyal robotic pal in the "Lost in Space" series of the 1960s. Others will trace the sci-fi vision of intelligent autonomous machines to the day Skynet became self-aware and turned on humanity in the "Terminator" films. The term artificial intelligence (AI) and the official pursuit of intelligent machines in the scientific community actually dates to a 1956 conference of researchers from Dartmouth and IBM. Today's AI is invading our everyday lives, albeit in more subtle ways, such as digital assistants like Alexa and Siri. And now, Artificial Intelligence in dentistry has arrived! Consider a daily task that we as dentists view as routine and relatively simple: finding caries on X-rays.

If, like Rip Van Winkle, you've been asleep for the last decade and have just woken up, that flip phone you have has become super-popular among retro technologists and survivalists alike, and, oh yeah, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is either going to kill you or save you. AI is the latest in a long line of technology buzzwords that have gripped society, and if we are to believe the people at the respected technology analysts firm Gartner Inc., 2018 will be the year in which AI is truly integrated into our daily lives. As unnerving as the surreal robotics being cooked up at Boston Dynamics or the deployment of facial recognition AI in Chinese public schools may seem, this technology is a product of the human condition and as such, we are embedding our own culture within its coded DNA. Debates about AI currently focus on the notion of ethics. In the study of culture, ethics are embedded within values, and they've become an important part of the deliberations about how AI will integrate into our lives.

Wait a minute, cats already rule the'interwebs'. Wouldn't handing the growing Internet of Things over to them be the end of civilisation as we know it? If you have been keeping an eye on this radical development appearing on the pet community radar. You will probably agree that a cat would prefer a long nap. Let's find out why! We can't give you an Internet of Things tutorial, but we can give you an idea of what's coming your way. We found an Internet of Things definition that helps us show the IoT as it affects pet owners, and their fur families.

You can now buy a holographic'wife' in Japan The unit has been targeted at'single men who live alone'. Image Credit: YouTube / Gatebox Labs The Gatebox virtual assistant takes the form of a holographic anime girl who you can interact with. Voice assistants such as Amazon Alexa and Apple Siri have become increasingly popular in recent years, but now one Japanese company has taken things one step further by transitioning from a purely voice-based system to one that you can practically have a relationship with. Originally only available in a limited capacity to customers who placed a pre-order, the Gatebox virtual assistant appears as a holographic anime girl named Hikari Azuma. In addition to responding to voice commands, Azuma is capable of recognizing her owner's face, controlling various'smart' devices around the home and can even send text messages.

One important distinction to make is that chatbots are not full-blown virtual assistants like Alexa, Cortana, or Siri. The distinction between a text- or voice-based chat interface is less important than the scope of where digital assistants live and what they do for a user as opposed to the more narrow focus of a chatbot. Virtual assistants are omnipresent AI helpers embedded within our smartphones, Bluetooth speakers, operating systems (OSes), and other computing environments, offering predictive recommendations and performing a wide range of evolving functions. Chatbots, for the most part, live within a single app or messaging interface, and can be programmed more simply with a selection of automated actions for specific business tasks.