Cooking is a social activity. Kids help in the kitchen. People get together for a potluck and trade cooking tips all evening. Amazon's virtual assistant, Alexa, has become commonplace in many homes, picking your music and helping you book Uber rides. Many Alexa commands make Amazon's Echo essential.

Which authors of this paper are endorsers? Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)

Microsoft should be a pioneer alongside Google when it comes to artificial intelligence, but the company only now appears to consider it a priority. In the company's annual report for the 2017 fiscal year, AI is now mentioned on six occasions. Compared to not a single mention in the previous report, it's clear Microsoft is now putting more of its focus on artificial intelligence. Microsoft also indicates this in their corporate vision statement: "Our strategic vision is to compete and grow by building best-in-class platforms and productivity services for an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge infused with AI." AI is only just starting to get real momentum (hence why this very publication has been launched, hello!) but it seems to be another case of where the company has slumbered, and that's incredibly frustrating because it has much to contribute. Microsoft is in a very advantageous position to lead in AI.

The term Artificial Intelligence (AI) was not coined yet and hardly anyone could follow what World famous scientist Alan Turing was talking about when he proposed a test which is now known as the "Turing Test" to answer the question "Can machines think?". When John McCarthy coined the term "Artificial Intelligence" around 1950, it was a dream to have machines that could actually think. Though we're not quite there yet, we are making rapid strides in the area of artificial intelligence and it is slowly making its presence felt in our lives. Let me illustrate where we will be heading in the coming 5 to 7 years. Imagine your present "you" in a self-driving car 5 years from now.

The other day, I covered at Search Engine Land a Wired article named Google's hand-fed AI now gives answers, not just search results. The article explains that Google is now using "sentence compression algorithms" as of this week in the desktop search results. Sentence compression algorithms is Google's way of extracting the best answer for a query to be displayed in the featured snippets. Of course, this is not just used for featured snippets but also for Google Home responses, Google Assistant and more. Which is why it is important that Google build a better way to get more answers.

They might look confident in their photos but people on the dating app Tinder are probably lacking morale. Swiping through the popular dating app lowers your self-esteem and makes you unhappy about your body, new research found. People accept or reject potential matches based on photos which takes a toll on people's sense of worth, the study found. People with lower self-esteem could be more likely to use these types of apps which then draws them in to a downward spiral of self-doubt, researchers suggest. The research, led by the University of Rhode Island, looked at 820 college-age Tinder users - 700 female and 120 male students.

Amazon announced today that users of its streaming service Prime Music, which is free with a Prime membership, and its subscription-based Amazon Music Unlimited can now ask Alexa to find tunes appropriate for various activities. As of now, over 500 different activity-based requests are supported including music for meditation, partying and even "getting pumped." The new feature is available immediately to users with Alexa-enabled devices. The new voice controls were geared towards activities that have been requested most often by Alexa users and listeners of Amazon's music streaming services. In the announcement, the company said that 27 percent of all activity requests come from users who want to relax.

Need an assistant to help cook family dinner, or that dessert recipe you've been dying to try? Amazon's Alexa is ready to help. Tech expert Kim Komando shows you how. A link has been sent to your friend's email address. A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. Need an assistant to help cook family dinner, or that dessert recipe you've been dying to try? Amazon's Alexa is ready to help.

Need an assistant to help cook family dinner, or that dessert recipe you've been dying to try? Amazon's Alexa is ready to help. Tech expert Kim Komando shows you how. Is there any company that can keep up with Amazon's different ventures? Cooking is a social activity. Kids help in the kitchen.

We take digital personal assistants for granted these days. But these systems are still limited: they only deal with one task at a time, and more complicated interactions can leave them confused. Iris, a chatbot system developed by a team at Stanford University, is different. It can handle more complex forms of conversation – and could pave the way for personal assistants that understand how we really speak to one another. "I would say this is probably among the most complex behaviour I've seen from a chatbot to date," says Ryan Lowe at research lab OpenAI, who was not involved in the work. When we talk, we use all sorts of linguistic tricks and techniques to make ourselves understood.