A Phys.org article states that Army researchers are making huge strides in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) that can support U.S. soldiers on the battlefield. Their latest development is an affordable yet capable AI assistant that can reportedly help human troops learn more than 13 times faster than normal training methods. Featuring vastly improved machine learning capabilities, the AI will be installed upon the Army's future ground combat vehicles. It is intended to help a human soldier spot important clues, recognize the developing situation, and come up with a solution to the problem on the fly. The AI would reportedly help preserve American lives during the chaos of combat.

Google is devoting more resources to a research project that seeks to determine whether artificial intelligence can free doctors from the laborious and time-sucking chore of taking notes during medical examinations. According to a report Thursday in CNBC, Google is expanding a program called Medical Digital Assist, which is overseen by Google Brain. Google recently posted four job openings that describe building the "next gen clinical experience...while using audio and touch technology to improve the accuracy and availability of care," the report says. In November, Google said in a blog post that it would begin working with doctors and researchers at Stanford University to explore whether Automatic Speech Recognition and other AI technologies could help lighten the note-taking load for physicians. Studies show that doctors often spend more hours of their workday documenting their patients' medical histories or treatment plans than they do actually treating patients.

Onstage at the launch of Amazon's Alexa Prize, a multimillion-dollar competition to build AI that can chat like a human, the winners of last year's challenge delivered a friendly warning to 2018's hopefuls: your bot will mess up, it will say something offensive, and it will be taken offline. Elizabeth Clark, a member of last year's champion Sounding Board team from the University of Washington, was onstage with her fellow researchers to share what they'd learned from their experience. What stuck out, she said, were the bloopers. "One thing that came up a lot around the holidays was that a lot of people wanted to talk to our bot about Santa," said Clark. "Unfortunately, the content we had about Santa Claus looked like this: 'You know what I realized the other day? Santa Claus is the most elaborate lie ever told.'" The bot chose this line because it had been taught using jokes from Reddit, explained Clark, and while it might be diverting for adults, "as you can imagine, a lot of people who want to talk about Santa Claus … are children." And telling someone's curious three-year-old that Santa is a lie, right before Christmas? That's a conversational faux pas, even if you are just a dumb AI.

A Portland woman recently told a local news outlet that her Amazon Echo device had gone rogue, sending a recording of a private conversation to a random person in her contact list. On Thursday, two senators tasked with investigating consumer privacy sent a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos demanding answers. In the letter, Republican senator Jeff Flake and Democratic senator Chris Coons, who serve respectively as chairman and ranking member of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, ask Bezos to explain how exactly the Amazon Echo device listens to and stores users' voices. The senators also seek answers about what the company is doing to protect users from having that sensitive information misused. The letter, which was reviewed by WIRED, comes in the midst of what Flake calls a "post-Facebook" world, referring to the data privacy scandal in which Facebook says the data of as many as 87 million Americans may have been misappropriated by a political consulting firm called Cambridge Analytica.

If there's one thing that the future of healthcare can't seem to escape, it's the promise and potential of artificial intelligence (AI). Though the field has been around for quite some time, it wouldn't be until IBM's Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in a series of seven chess games in 1997 that people would really begin taking machine learning and AI seriously. After two decades, IBM would be pushing another AI machine into the public eye, this time dubbed Watson, and presented as a game-changer for healthcare. Unfortunately, the hype hasn't quite lived up to the reality, prompting Chamath Palihapitiya, an influential tech investor who founded the VC firm Social Capital, to call Watson is "a joke" in May 2017 via CNBC. The good news is that, according to David H. Freedman writing for Technology Review, "most of the criticism of Watson … doesn't seem rooted in any particular flaw in the technology. Instead, it's a reaction to IBM's overly optimistic claims of how far along Watson would be by now. In fact, it still seems likely that Watson Health will be a leader in applying AI to health care's woes."

An increasing number of companies are exploring the realms of artificial intelligence and a wide array of innovative use cases are coming to light. Enterprises of all sizes are considering how and when to incorporate AI into their products and services, which is not at all surprising when you consider the vast opportunities for personalized customer engagement. In fact, AI can be used to tailor every moment and conversation with a customer by learning and applying their preferences, behaviors and emotions to shape human-like interactions. Amazon Alexa, Google Home and Apple's HomeKit have all piqued consumer interest in new AI-based "smart" technology. Many industry leaders are successfully using AI in their back-end systems. For example, Netflix has just 90 seconds to grab a subscriber's attention; if they don't find engaging content in that minute and a half, subscribers lose interest.

Mobile apps have penetrated way deeper into our daily lives, and they have transformed it by the significant way. With the emergence of AI or artificial intelligence, it will impact the interactions with the smart devices even more as well as the mobile apps. AI is currently a new technology which is ready to use along with a single-faceted impact. It is becoming multi-faceted with a wider range of impacts. Different aspects like machine learning, natural language processing, deep learning as well as advanced algorithms, AI has been working at different levels, and they are leading to the creation of new as well as unique applications and helps the user interaction with different apps.

Over the next five years, we are about to witness the world we live in entirely disrupted by improvements in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Children today are growing up with AI assistants in their homes (Google Assistant, Siri and Alexa) -- to the point that you might consider their mere presence an extension of co-parenting. As voice and facial recognition continue to evolve, machine learning algorithms are getting smarter. More and more industries are being influenced by AI, and our society as we know it is transforming. The transportation industry looks like it will be the first to be completely disrupted by artificial intelligence.

Security experts have warned about a major security flaw in Windows that allows hackers to bypass the password on your computer and access your private files. The Microsoft voice assistant is built into every version of Windows 10 and is designed to schedule calendar appointments, check the weather, set reminders, send emails, and more. However, the latest security flaw could enable hackers to browse your private files, install a virus, and even reset your password – locking you out of your own machine. Windows 10's in-built voice assistant Cortana (pictured in-use, above) can be used to schedule calendar appointments, check the weather, set reminders, send emails, and more The hack, which works on password-protected PCs, was discovered by McAfee security researchers. When Windows 10 is installed with default settings, Cortana is accessible from the lock screen.

Today shopping is all about online shopping, very fast-paced, just a click away from the comforts of your home. With the ever-increasing usage of smartphones and tablets worldwide, we are witnessing a new trend, the shift from e-commerce to m-commerce. With advancements in technologies like artificial intelligence, the popularity of virtual assistants like Google assistants, Siri, Alexa and Cortana are gaining momentum. These voice-activated AI-enabled assistants are very convenient to use on your mobile devices even while you are on the go.