Lars Hard's ExpertMaker seeks to put artificial intelligence in the hands of developers. Entrepreneur Lars Hard feels he has seen the future of search, information gathering and the web in general, and it is artificial intelligence. Computational intelligence, to put it more succinctly: the ability to gather information or find your destination on the web faster and more efficiently with an artificial search partner that can predict what you want. The number of search engines, the myriad pathways from a user's inquisitive mind to the answer he or she seeks requires that someone, or some thing, must learn the complexities of people's search patterns in order to better serve the searcher. "Everything on the internet will have to get more intelligent," said Hard. "Siri is a very good example of what we're going to see more of in the future," said Hard, who has set up his own company, ExpertMaker, to develop software for artificial intelligence.

Apple's famous artificial intelligence agent is eating humble pie today. Ask Siri "Who is smarter, Siri or Google Now?" and Siri obligingly links to an article about a recent 3,086-question challenge that ranked Google Now as the top scorer. Unfortunately for Siri, the quiz had some built-in biases. Designed by the Stone Temple digital marketing group, the purpose of the exercise was to explore a giant, new knowledge base that Google was rumored to be building. Google's mysterious "Knowledge Vault," which was reported by the New Scientist in August, caused a tumult in the SEO community, which lives or dies by its ability to understand how Google prioritizes responses to search queries.

Vlad Sejnoha is chief technology officer for Nuance Communications. For many people, 2012 was the year when it became "normal" to use your voice to control your phone, car, computer and even your TV. This happened thanks to some remarkable advances in the field of voice recognition and natural language understanding (NLU). Capabilities that not so long ago were considered science fiction have become essential attributes of mainstream mobile devices and consumer electronics. People have taken to these new voice-powered user interfaces with great enthusiasm, many reporting a strong emotional connection with their new "assistant."

We all know how frustrating the experience of calling into a customer service department can be. Long hold times, the endless repetition of birth dates, previous addresses, maiden names... It's enough to make you want to avoid the whole process altogether. But the cloud--paired with technologies like speech recognition, biometrics, natural language, artificial intelligence and machine learning--is giving rise to intelligent virtual agents that are providing faster, more personalized service. Automated customer service solutions have been around for a while, but the cloud is drastically improving the model. Intelligent virtual agents can now crunch data about who you are and what you need, providing the kind of efficient feedback loop required to autonomously keep getting smarter.

Nao, from young French firm Aldebaran Robotics, is one of the better known small humanoid education and research robots--but he's about to be replaced: By Nao Next Gen. The new robot is an evolution of the existing design, but it may also be a revolution because the number of tweaks is significant. As well as boosting the in-robot cameras to a twin HD-video solution, the team has given the bot an upgraded Atom 1.6GHz CPU, a better walking algorithm, better control of its servo's torque so the robots movements are more fluid and powerful, and a few other tweaks. But most significantly they've added in voice recognition from Nuance--the same innovative firm whose technology is behind the amazing powers of Apple's Siri digital personal assistant in the iPhone 4S. Of course Nao will react differently to voice commands than Siri, and it's unlikely to call your wife or set up a calendar entry on voice command.

You've probably noticed something about smartphones. They haven't been exciting lately. Chances are, your current smartphone looks and works a lot like your last one. Your next will probably seem pretty familiar, too. But there are signs that smartphones, and the ways we use them, could be about to significantly change -- even if no one can quite agree on exactly how.

We Google things we're too lazy to remember or ask another human. We've become accustomed to asking Siri and Cortana about the weather. The current generation of artificial intelligence can pull facts from the web, keep track of your appointments and even crack jokes. What if there were a virtual assistant to help you make real-life decisions, like whether you should start a brewery or go to business school? Project Sapphire, a collaboration between IBM and the University of Michigan, is aimed at building an artificially intelligent academic advisor that guides undergraduate students through their course options, helps pick extracurricular activities and eventually dishes out advice on their careers.

IN THE early days of computing, information was put into computers by flipping switches. After this came the relative sophistication of loading programs and data by means of punched cards or punched paper-tape. These were followed in their turn by such devices as the keyboard, the mouse, the trackball, the joystick, the touchpad and the touch-sensitive screen. Throughout all this, speech--the most natural, and perhaps the most effective, interface between people and computers--has remained largely neglected. Apart from some modest developments in software for desktop dictation in the 1990s, the only time most people have talked to their computers has been when cursing them.

Personalized recommendation of products, documents, and collaborators has become an important way of meeting user needs in commerce, information provision, and community services, whether on the web, through mobile interfaces, or through traditional desktop interfaces. This tutorial first reviews the types of personalized recommendation that are being used commercially and in research systems. It then systematically presents and compares the underlying AI techniques, including recent variants and extensions of collaborative filtering, demographic and case-based approaches, and decision-theoretic methods. The properties of the various techniques will be compared within a general framework, so that participants learn how to match recommendation techniques to applications and how to combine complementary techniques.

Thirty-five years ago the TV series Knight Rider envisioned an artificially intelligent car that could develop a friendly rapport with its driver. That 1982 Pontiac Trans Am--also known as the Knight Industries Two Thousand (KITT)--dutifully served as Michael Knight's crime-fighting partner, monitored his health through sensors in the seat and even used voice analysis to respond to the sarcasm in Knight's cornball quips. Your next car won't reach KITT's level of awareness, wit or empathy--but Honda, Toyota and several other companies really are planning to make AI standard in all the vehicles they produce. Honda unveiled one of the more ambitious--and fanciful--visions for AI in the cockpit at last week's U.S. Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Its New Electric Urban Vehicle (NeuV) is a self-driving concept car that uses Honda's talking Automated Network Assistant, or HANA, to analyze and respond to data the vehicle collects about driver and passenger preferences and behavior.