To most people, artificial intelligence (AI) is represented in terms of robots with human-like similarities. Today's reality is that of AI powering technologies and driving companies to complete tasks and make things easier. Companies are using AI more than ever, even for tasks that you may not consider. To understand how AI impacts your business, it's important to understand exactly what artificial intelligence is. According to Merriam Webster artificial intelligence is, "an area of computer science that deals with giving machines the ability to seem like they have human intelligence."

The Amazon Echo's smaller, more affordable sibling is a fail-safe gift for anyone who values convenience (and who doesn't?). Driven by Amazon's Alexa digital assistant, this unobtrusive puck puts a wealth of useful information, entertainment, and practical functionality just a voice-command away. Use the Echo Dot to control a home's lighting, play music, estimate commute times, operate a timer, answer trivia questions, read books and news bulletins aloud, provide local movie times and locations, hail an Uber, or order anything from Amazon (natch). Don't be surprised if your gift of a single Dot has the recipient buying more to fill every room.

While Home is positioned as a way to add Assistant to your domicile, it's only fully usable for a single person. You cannot have more than one account tied to Google Home, so all the user-specific data accessible on Home belongs to whoever sets it up. The only option here is to disable "personal results" so other people can't get into things like your calendar. It should be able to figure out who's who, though. Google is able to recognize voices--you train your phone's OK Google trigger so only you can set it off.

Humans are already forming relationships with their artificial intelligence (AI) assistants, so we should make that technology as emotionally aware as possible by teaching it to respond to our feelings. That is the premise of Rana el Kaliouby, cofounder and CEO of Affectiva, an MIT spinout company that sells emotion recognition technology based on her computer science PhD, which she spent building the first ever computer that can recognise emotions. The machine learning-based software uses a camera or webcam to identify parts of human faces (eyebrows, the corners of eyes, etc), classify expressions and map them onto emotions like joy, disgust, surprise, anger, and so on, in real time. "We are getting lots of interest around chatbots, self-driving cars, anything with a conversational interface. If it's interfacing with a human it needs social and emotional skills. This tech is already being integrated into robots," el Kaliouby tells Techworld.

We imagine them to be wickedly intelligent, like Samantha from the movie Her. There is no "I" in their AI. They are so hopeless that some people argue that bots would be better without conversation. But without conversation they are not bots. They are more like the Internet on Nokia feature phones (a.k.a.

When you hear the term "artificial intelligence," you may think of tech giants Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, or Facebook. Industrial powerhouse General Electric is now aiming to be included on that short list. It may not have a chipper digital assistant like Cortana or Alexa. It won't sort through selfies, but it will look through X-rays. It won't recommend movies, but it will suggest how to care for a diesel locomotive.

The app boom is over. There are now more than 4.2 million apps available for Android and iOS, but three-quarters of American smartphone users download a grand total of zero new apps per month. They might be mostly free and easy to access, but apps are struggling to make it on to our phones and tablets. According to comScore, we spend the majority of our screen time using just three apps, with the average American spending almost half their time in just one. With the eyeballs of the world glued to WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat and Skype, developers have started turning once-simple chat apps into complex ecosystems. And at the centre of this change is a horde of subservient bots. You've just walked into your kitchen after a long week. "Play Etta James," you say.

Yes, artificial technology is rapidly improving -- and true, AI will invade the legal business before you know it -- but futuristic AI-infused robot lawyers aren't going to replace legal pros anytime soon. AI-based tools and technologies created and customized for legal work are coming for sure, though. AI-enabled software can use pattern recognition and extreme machine learning algorithms to help legal pros work faster. Their capability digest vast amounts of information and interpret it can help you work smarter, too. The time to start thinking about the first wave of AI legal tools is now.

Get yourself ready for the bot invasion. Powered by artificial intelligence and fueled with big data, bots are gearing up to serve people the data, insights, and services they demand. Anybody who's interacted with Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa or Microsoft's Cortana is familiar with the question-and-answer capabilities of bot technology, which uses natural language processing and machine learning to answer questions or provide information via email, social media, messaging platforms, and mobile apps. But the bots you've seen up to this point will pale in comparison to the bots of the future. Consider that, by 2020, the average person will have more conversation with bots than with their spouse, according to Gartner.

It seems like we've perennially been on the edge of major breakthroughs in AI (artificial intelligence), virtual reality, personal robots, and other such cool tech for the past two decades. The first set of science fiction imaginings came true rather rapidly -- think trans-continental air travel, space stations, even drone warfare -- but it appears that the emergence of next-gen tech wizardry has stalled. But while we still can't chat with the on-board computer on our personal spaceship, artificial intelligence is far more pervasive in our daily lives today than most of us realize. As anyone who has trained their mobile phone assistant can attest, years of painstaking research and investment in artificial intelligence technologies is starting to yield impressive results. Siri can predict our commute patterns, Microsoft Cortana warns us of bad weather, and the Google Assistant diligently sets calendar reminders with the impassive demeanor of an English butler of yore.