Sometimes you go out hard and party like the cool kids. Other times, your Saturday night plans are … less than spectacular. For times like those, here are the 6 best ways to get entertainment out of your Amazon Echo when you're bored and lonely, or just sick of other people. After all, your friends may judge you, but Alexa never will. You can either read this whole article, or watch our entertaining video coverage where we make fools out of ourselves in the attempt to honestly demonstrate these features to you.

William Tunstall-Pedoe, the founder of a voice recognition app that was acquired by Amazon and used to develop the Amazon Echo device, has invested in a London-based art startup called Artfinder. Tunstall-Pedoe, the founder of Evi Technologies, which later became Amazon Alexa, has been investing in artificial intelligence startups ever since he departed Amazon in February. Founded by Swedish entrepreneur Jonas Almgren in March 2013, Artfinder describes itself as an online art marketplace that helps people to find art spanning a variety of tastes, budgets, and styles. Artfinder claims to have 500,000 subscribers worldwide, with 8,500 artists selling their works on the platform. Artfinder announced the investment on Wednesday, saying that it has raised $2.2 million (£1.8 million) from Tunstall-Pedoe and venture capital firm Oxford Capital.

At long last, Microsoft has set a public target of bringing consumer devices--that aren't PCs--to market in 2017 with its personal digital assistant, Cortana, inside of them. On Tuesday, Microsoft announced a way to challenge Amazon's Alexa-powered Dot and Echo devices, as well as Google's Google Home. Microsoft's New Devices SDK will allow to power a new line of connected-car speakers from Harmon Kardon in 2017, executives said, with presumably more partnerships to come. This follows an earlier announcement that Cortana is coming to Windows 10 IoT, Microsoft's operating system for smart devices. Why this matters: Though Apple, Microsoft, and Google all have prominent artificial-intelligence initiatives, it's been Amazon--and, to a lesser extent, Google--that have designed devices around their technology.

Evernote won't implement its new privacy policy after all but the damage is done Microsoft releases giant Q&A dataset to help researchers build AI tools that ... Microsoft gives away 100000 questions and answers to advance virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa ... Stay up-to-date on the topics you care about. We'll send you an email alert whenever a news article matches your alert term. It's free, and you can add new alerts at any time.

Microsoft releases giant Q&A dataset to help researchers build AI tools that ... Microsoft gives away 100000 questions and answers to advance virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa ... Stay up-to-date on the topics you care about. We'll send you an email alert whenever a news article matches your alert term. It's free, and you can add new alerts at any time.

Microsoft releases giant Q&A dataset to help researchers build AI tools that ... Microsoft gives away 100000 questions and answers to advance virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa ... Stay up-to-date on the topics you care about. We'll send you an email alert whenever a news article matches your alert term. It's free, and you can add new alerts at any time.

Microsoft is trying to help create machines that can have conversations by releasing a new set of data for free. The data, called the Microsoft Machine Reading Comprehension dataset (MS MARCO) is a bundle of 100,000 English queries along with corresponding answers. It's supposed to help people build artificial intelligence systems that can understand human written language. The company is opening up its dataset in the hope that Microsoft can work with other organizations on making machines better at reading comprehension, said Rangan Majumder, program manager for the Microsoft Partner Group, in a blog post on Friday. The queries in MS MARCO are based on anonymized questions that were submitted to Microsoft's Bing search engine and Cortana virtual assistant.

Microsoft gives away 100000 questions and answers to advance virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa ... Stay up-to-date on the topics you care about. We'll send you an email alert whenever a news article matches your alert term. It's free, and you can add new alerts at any time.

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.

No longer simply the subject of science-fiction movies, artificial intelligence is making its way into the insurance enterprise. According to Accenture, four in five insurers are planning to or have deployed some sort of artificial intelligence technology in their enterprises. Allstate Business Insurance deployed ABie -- the Allstate Business Insurance Expert -- virtual assistant to help walk agents through the quoting process for complex products. The context-aware technology understands agents inputs and is able to direct them through the process without using the call center. AIG has partnered with Human Condition Safety to deploy devices that "couples wearable technology with artificial intelligence (AI) and building information modeling."