A couple of years ago, Facebook introduced M, an AI-powered personal assistant for Messenger. The idea behind M is that you could ask it to do pretty much anything -- book flights, cancel your cable service and even find a plumber -- and it'll do it for you, with the occasional help from human beings. It was rolled out to just a small test market of users in San Francisco, but we've not heard much about it since then. Today, Facebook has announced that a version of M will finally be available to all Messenger users in the US. It's called "M suggestions," and it'll essentially pop up at certain points of your Messenger conversation to recommend related content or features.

Facebook will soon start weighing in on your conversations. The social media giant announced Thursday that it's bringing a virtual assistant to its Messenger chat app that aims to make helpful suggestions based on your exchanges. The feature, which will immediately begin rolling out to iPhone and Android users in the U.S., aims to speed up tasks like making plans or settling a restaurant bill with friends. If you receive a message inviting you to dinner, for example, a button will pop up encouraging you to start planning the outing. Or if a friend reminds you that you owe him or her $20 for drinks from last week, Facebook will serve up a feature that lets you repay that friend with a tap.

Baidu has been something of a dark horse where AI breakthroughs are concerned; the company's pronouncements always seeming to fall short of the shockwaves sent out by DeepMind, Facebook, and IBM. Nevertheless, this recent achievement could have some important consequences. It helps to differentiate the Baidu AI language use from anything you've encountered with Siri or Google Assistant. In the Baidu project, a virtual teacher gave positive or negative feedback to an agent who was responding to commands issued by the teacher. If the agent rightly connected the command with the intended action, it received a reward, and in the case of failure, it was penalized.

AI assistants now surround us. You can summon them from your phone, from devices in your home, and from your inbox. But they are not all created equal. Some enable and coordinate other services. Others get a single job done exceptionally well, whether that's scheduling meetings or writing data-driven stories.

If you look up in the sky at night, you might notice one of over 1,300 active satellites orbiting the Earth. If you believe they are all controlled by human operators, think again. Artificial intelligence is becoming more prevalent in our daily lives, from every day tasks, such as analyzing stock trading data to helping power and maneuver satellites thousands of miles away from Earth. Vehicles can now sense a lane marking and move you back into position automatically. Amazon's Alexa voice assistant can not only order a USB charger for your phone but tell you the score to last night's Golden State Warriors game.

Since 2005, artificial intelligence (AI) has been on a fast-growing streak as a collection of multiple technologies that enable machines to sense, comprehend, act and learn, either on their own or to augment human activities, and it has been figuring on many released trends to watch research notes and whitepapers from important organizations, such as Gartner, Forrester and IDC. Looking back the past 10-15 years, there has been a lot of work in developing different AI technologies by major market players, such as IBM's Watson system and Google's DeepMind's AlphaGo system. Currently, thanks to Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, Google's Google Assistant, and Amazon's Alexa, consumers have easy access to a variety of AI-powered virtual assistants to help manage their daily routines and tasks. The potential uses of AI to identify patterns, learn from experience, and find novel solutions to new challenges continue to grow, as increasing investments will bring new AI technology advances to corporations and consumers. Further to that, AI is impacting many different sectors of the global economy and society in a very positive way, as humanitarian organizations are currently using intelligent chatbots to provide psychological support to Syrian refugees, and doctors are using AI to develop personalized treatments for cancer patients.

Most consumers don't really know what artificial intelligence (AI) does, and the basic misunderstanding has some fearful of the technology. In a survey of 6,000 customers in six countries, the findings from Pegasystems study released this week found that consumers are hesitant to embrace AI devices and services. Some 36% are comfortable to engage with businesses using AI even if it results in a better customer experience. About 72% said they have some sort of fear about AI, with 24% worried about robots taking over the world. Only 34% of survey respondents thought they had directly experienced AI, but when asked about the technologies in their lives, the survey found that 84% use at least one AI-powered service or device such as virtual home assistants, intelligent chatbots, or predictive product suggestions.

Amazon's Fire TV is currently the best streaming box for most people, thanks to its clever interface and powerful voice search features. The current Fire TV only supports 4K video, not 4K HDR like some rival streaming boxes. And if you look across the entire streaming device landscape, we've seen plenty of innovations that would be ripe for Amazon's picking. I've been thinking about what a third-generation Fire TV box might look like ever since AFTVNews reported a couple weeks ago on a rumored mid-tier Fire TV device--possibly a souped-up streaming stick--with 4K HDR support. I can't imagine Amazon would let its flagship streamer fall behind in video resolution, so I suspect a new Fire TV box is also on the way.

Google's strategy to be part of a smarter connected home consists of its Google Home speaker and its Google WiFi router. Now it's being reported that the search engine giant is considering to combine the two into a single device. The problem with Google Home and Google WiFi is that users will need multiple of these devices to work all over their houses. Google Home is able to provide Google Assistant and music playback all over the house if users have multiple of these scattered around. Likewise, Google WiFi is able to provide consistent and strong internet connection throughout a house if users have a number of this device.

There is a lot of talk about artificial intelligence; sadly, not a lot of substance. We are in such early days of AI that I prefer to talk about what is happening in Machine Learning since that is the current stage of the AI future we are in. We are currently trying to teach computers to see, hear, learn, and more. Right now, that is the focus of every major effort that will someday be considered AI. When I think about how tech companies will progress in this area, I think about it from the standpoint of what data they have access to.