The company's widely touted artificial intelligence tool Bixby -- seen as a rival for Apple's (AAPL, Tech30) Siri -- won't be fully operational in time for the U.S. release of the Galaxy S8. While some elements of Bixby will be included in the April 21 launch, the headline voice activation feature won't be available in the U.S. until "later this spring," Samsung (SSNLF) said in a statement. The delay is an embarrassing hiccup for Samsung. The rollout of the tech giant's first high-end smartphone since the debacle over its fire-prone Galaxy Note 7 is being closely watched. After a bungled recall that cost the company more than $5 billion and ultimately led it to kill off of the Note 7, analysts have said Samsung needs a flawless launch for the S8.

With the exception of helping create Expedia, Microsoft has struggled to figure out travel. But it is hoping that artificial intelligence (AI) will be its route finally to leapfrog ahead of Google and Oracle, playing a larger role as middleman. The example illustrates the company's current approach to the travel sector. The technology giant appears to be more interested in building "middleware services" that sit between customers and travel companies. The company has a mixed past record of engaging with consumers on its own.

From Siri to our investments, the use of artificial intelligence to make decisions has expanded rapidly in the last five years. As we've seen in this series, this trend is just starting to reach the insurance industry. Insurance agents working today could be forgiven for wondering if a robot will put them out of work in the coming years. While automation is likely to transform many jobs in the future, it is extremely unlikely that the insurance industry will give up entirely on its existing advantage of agent-consumer relationships. As a recent Accenture survey of nearly 33,000 customers around the world revealed demand for human interaction is not incompatible with demand for robo-advice.

Until recently, Robyn Ewing was a writer in Hollywood, developing TV scripts and pitching pilots to film studios. Now she's applying her creative talents toward building the personality of a different type of character -- a virtual assistant, animated by artifical intelligence, that interacts with sick patients. Ewing works with engineers on the software program, called Sophie, which can be downloaded to a smartphone. The virtual nurse gently reminds users to check their medication, asks them how they are feeling or if they are in pain, and then sends the data to a real doctor. As tech behemoths and a wave of start-ups double down on virtual assistants that can chat with human beings, writing for AI is becoming a hot job in Silicon Valley.

When Samsung introduced the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 to the world, the company proudly shared that the Android devices will have their own voice assistant called Bxby. Unfortunately, consumers shouldn't expect to get their hands on the new Siri rival as it was recently found out that Bixby will not ship with the flagship phones. On Tuesday, CNET learned that the key feature that was supposed to debut when the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 start shipping at the end of the month will not come with the handsets. The South Korea giant has confirmed that its new voice assistant will not be operational out of the box, so consumers won't be able to use it starting April 21. Samsung said that while key features of Bixby will be functional at launch, the voice assistant will not be available for use until the later part of spring. "Key features of Bixby, including Vision, Home and Reminder, will be available with the global launch of the Samsung Galaxy S8 on April 21.

Don't expect to start talking to Samsung's Bixby voice assistant when you fire up your new Galaxy S8 later this month. The key feature was expected to debut on the new flagship handset, but the electronics giant is now saying Bixby won't be operational on the Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus when they ship to consumers April 21. Bixby's voice assistant will be delayed, the company warns. "Key features of Bixby, including Vision, Home and Reminder, will be available with the global launch of the Samsung Galaxy S8 on April 21," Samsung said in a statement. "Bixby Voice will be available in the US on the Galaxy S8 later this spring."

Bayesian optimization (BO) has emerged during the last few years as an effective approach to optimizing black-box functions where direct queries of the objective are expensive. In this paper we consider the case where direct access to the function is not possible, but information about user preferences is. Such scenarios arise in problems where human preferences are modeled, such as A/B tests or recommender systems. We present a new framework for this scenario that we call Preferential Bayesian Optimization (PBO) which allows us to find the optimum of a latent function that can only be queried through pairwise comparisons, the so-called duels. PBO extends the applicability of standard BO ideas and generalizes previous discrete dueling approaches by modeling the probability of the winner of each duel by means of a Gaussian process model with a Bernoulli likelihood. The latent preference function is used to define a family of acquisition functions that extend usual policies used in BO. We illustrate the benefits of PBO in a variety of experiments, showing that PBO needs drastically fewer comparisons for finding the optimum. According to our experiments, the way of modeling correlations in PBO is key in obtaining this advantage.

Amazon Web Services and Merck announced a developer competition on Monday to that plans to harness artificial intelligence for diabetics. Dubbed the Alexa Diabetes Challenge, and powered by Luminary Labs, the contest aims to incent upstarts and individual developers to create apps that harness Amazon's Alexa voice-enabled technologies particularly for patients recently diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. Early adopters such as Penn Medicine and Commonwealth Care Alliance are already running proofs-of-concept or pilot programs with Amazon Alexa being the centerpiece of improving patient experience. What's more, a new Healthcare IT News and HIMSS Analytics HIT Market Indicator report found that half of hospitals intend to adopt some fashion of AI in five years and more than a third plan to do so within two years. The Amazon and Merck contest enables innovators to use not only Alexa but also Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure.

Facebook is making it easier for users to split a dinner bill or chip in on a group gift. The social media giant is expanding its peer-to-peer payments on Messenger, letting its US users send or receive money between groups of people. Starting with Android and desktop, the new feature will be free to use, but just like the original version, it will only support Visa or Mastercard debit cards for now. Facebook is expanding its peer-to-peer payments on Messenger, letting users send or receive money between groups of people.Users choose who they want included in the group payment and enter the amount per person or the total sum to divide evenly Tap on the plus sign in the bottom left hand corner of a group conversation to find more features, and tap the payments icon ($). Then choose anyone in the group you would like to send or request funds from and enter the amount per person or the total sum to divide evenly.