Having robots in our lives is an inevitability. We already have artificially intelligent voice assistants on our phones like Cortana, Siri and Google Now. But how will we interact with robots when they look and act like us? Researchers at the University College London and University of Bristol experimented with a humanoid robot to find out how humans instinctually interact with robots. Users took each robot's apology well, and were especially receptive to robot C's sad facial expression as it reassured people that it "knew" it made a mistake.

AI will kill jobs in India, Are government policies a viable solution? Dissident artist Ai Weiwei says work was pulled from Yinchuan Biennale due to'political sensitivity' Apple claims there's a lot of "hidden" AI already in iOS

Steven Levy has published an in-depth article about Apple's artificial intelligence and machine learning efforts, after meeting with senior executives Craig Federighi, Eddy Cue, Phil Schiller, and two Siri scientists at the company's headquarters. Apple provided Levy with a closer look at how machine learning is deeply integrated into Apple software and services, led by Siri, which the article reveals has been powered by a neural-net based system since 2014. Apple said the backend change greatly improved the personal assistant's accuracy. "This was one of those things where the jump was so significant that you do the test again to make sure that somebody didn't drop a decimal place," says Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of internet software and services.Alex Acero, who leads the Siri speech team at Apple, said Siri's error rate has been lowered by more than a factor of two in many cases. "The error rate has been cut by a factor of two in all the languages, more than a factor of two in many cases," says Acero. "That's mostly due to deep learning and the way we have optimized it -- not just the algorithm itself but in the context of the whole end-to-end product."Acero

Apple wants you to know it already does great AI -- but it's'subtle' South Africa's CLEVVA is making AI-powered virtual advisors a thing Polly.ai

Microsoft on Monday announced it bought a startup to boost its artificial intelligence capabilities, and rival Apple confirmed it has boosted... Microsoft did not disclose financial terms of its deal to buy Genee, which specialises in using machine smarts to handle the time-sucking task of scheduling meetings. "Genee uses natural language processing and optimised decision-making algorithms so that interacting with a virtual assistant is just like interacting with a human one," Outlook and Office 365 corporate vice president Rajesh Jha said in a blog post. For example, Genee can be copied into an email exchange to act as a virtual assistant of sorts to pin down a time for a business or social meeting. Jha touted Genee as having designed "an intelligent virtual assistant specialised in the appointment decision." The technology was expected to be put to work in Office 365 software that Microsoft offers as a service in the internet cloud.

Practical artificial intelligence has made its way out of the labs and into our daily lives. And judging from the pace of activity in the startup community and the major IT powerhouses, it will only grow in its ability to help us all get things done. Most AI solutions today are fielded by the big players in IT. For example, Apple's Siri or the capabilities Apple embedded directly in iOS9, Google's many savvy search solutions, Amazon's very smart recommendation engine, and IBM's Watson. We expect to see a new wave of AI solutions that deliver value from smaller start-up companies as well.

Your AI powered personal assistant for scheduling meetings. You interact with me as you would to any other person – and I'll do all the tedious email ping pong that comes along with scheduling a meeting.

If documents and photos submitted to the US Federal Communications Commission are to be believed, Samsung is prepping a new voice-activated Bluetooth speaker that looks an awful lot like a potential competitor for the Amazon Echo and the upcoming Google Home. First noticed by Ausdroid, the speaker is currently called "Scoop." It's about the same size as the Amazon Echo Dot, and judging from a brief user manual included in the filing, it seems to serve the same basic purpose: streaming music from your phone over Bluetooth, or from an external audio source via built-in audio jack. A user manual submitted to the Federal Communications Commission offers a look at the Scoop's hardware. What's less clear is whether the Scoop does anything else.

It appears Samsung is working on a competitor to Amazon Alexa and Google Home, with its own take on a voice assistant speaker, according to a filing with the US Federal Communications Commission spotted by Ausdroid. However, the FCC leak has images of a small, white speaker allegedly called the "Samsung Scoop". Documentation points to an internal microphone and Bluetooth within the speaker -- likely to take voice commands like the Amazon Alexa and connect to smartphones. Functionality isn't discussed in the filing, so it's not clear what type of commands or information the Scoop is able to serve up. Exact dimensions of the Scoop aren't known.

Amazon.com is expected to release a cheaper music service exclusively for its Echo devices, according to a report from Recode. The service will cost substantially less than other subscription music services, at either 4 or 5 per month, Recode's Peter Kafka reports. Most monthly music subscriptions cost about 10 per month. Amazon declined to comment on the reports. Amazon chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos is also the owner of The Washington Post. Details on the reported service are thin, but it seems that users will be able to listen to on-demand, ad-free music through Amazon's smart-home devices.