Bots will become the next version of mobile apps, creating the emotional connection between brands and consumers through artificial intelligence (AI) and search, according to Ryan Gavin, GM at Microsoft for search, cloud and content. During Advertising Week, Gavin told Search Marketing Daily that bots will replace mobile applications. The conversations on bots will occur more often and will become the new app for brands; and natural language will become the use interface, he said. Microsoft this week announced a new group that will help accelerate the use of AI. About 500 computer scientists and engineers will support the team and will include Microsoft Research along with the company's Information Platform Group, Bing and Cortana -- natural language processing -- product groups, along with its Ambient Computing and Robotics teams.

If you need an Uber, Amazon Alexa has your back. Unfortunately if what you need is a conversation buddy, the personal assistant isn't quite up to the task. In an effort to bolster Alexa's social intelligence, Amazon is putting 2.5 million into a new university competition to design and build "socialbots" for the platform. Engineers will use the Alexa Skills Kit to build the artificial socialites. As part of the competition, the Washington Post, owned by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, will also be making its corpus available to participants as a tool to train the bots.

Following up on CEO Satya Nadella's big talk about artificial intelligence, Microsoft today announced the creation of the AI and Research Group, gathering more than 5,000 computer scientists and engineers. The group will include the engineering teams for the Cortana personal assistant and Bing search engine. To lead the group, Microsoft has chosen 20-year company veteran Harry Shum, whose previous experience includes Bing and Microsoft Research. The AI and Research Group will work on products, but it will also conduct basic research. AI was a major point in Nadella's keynote this week at Microsoft Ignite, the company's annual IT conference.

Amazon is hoping some universities start getting chatty with Alexa. The online retailer announced on Thursday the Alexa Prize, a 2.5 million award for college students who develop technology to make it more natural to talk with Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant. The company said the goal of the competition is to build a "socialbot" on Alexa that will converse with people about popular topics and news events. The university team with the best performing socialbot will win a 500,000 prize. Amazon also will give 1 million to the winning team's university if its socialbot is able to talk "coherently and engagingly" with humans for 20 minutes.

An industry-wide organisation including five Silicon Valley giants has been formed to promote the fair and ethical development of artificial intelligence technologies. The organisation aims to "conduct research, recommend best practices, and publish research" rather that directly lobby legislators, and will focus on "ethics, fairness and inclusivity; transparency, privacy, and interoperability; collaboration between people and AI systems; and the trustworthiness, reliability and robustness of the technology". The group - known as the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society - includes Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and IBM, with academic and non-profit organisations expected to join in the near future. "Over the past five years, we've seen tremendous advances in the deployment of AI and cognitive computing technologies," said IBM AI ethics researcher, Francesca Rossi, "ranging from useful consumer apps to transforming some of the world's most complex industries, including healthcare, financial services, commerce and the Internet of Things." "This partnership will provide consumer and industrial users of cognitive systems a vital voice in the advancement of the defining technology of this century - one that will foster collaboration between people and machines to solve some of the world's most enduring problems - in a way that is both trustworthy and beneficial."

With the release of Google Allo last week, we've officially entered the era of the assistant. Every company that owns a major tech platform is now betting that assistants will be an important interface in the post-mobile world. You might think assistants today are trivial or stupid, and you wouldn't be wrong. They often don't understand what we say and can't hold real conversations yet. Mostly they're relegated to simple tasks like playing music, sending texts, or setting timers.

Machine Learning is rapidly becoming a required and critical component of engineering organizations across the tech industry. From movie recommendation algorithms to self-driving cars, it is clearly an exciting and compelling field. Companies are hiring armies of Machine Learning researchers to solve difficult problems like voice and object recognition. What does this all mean to the average software engineer? In many cases, extremely specialized knowledge is necessary to outperform existing state-of-the-art systems.

Microsoft wants to "democratize artificial intelligence" and bring AI to systems that everyone uses. So to reflect that desire, the company is shaking up its organization. The company is creating a new group, the AI and Research Group, by combining the existing Microsoft Research group with the Bing and Cortana product groups, along with the teams working on ambient computing (a world in which everything around us is computerized and connected and responsive to our presence), robotics, and the Information Platform Group (which covered both Bing advertising and natural user interfaces). Together, the new AI and Research Group will have some 5,000 engineers and computer scientists. It will be lead by 20-year Microsoft veteran Harry Shum, who was previously the Executive Vice President of Technology and Research.

Called the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society, the group consists of Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and IBM. Executives from four of the five founding members of the Partnership on AI (from left): Eric Horvitz of Microsoft, Francesca Rossi of IBM, Yann LeCun of Facebook and Mustafa Suleyman of Google's DeepMind. Executives from four of the five founding members of the Partnership on AI (from left): Eric Horvitz of Microsoft, Francesca Rossi of IBM, Yann LeCun of Facebook and Mustafa Suleyman of Google's DeepMind. But Banavar hopes the group's work will make its way into educational curricula around the world that will inspire the new generations of AI researchers.

On Thursday Amazon announced the Alexa Prize, a 1 million award for the creation of a conversational artificial intelligence that can talk to people "coherently and engagingly" for a third of an hour. To aid the endeavor, up to ten teams will get a 100,000 stipend from Amazon along with Alexa-enabled devices, free cloud computing and support from Amazon's Alexa team. The push comes as Amazon's digital assistant Alexa is coming to multiple platforms beyond its original home on Amazon's Echo speaker, and as artificial intelligence is anticipated to become the cutting edge of tech companies' interfaces with their customers. The Alexa Prize announcement comes the same day several of the world's largest tech companies announced the formation of a consortium aimed at fostering the promise of artificial intelligence.