Welcome once again to Video IRL, where several of our editors talk about what they've been watching in their spare time. This month brings a mixed bag; while one of us dived into season one of Starz' series American Gods; another is obsessed with a quirky UK game show that will make the jump to America soon; we've given anime another chance and last but not least, there's even some robot-enabled larceny. A decade after slowly drifting away from watching anime as a genre, I've somehow found myself with a Crunchyroll Premium subscription. It started when my wife wanted to watch the 2014 Sailor Moon reboot, continued as we stumbled into the addictive absurdity of Food Wars and became a paid subscription somewhere between starting Rin-ne and catching up on new episodes of Dragon Ball Super. Somehow, we became anime fans again. It's good to be back, too -- but it's not the high-profile, weekly simulcast adventures of Goku that keep me coming back to the anime streaming service.

Chatbots are "computer programs which conduct conversation through auditory or textual methods". Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, Google Assistant, and Amazon's Alexa are four of the most popular conversational agents today. They can help you get directions, check the scores of sports games, call people in your address book, and can accidently make you order a $170 dollhouse. These products all have auditory interfaces where the agent converses with you through audio messages. In this post, we'll be looking more at chatbots that operate solely on the textual front.

Collaborative filtering (CF) and its modifications is one of the most commonly used recommendation algorithms. Even data scientist beginners can use it to build their personal movie recommender system, for example, for a resume project.

There are a ton of exciting new technologies on the way in the near future. These include the likes of virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, IOT, personal assistants and more. We're taking tentative steps into the future and the next few years promise to be very exciting indeed for tech enthusiasts (that's you!). But when looking at these kinds of paradigm shifts, what's more important is the technology that lies beneath them. Keeping your ear to the floor and looking out for examples of new technology can therefore help you to better understand what might be around the corner.

Getting a pizza delivered just got easier, thanks to a new feature for the Alexa smart assistant. A deal signed between Domino's and Amazon means the firm's voice activated devices will now allow you to order your favourite items with a single command. GPS tracking in trial locations also means the service can tell you exactly how far away your delivery is, right down to the minute. Getting a pizza delivered just got a slice easier, thanks to a new feature for the Alexa smart assistant. A deal signed between Domino's and Amazon means the firm's voice activated devices (pictured) will now allow you to order your favourite items with a single command Pizza fans can now simply call for Alexa, who will take care of your order.

If you're a content creator, you're not just striving to do your best work. You want to make your best work better. At the SIGGRAPH conference, which runs July 31-Aug. From Siri to Smart Cars to Netflix recommendations, AI is infused in our daily lives. Now, thanks to the computational power of NVIDIA GPUs, new AI accelerated workflows are optimizing content creation, saving artists and studios time and money, and driving greater creativity.

Amazon's range of smart speakers and their artificial intelligence assistant Alexa have proved to be a huge sales hit. But the product is still a shadow of what the man in charge - Dave Limp - and indeed their owners, hope it will become. "We have thousands of engineers inside Amazon adding to [its] capability every day and then another tens of thousands of developers adding to the skills," he tells the BBC. "The thing I am sure of is that this time next year she will be significantly more intelligent than she is now, and that sometime in the future we will hit our goal of reinventing the Star Trek computer." It's a lofty goal, especially since any attempt to go beyond commanding a weather update or asking for the lights to be switched on is currently asking for trouble.

Home robots are the promised land of a consumer market that has been on the precipice of burgeoning for a few years. But aside from a roving vacuum cleaner-turned-spy or a Tesla with some self-driving functionality, you probably don't have a robot in your house. One company is hoping to take a circuitous path past the discarded corpses of helper bot prototypes and creepy home assistants. Ori has developed a line of robotic, reconfigurable furniture that moves around a small space, creating new partitions and spitting out hidden features like cabinets, a bed, or a desk on-demand. If you live in San Francisco, New York, or Vancouver, you probably don't have as much space as you want.

New research examining how organisations are evolving from a traditional office environment to a digital workplace, has revealed that gaining competitive advantage and improving business process are among the top goals of their digital transformation strategy. This is according to 40% of 800 organisations in 15 countries on five continents that were interviewed for Dimension Data's survey. The report found that digital transformation is not just about adopting the technologies of the past: 62% of research participants expect to have technology such as virtual advisors in their organisations within the next two years. In addition, 58% expect to start actively investing in technology that powers virtual advisors in the next two years. Today, the digital workplace is no longer just made up of managers and those managed; co-workers collaborating with one another to complete projects; and employees interacting with customers and partners.

When it comes to artificial intelligence (AI), both reporters and consumers tend to focus on big, bold, and very sexy stories, like autonomous self-driving cars or machines beating human world champions at games like chess, Go, and even Jeopardy. And I'll admit, those stories are very cool, and they certainly deserve the attention they get. Aside from those stories, though, some of the largest, most practical advancements in AI are happening in the industrial sector, and it might come to the surprise of more than a few that the retail industry -- traditionally risk-averse and more fast follower than early adopter -- is leading the way. Currently, retail sees AI solutions like Amazon's Echo, Google's Home, and Apple's Siri making real differences in the online shopping experience, and the Amazon Go concept store appears destined to be a disruptive force in the brick-and-mortar realm. Seemingly every week, new applications come online, like Original Stitch's Bodygram, which custom-tailors button-down shirts from a single photo.