Will skills be as vibrant as apps?

Microsoft's Cortana AI bot is known for dealing with customer service enquiries – but it goes much further than that. The artificial intelligence technology is being applied in a great variety of ways at huge companies such as Volvo. Chris Testa-O'Neill of Microsoft's data science team demonstrated the Cortana Intelligence Suite at SpaceportX in Manchester's Northern Quarter this week. Speaking at the first of a series of regular business intelligence and data meetups organised by Travel Counsellors, he discussed subjects such as machine learning – which the CIS can perform – with a captive audience. We spoke to him afterwards to get the lowdown on what the Big Data and advanced analytics suite can do for firms large and small.

Of course, Google knows what you've searched for. So do Bing, Yahoo!, and every other search engine. And your ISP knows every website you've ever visited. Google also knows your age and gender -- even if you never told them. They make a pretty comprehensive ads profile of you, including a list of your interests (which you can edit) to decide what kinds of ads to show you.

With the rise in self-driving technology, the latest automobiles are grabbing more attention at The Consumer Electronics Show. CES showed off some technology (available now or soon) that can make your life easier and/or better. While CES is an acronym for Consumer Electronics Show, the running joke at this annual Las Vegas event is that CES is turning into the Car Electronics Show. Many of the world's biggest auto makers have become a major part of this highly-publicized conference – which serves as a glimpse into the future of technology -- by dominating much of the North Hall at the Las Vegas Convention Center, as well as surrounding facilities. And it doesn't seem to matter this Sin City event falls on the heels of the North American International Auto Show in Detroit.

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I still have my Chatty Cathy doll, clothes and all. Never will I forget the excitement of waking up one Christmas morning to this delightful new "best" friend. This pull-string "talking" doll manufactured by the Mattel toy company was all the rage during my youth. With a quick Google Search, I learned that she was only in production from 1959 to 1965 and I'm guessing I was five at the time. Let's not go there with the math… Chatty Cathy was cutting edge back then and I find it not unreasonable to compare the soon to be released AI friend that Mattel is calling Aristotle to the 1960's toy sensation.

When Amazon's Echo hit the market, it was basically just a voice-operated speaker. Don't get me wrong--it was an attractive piece of technology and it responded well to voice commands, but a lot of people ended up with an Echo asked Alexa a few basic questions, like: What time is it? Click here for a list of Alexa commands you're not using but should be. Here's the question I get over and over again: What else can Alexa do? The answer is: Much more than just take commands.

Millions of people own smart devices that do simple things like adjust temperature, turn down lights or lock doors when they go out. You can buy a connected fridge that tells you when you have run out of food or set up security cameras that tell you when suspicious movement is detected. There is even a toothbrush that tells you what areas of the mouth you have neglected and an intelligent hair brush that does … something. Depending on which market forecast you believe, the install base for connected devices could be anywhere between 20 billion to just over 30 billion by 2020. A recent prediction by IHS cited by Forbes said that there will be 75.4 billion devices by 2025.

Just recently I wrote an article for Venture Beat where I retold the story of the chess playing king and the traveling sage. The sage, in return for beating the king at chess, requests that the king pays his reward in rice - one grain on the first square of the board, two on the second, four on the fourth and then so on. After losing, the king quickly discovered he could not pay his debt, for on the 20th square he needed to place 1,000,000 grains of rice, on the 40th 1,000,000,000 grains of rice. And, finally on the 64th square, the king would have had to put more than 18,000,000,000,000,000,000 grains of rice - equal to about 210 billion tons. The point behind all of this is to start thinking about the power of exponential growth and how it is impacting our world and our future.

SAN FRANCISCO: Microsoft announced on Friday (Jan 13) a deal to buy Maluuba, a Montreal startup focused on making machines able to think the way people do. Bringing on board Maluuba co-founders Kaheer Suleman and Sam Pasupalak, along with their team from the startup, was intended to accelerate Microsoft's "ability to develop software so computers can read, write and converse naturally," the company said. Microsoft did not disclose financial terms of the acquisition. "Maluuba's vision is to advance toward a more general artificial intelligence by creating literate machines that can think, reason and communicate like humans - a vision exactly in line with ours," Microsoft artificial intelligence and research group executive vice president Harry Shum said in a blog post. "I'm incredibly excited about the scenarios that this acquisition could make possible in conversational AI." Tech giants Apple, Samsung, Google and Microsoft are all vying to develop the most sophisticated connected assistant - working to give software the ability to understand what people say and even anticipate desires or needs.