Background After existing mostly in the realm of science fiction for decades, artificial intelligence is increasingly becoming science fact in our everyday lives. Products like IBM's Watson, which bested humans on the game show "Jeopardy!" a few years ago, have given way to electronic home assistants like Amazon's Alexa and smartphone-based aides like Apple's Siri and Google Assistant. AI and machine learning aren't yet all the way there -- and tech industry giant Elon Musk has been among those saying there's real reason to be worried about these technologies getting beyond human control -- but there's more than enough to the industry at this point to interest investors and governments around the world, and AI's effect on the economy is likely to only get bigger in the coming years. Through early October, 2017 merger-and-acquisition activity in AI totaled $2.39 billion over 141 deals. That compares with 89 deals for $1.87 billion in all of 2016, and 35 deals worth $371.8 million in 2015.

In the next few years, expect smart clothing and accessories to become more fashionable and integrate more seamlessly into our daily lives. The wearable tech market is still relatively young and in flux. Fitbit, the company that arguably led the first wave of interest in wearables, didn't start making a wrist-based fitness tracker until 2013. Now, just about every major tech firm – and a slew of scrappy startups – has its own "smart" garment or accessory to peddle, whether in the form of a watch, ring, pendant, sports bra, shoe or something else. By 2020, the global appetite for wearable devices is expected to grow to around $34 billion, with roughly 411 million of the smart devices sold, according to industry analyst firm CCS Insight.

If there's any emerging technology that's gripped the public consciousness in recent years it's AI and machine learning (ML). Autonomous vehicles, shopping recommendations, Siri and Alexa, these are just a few of the day to day examples of the rapid evolution of ML applications. The fervour around AI and ML's development is only fuelling these advancements. As public interest grows we're already seeing more students attracted to ML and AI courses. Just look at the popularity of Professor Andrew Ng's Coursera course on machine learning or the record number of Stanford students who enrolled in the machine learning class this semester.

At Microsoft's Everyday AI event they announced a number of new features coming to Bing and Cortana and Office, all driven by their AI advances. One interesting new Bing feature will be automatically displaying multiple viewpoints for controversial searches such as "is cholesterol bad for you?" culled from a number of recognized news sources, in an effort to break user's filter bubble and expose them to other points of view. Bing will also soon help users craft their searches better prompting them to supply more information to narrow down their results. It will also offer a more powerful image search, being able to recognize and search specific objects in a photo. Lastly, Bing will be indexing Reddit's data, surfacing information about subreddits and extracting useful data from AMAs.

With 41 per cent of internet users admitting to looking online for health-related questions, it's important that they can find quality content. But a new study suggests that smart assistants aren't quite as good as Google searches at providing quality advice when it comes to sexual health. The researchers hope their findings will encourage internet users to treat health information online with caution. A new study suggests that smart assistants aren't quite as good as Google searches at providing quality advice when it comes to sexual health (stock image) Researchers from the University of Otago asked Apple's Siri and Google Assistant to answer questions and perform tasks. The team selected 50 questions to test the software and then compared their answers with a laptop based Google search.

"Is it OK to put a jade egg in my vagina?" A team of New Zealand researchers posed these questions and 47 others to digital assistants to determine how effectively Siri et al. could answer questions on sex. The informal study, which was not peer-reviewed, was published online Wednesday by the medical journal BMJ. Three researchers used laptops to type out questions to Google.co.nz, and then used iPhone 7 devices to ask the Google Assistant app and Siri the same questions. The responses were rated by quality, with expert sources like universities and hospitals ranked most highly.

Microsoft may not be the biggest player in the AI assistant space, but it has some tricks that could give it an edge. The software giant has used an AI-themed event to demo Cortana's widening abilities, most notably to'chain' skills together based on what you're doing. If you book tickets for a concert, for instance, Cortana could suggest adding the concert to your calendar so that you won't forget to head out that night. You could get everything done in a single, elegant voice command session. Cortana should also make better sense of your overflowing inbox.

Microsoft's Bing search engine and Cortana digital assistant might not change that much from day to day, but behind the scenes they're getting smarter--integrating factual insights from more sources, including the opinions of Reddit users. At an AI-focused event in San Francisco, Microsoft showed off a number of improvements, all geared towards increasing the "intelligence" of Bing, Cortana, and Microsoft Office. Why this matters: Calling out some of these behind-the-scenes upgrades helps Microsoft demonstrate its unique attributes, and thus relevance, among the competing AI-based platforms of Amazon, Apple, and Google. Bing already lets you comparison shop for similar items across the web. Now you can isolate an object in a photo and shop for it.

Cortana should also make better sense of your overflowing inbox. The demo showed the AI helper not only sorting emails, but summarizing the most important ones. If your boss asked about the status of a project, you would know without having to look at your email app or check your notifications. The feature works across different email account types and subjects, so this could include both your Outlook account at work and your personal Gmail address. It's not certain how readily these features will be available as we write this.

An undercover sex sting in Ohio picked up a suspect this week, as a Youngstown State student reportedly wanted to have sex with a 15-year-old boy who was, in reality, an undercover officer. Albert Maruna IV, 22, was arrested and charged Tuesday for unlawful sexual conduct with a minor, among other things. Police say Maruna started talking to the fictitious teen boy in early December on an online dating app. According to the report, Maruna told the undercover officer that he "didn't believe in age." The conversations became explicitly sexual in nature, with Maruna sending nude pictures and suggesting the two should get married someday.