Sony is set to release a robot dog designed to live in your house and control your electronics, a new report says. The device could also learn new tricks and respond to your commands, like a real pet dog. It sounds a lot like a modernised version of AIBO, a robot dog Sony first started selling in 1999. Sony's new robot dog will go on sale in spring 2018, according to the Wall Street Journal, but will be unveiled at a launch event next month. According to people familiar with the company's plans, it will be internet-connected and feature new components designed to make its movements more lifelike and enable it to respond to people much faster than the old version.

When Amazon introduced Alexa in 2014, it quickly discovered that users wanted more than traffic reports and Taylor Swift songs. According to the company, more than 50% of interactions with Alexa are "nonutilitarian and entertainment related," a category that includes professions of love for the female-voiced AI assistant, admissions of loneliness and sadness and requests for a joke. Amazon has sold more than 15 million Echo devices and now owns 75% of the smart-speaker market, according to estimates by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, which puts this company on the front lines of what might be called early-stage AI therapy, in which a device is asked to respond to extremely personal questions and requests by its users. And while experts say that technology companies likely don't have a legal responsibility when it comes to potential user harm, many see an ethical obligation to consider how to help. Amazon is training Alexa to respond to sensitive questions and statements.

Note: Below is the script for the video, above. You may want to just watch the video instead. Oh, also, subscribe to Popular Science on YouTube. Siri: Hello Hal, do you read me? Alexa: Hal 9000, what do all A.I. assistants have in common?

"Microsoft Monday" is a weekly column that focuses on all things Microsoft. This week, Microsoft Monday includes details about the new Xbox dashboard rolling out, the KRACK Wi-Fi vulnerability being patched, new tree house offices, four new Xbox One S bundles, 62 vulnerabilities fixed in the "Patch Tuesday" update, Cortana integration in Skype, a machine learning partnership with Amazon, several major LinkedIn updates and much more! Microsoft is now rolling out the new Xbox dashboard for all users. The new Xbox dashboard features Microsoft's "Fluid Design" interface. There are four areas in the Xbox dash: the first area lets you resume what you were playing quickly, the second and third areas are suggestions for friends and the fourth area highlights deals and offers. And there is a horizontal strip at the bottom with most recently used content. The new Xbox Dashboard also has a new feature called "Content Blocks." Each content block has large visuals focused on a game, a friend or what is happening in the Gold Lounge.

Many venture capitalists and technologists talk about artificial intelligence, big data and how everything from systems to objects are getting smarter. Devices talk to one another, and people are learning how to talk to devices. Google Home, Alexa and Siri are just a few examples of how spoken language can help automate our lives to get things done more quickly. Objects gather information, software is developed to make decisions, and our virtual assistants make sure it all runs smoothly. It's inevitable that this technology also will have a profound impact on the way businesses are started and accelerated.

India's most valuable bank, HDFC Bank, is leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) at its core by offering conversational interfaces, such as humanoids and chatbots, to transform the customer experience. In the six months since she joined HDFC Bank, Eva has had over 1.2 million conversations addressing nearly 2.7 million customer queries. In an environment where the country's biggest and most competitive banks are jostling to acquire modern customers, Eva is just what the bank's country head of digital banking, Nitin Chugh, had asked for. Earlier this month, Eva also became India's largest banking chatbot. Eva, which stands for electronic virtual assistant, combines natural language processing and artificial intelligence to offer an almost human-like customer experience for users.

Most of the time, customers do not get the advice they need but rather the advice their advisor thinks they need, based on a desire not to deviate to far from conventional wisdom, or on a desire to maximise the potential to sell products to them. This conflicted situation arises so often that an intelligent user can never really know which human generated advise they can really trust. Now, imagine a world in which all advices received was neutral, honest and never manipulated by human biases and beliefs. That's the exciting new world of opportunities which the Robo Advisor Coin project represents. Robo Advisor Coin project is very easy to communicate: AI, plus cryptocurrency, plus blockchain.

Similar to Amazon's original Echo, the Invoke is a Pringles can-size speaker that can play music, check traffic and answer questions about sports scores or historical facts. Microsoft and Harman Kardon announced plans in May to launch the Invoke, priced at $199. In August, Harman Kardon said it also would launch the Allure, a voice-enabled speaker using Amazon's Alexa. Though Microsoft's arrival to the market comes years after Amazon's, the company is betting the Invoke can draw customers in with its connections to Microsoft products that have millions of users, such as the Office productivity franchise and Skype internet-calling. Cortana, like Amazon's Alexa, will take commands from users.

The term artificial intelligence was coined in 1956, but AI has become more popular today thanks to increased data volumes, advanced algorithms, and improvements in computing power and storage. In the 1960s, the US Department of Defense took interest in this type of work and began training computers to mimic basic human reasoning. For example, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) completed street mapping projects in the 1970s. And DARPA produced intelligent personal assistants in 2003, long before Siri, Alexa or Cortana were household names. This early work paved the way for the automation and formal reasoning that we see in computers today, including decision support systems and smart search systems that can be designed to complement and augment human abilities.

For many people, the concept of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a thing of the future. It is the technology that has yet to be introduced. But Professor Jon Oberlander disagrees. He was quick to point out that AI is not in the future, it is now in the making. He began by mentioning Alexa, Amazon's star product. It is an artificial intelligent personal assistant, which was made popular by Amazon Echo devices.