This year's news about what artificial intelligence can do in the arts has been both exciting and scary. Neural networks have learned to paint like masters and compose sophisticated music. Those of us in creative endeavors might be as endangered by technological advances as blue-collar workers are often said to be--though we are protected by certain limitations that technology is never likely to overcome. Last summer, a team of Russian developers released Prisma, a mobile app based on the work of some German artificial intelligence researchers. The neural network behind it could redraw an image using techniques it had learned from studying the oeuvre of a number of painters, including Vincent Van Gogh and Edvard Munch. The end product was impressive: Prisma could reproduce brushstrokes and palettes, using only a photo for guidance, almost the way a human painter could have.

In 2005, Atlanta-based voiceover artist Susan Bennett recorded hundreds of hours of audio for a text-to-speech company. Six years later, on 4 October 2011, she quickly learned that those recordings had been licensed by Apple for the iPhone 4S's built-in personal assistant, Siri. Overnight, Susan's voice became globally recognised, whether she liked it or not. In this week's episode of Chips with Everything, Matt Shore speaks to Susan about her experiences of being thrust into the world of Siri and how her life has changed since that fateful day. Follow us on Twitter: @mattshore and @guardianaudio Tell us how technology affects you.

And how can they each illuminate the nature of mind and self? These were some of the questions on Siri Hustvedt's mind as she began her new book of essays, A Woman Looking At Men Looking At Women. Hustvedt herself has an omnivorous professional history that blends the two worlds in unconventional ways. She is an essayist, poet, and novelist (best known for her recent novel The Blazing World), an English literature PhD by training, and lectures on psychiatry at the Weill Medical School of Cornell. In her essays, Hustvedt uses this eclectic expertise to jump freely from the arts to empirical science and back again.

While we think of them as the latest thing in tech, conversational interfaces have been around for quite some time. From Cleverbot and Smarter Child to labyrinthine phone trees ("say REPRESENTATIVE"), we have been trying for years to build technology that mimics how we interact with humans. Recent advances have positioned these tools for substantial growth and brought them back to the foreground of the conversation on the future of technology. Conversational interfaces for both speech and text have risen to prominence thanks to virtual assistants or "chatbots," such as Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa. Also, text-based chatbots, or messaging platforms such as Slack and Facebook Messenger, have seen a huge spike in utilization.

How to start learning Artificial Intelligence?Software Development 0 comments by Thomas De Vos Artificial intelligence (AI) is a sub-division of computer science. The main goal is to enable a smart device (e.g. First mentioned back in the 50s in the paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", written by mathematician Alan Turing, artificial intelligence is now a very popular field, and we have advanced technology to "blame" for that. This article is about learning Artificial Intelligence and we will give you a comprehensive guide that you can use as a starting point towards learning artificial intelligence. Today's AI-based computers can beat chess champions, so it's safe to say that little by little the world is taking a turn. Some people say that artificial intelligence will save humanity; others, claim it will destroy it. The truth is, we don't really know what AI is capable of. Artificial intelligence is a fascinating area of computer science we all want to know more about. We've seen cars drive by themselves and computers understand our basic needs and wants. Robotics is yet another sub-field of computer science that depends entirely on AI. Advanced technology has gotten to a whole new level; a level that some people just can't accept. Artificial intelligence studies how people's brain think, learn, work, and make decisions.

Virtually everywhere you look, Bay Area tech businesses are running into walls. Smartphones were revolutionary and lucrative, but the U.S. market is saturated, and Apple's iPhone sales have fallen for three quarters. The "app economy" has matured, with more people using existing apps than downloading new ones. And Facebook, which has filled users' news feeds with so many ads it can barely add more, is predicting its revenue growth will slump next year. Silicon Valley needs its next big thing, a focus for the concentrated brain power and innovation infrastructure that have made this region the world leader in transformative technology.

If a voice inquiry, Siri invokes a speech-to-text mechanism that transcribes what has been spoken to text. This is very difficult, by the way, particularly given the number of languages in which Siri works.

Analyst Carolina Milanesi of the research firm Creative Strategies said that "2016 was the year about raising awareness, and exposing consumers to the idea of AI in a more mass market way." Milanesi said it may take time for the technology to fulfill its potential, noting that companies need "a strong hook" to bring large numbers of consumers into this world. Consumer Intelligence Research Partners estimates that Amazon has sold more than five million of its connected speakers such as Echo since 2014, in a market now heating up with competition from Google Home, and others likely in development. Google meanwhile is also using its AI prowess to make smartphones smarter - its Allo messenger can, for example, suggest a meeting or deliver relevant information during a conversation. Among other tech giants Apple has been quietly ramping up the capabilities of its Siri digital assistant and Facebook its Messenger platform.

Apple did not invent the mobile application. Phones have had apps since the first time a phone had a screen. These first apps, however, lived in a closed ecosystem; the calendar, web browser and games came preloaded and locked down. If you wanted something more, you needed to buy a new phone. App developers worked for or were close partners of the phone developer, and reach was extremely limited.

IBM has announced a collaboration with the BMW group to develop new potential interfaces for its Watson AI product into vehicles. The agreement will see the car manufacturer relocating a group of its researchers and engineers to the IBM headquarters for Watson IoT in Munich, with the scope of exploring new'intelligent assistant' functions for the BMW range. Four BMW i8 hybrid sports cars will also take up residence at the Munich centre, as lab fodder prototype Watson-based experiments to run on IBM's Bluemix cloud platform. According to today's release, the objective is the development of new'conversational interfaces' between cars and drivers. The i8's manual will be integrated into Watson's database for the purpose of the experiments, allowing drivers to ask natural language questions and hope to receive a better response than the commonly-lamented AI offer to'look it up on the web for you'.