I began my dating app experience much later in life. I was anxious to get started the moment I upgraded devices. The first and most obvious download was the infamous Tinder, renowned as a hook-up app but also responsible for significant relationships for several of my friends. A female friend offered to look at my profile and provide some tips. She quickly started searching through my Facebook pictures and then completely rewrote my description.

So lets look at the landscape of assistants. There are two main AI types of assistants; Personal Assistants and Brand Assistants. A Personal Assistant is focused on providing a user with as wide array of useful assistance as possible. It may open an app, send a text message or order a pizza. All of these companies are investing heavily to be the users Personal Assistant of choice.

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, Macy's (NYSE:M) announced the pilot of "Macy's On Call," a mobile web tool that allows customers to interact with an AI-powered platform via their mobile devices. "Macy's On Call" taps IBM Watson, via Satisfi, an intelligent engagement platform, to deliver a first-of-its-kind solution that will enhance the customer in-store shopping experience at 10 test locations nationwide. The mobile companion, accessed via a mobile browser, allows customers to input natural language questions regarding each participating store's unique product assortment, services and facilities and receive a customized response to the inquiry. There are a number of ways that customers may request information. For example, a customer could type, "Where are the women's shoes?" or type a combination of brand and product inquiry such as "I.N.C dress," and they will receive the relevant response and location of that product in the store.

In the early days of the Information Age, people who wanted to interact with a computer had to learn to speak its language, like Fortran or BASIC. Today's devices are learning to speak our language -- not perfectly, but well enough to conduct a Google search, schedule an appointment or order a pizza. And smart devices seem to get smarter every day. Does that mean bots with artificial intelligence (AI) will soon replace virtual assistants -- human beings located offsite who provide executive support? We're not there yet, if a recent survey by Creative Strategies is any indication.

The use of robots is increasingly becoming inevitable in our daily lives. From social and domestic bots like Alexia – Amazon Echo to financial robo-advisors, Robots exist in real life and no longer synonymous with science fiction alone. The nature of work and the role of human in getting work done is constantly being redefined, as we see more machines take on, and even getting better and more efficient that human in routine task execution. Robots are always related with industrial applications, but have gradually crept into our offices, banks, homes, roads, labs and even hospitals. Below is an illustration of broad application of robots.

Talking toys have come a long way since the original Furby. Now they're connected to the Internet, use speech recognition, and are raising a host of new questions about the online privacy and security of children. Hackers have already targeted toys. Late last year, Hong Kong-based digital toy maker Vtech admitted that cybercriminals accessed the personal information of 6.4 million children. Researchers have also shown how hackers can gain control of connected dolls.

Earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg reveal he is dedicating his year to making a home AI butler. Now, he has revealed the project is already coming to fruition - and promised to reveal it soon. He told The Verge it can already control his home, and even makes his breakfast. Earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg reveal he is dedicating his year to making a home AI butler. Now, he has revealed the project is already coming to fruition - and promised to reveal it soon. 'It's going well, and I'm planning on doing a demo soon,' he said.

The artificial intelligence and voice recognition space has been growing rapidly. According to a Gartner report, by 2020, 85% of customer interactions will be managed without a human. This is pretty much likely, as we are already teaching our machines to interpret data into logical solutions. Apps running on artificial intelligence should make a user's life easy, but what goes into building such apps? In a #Bitesize interview with us, Xavier Amatriain, VP of engineering at Quora, explained the key to successful machine learning in developing products.

Written by our strategist and resident science fiction nerd Erik Magnuson, these monthly roundups won't cover every development in the ever accelerating world of technology, but they will hopefully provide a little insight into why things are happening, and what might happen next. I will start this roundup as I often do by talking about artificial intelligence. I am convinced that Eric Horvitz of Microsoft Research is correct when he says "the next if not last enduring battlefield between technology companies is artificial intelligence." That battle has so far been fought mostly between digital assistants from Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft. But recently a new player entered the arena: Viv.

You've studied machine learning, you're a dataframe master for massaging data, and you can easily pipe that data through a bunch of machine learning libraries. You go for a job interview at a SAAS company, you're given some raw data and labels and asked to predict churn, and come on - are these guys even trying? You generate the shit out of some features, you overfit the hell out of that multidimensional manifold just so you can back off and show off your knowledge of regularization, and then you put the icing on the cake by cross validating towards a better metric for the business problem than simple accuracy. You roll up on an ecommerce company, and they trick you by basically giving you no features. Ha! Nice try, but you know that's a classic recommender system.