You don't have to be a Go champion to have artificial intelligence change your game. You get in your car and your Apple iPhone tells you what traffic looks like where you're going--before you ask. We're all on the road with Tesla's self-driving cars, which are redefining what driving means. The artificial-intelligence, calendar-assistant "Amy" emails three of your friends to figure out a meeting time that works for everyone--and nails it. Thankfully, chatting with Amazon's Alexa is a lot more entertaining than, say, chatting would be with Hal, the fictional artificial intelligence from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Google has launched a new venture capital program focused on artificial intelligence, Axios is reporting. Google declined to comment on the report, which states that the initiative will be led by longtime Google VP of engineering Anna Patterson and involve a rotating cast of engineers instead of the venture investors who work for Alphabet Inc.'s corporate venture unit, GV. It isn't completely surprising that Google might create an investing practice around AI, particularly given Google CEO Sundar Pichai's recent pronouncement that Google is becoming "AI first" rather than "mobile first." Indeed, AI was the running thread throughout the recent Google I/O developers conference, where the company introduced new tensor processing unit (TPU) chips that promise to more quickly train and run AI models for researchers and businesses; it also announced (among many other things) that its Google Assistant, the company's virtual personal assistant that's available on devices like the Google Home and Pixel phone, will soon grow more conversational. According to Axios, Patterson and company will reportedly be co-investing with GV when it makes sense to do so.

Artificial intelligence has begun seeping its way into every tech product and service. Now, companies are changing the underlying hardware to accommodate this shift. Apple is the latest company creating a dedicated AI processing chip to speed up the AI algorithms and save battery life on its devices, according to Bloomberg. The Bloomberg report said the chip is internally known as the Apple Neural Engine and will be used to assist devices for facial and speech recognition tasks. The latest iPhone 7 runs some of its AI tasks (mostly related to photographer) using the image signal processor and the graphics processing unit integrated on its A10 Fusion chip.

Apple Inc. got an early start in artificial intelligence software with the 2011 introduction of Siri, a tool that lets users operate their smartphones with voice commands. Now the electronics giant is bringing artificial intelligence to chips. Apple is working on a processor devoted specifically to AI-related tasks, according to a person familiar with the matter. The chip, known internally as the Apple Neural Engine, would improve the way the company's devices handle tasks that would otherwise require human intelligence -- such as facial recognition and speech recognition, said the person, who requested anonymity discussing a product that hasn't been made public. Engineers at Apple are racing to catch their peers at Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc. in the booming field of artificial intelligence. While Siri gave Apple an early advantage in voice-recognition, competitors have since been more aggressive in deploying AI across their product lines, including Amazon's Echo and Google's Home digital assistants.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics have become the technology industry's hottest topics with major companies and start-ups cashing-in on their bright promises. On the crest of the AI wave is the advent of conversational computing, or chatbots, as well as more complex virtual assistants that respond to voice commands on smartphones or tablets, such as Amazon's Alexa or Apple's Siri. However, many companies experimenting in this area have yet to get it right – a stark reminder of the risks of overhyping technologies. What many don't realise is that AI has already been around for some time, albeit in different guises. To understand how, it's important to define this technology.

The market research and insight industry will soon undergo a public test of its potency. In two weeks it will predict what it believes will be the outcome of the general election. Already under fire for failing to predict the outcomes of both the UK referendum and the US presidential election, you'd forgive top polling organisations for being nervous. The general election, however, is not the biggest challenge facing the market research industry. Insiders say market research agencies are slowly waking up to a much greater threat.

Artificial intelligence is where the competition is in IT, with Microsoft and Google both parading powerful, always-available AI tools for the enterprise at their respective developer conferences, Build and I/O, in May. It's not just about work: AI software can now play chess, go, and some retro video games better than any human -- and even drive a car better than many of us. These superhuman performances, albeit in narrow fields, are all possible thanks to the application of decades of AI research -- research that is increasingly, as at Build and I/O, making it out of the lab and into the real world. Alexa and Samsung Electronics' Bixby may offer less-than-superhuman performance, but they also require vastly less power than a supercomputer to run. Businesses can dabble on the edges of these, for example developing Alexa "skills" that allow Amazon Echo owners to interact with a company without having to dial its call center, or jump right in, using the various cloud-based speech recognition and text-to-speech "-as-a-service" offerings to develop full-fledged automated call centers of their own.

This could all change--or rather has to change, because humans need emotional connection. If AI-to-human interactions are to gain traction, we will need to develop AI sensitivity, somehow. In the meantime, a new job is up for grabs in Silicon Valley: robot poetry coach. Engineers are recruiting gifted authors and Hollywood screenwriters with sharp wits and a soft heart to make interactive conversational programs, known as bots, more human. They have the difficult job of teaching tact to Microsoft's Cortana and humor to Apple's Siri.

The developmental trajectory of future apps will be heavily influenced by AI and machine learning, says a new report by F5 Networks, released ahead of the annual EMEA F5 Agility conference in Barcelona, Spain. The Future of Apps study, commissioned to The Foresight Factory, says developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning are likely to include more personalised, predictive services in areas such as cognitive health and finance. EMEA is already poised for the next wave of advances in AI, says the report. Nearly a third of surveyed respondents across Europe and South Africa say they use voice commands on their mobile devices. Already, some 10,000 third-party voice enabled apps are available for use with Amazon's Alexa at the end of Q1 2017.

However, AI represents an opportunity to introduce intelligent, scalable engagement and more personalised experiences to help customers accomplish tasks or solve problems while also improving overall satisfaction. Whether they're based in messaging platforms or hardware devices, virtual concierges are bots designed to provide personalised services. We're already seeing the following list of AI applications implemented today: Today's customers live in a multi-screen, omnichannel world. Whether it's integrating back-end CRM, enhancing commerce, personalising experiences, introducing new touch points, predicting behaviors, trends and expectations, successful AI implementations require a new blueprint.