Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Want to know how much you spent on Uber rides last month? A new banking bot called MyKAI can give you some answers. Kasisto's new banking smart bot, which works with messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger and Slack to make financial transactions and answer questions, is part of a broader trend towards using AI to enrich customers' interactions with companies. You can make payments, ask the bot things like how much money is in your account, and even ask general questions like "What is a CD?" It can even provide an answer if you want to know if you have a gambling problem. Why Dick's Sporting Goods decided to play its own game in e commerce Dick's Sporting Goods has long partnered with eBay Enterprise on its e -commerce platform. Learn the benefits and risks of this multi -million dollar IT bet.

For many years, effective voice-based search technologies have eluded businesses that have tried to bring next-generation input methods to customers. Confined to basic navigation and so-called'magic words', command-based speech systems have been ineffective and hard for consumers to use. The widespread adoption of smartphones and tablets, and their minimised keyboards, has led to a renewed interest in this genre of technology however, with Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa and Google Now's'OK Google' progressing beyond basic menu navigation functions and striking a chord with consumers and businesses alike. In fact, any device with a microphone has potential for speech based commands, and can become an intelligent discovery system that uses a sophisticated entertainment brain to understand customer desires. This technology is important and under-explored by the TV industry, which often appears to have been left behind in terms of intuitive discovery functionality.

In 2012, Dennis Mortensen had 1,019 meetings, each of which required an average of roughly eight back-and-forth emails to schedule. Every time Mortensen comes across a contact interested in meeting with him, the CEO and founder of New York City-based artificial intelligence firm x.ai simply sends them a return email copying Amy, who takes care of the rest. "In raw numbers, I've saved about an hour every day -- an hour which I would otherwise have to use in really rudimentary work where I add not much value," Mortensen said of Amy's help scheduling meetings. Virtual assistants like Amy are becoming more common. Just as household technology platforms like Apple's "Siri" and Microsoft's "Cortana" has helped consumers navigate their lives more easily, other forms of rudimentary artificial intelligence platforms are starting to proliferate the market, many of them upending traditional business roles.

I became highly confused the first time I used the Amazon Echo, a voice-activated "smart home assistant" that sits in the corner and responds to the name Alexa – as in "Alexa, play some music!" or "Alexa, how many ounces in a kilogram?" Partly, this was because the only person I know who owns an Echo is herself called Alexa, and she was home at the time. That is, unless you start young. "We love our Amazon Echo… but I fear it's also turning our daughter into a raging asshole," the Silicon Valley investor Hunter Walk fretted recently. Alexa doesn't need you to say please or thank you; indeed, she responds better to brusque commands.

On a post-apocalyptic 2077 Earth, Tech 49 named'Jack' (played by Tom Cruise) works with drones to protect the fusion generators fueling colonists relocating to Saturn's moon. Hostile aliens capture, reprogram and arm one of the drones with a nuclear weapon. "You can't blame yourself… Drones are unreliable… Sometimes things go wrong." Sixty-two years earlier (in 2015), Google's new CEO Sundar Pichai (below) inherited the home planet of the Alphabet universe from Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Per Pichai, the post-mobile Google is "normalizing" home and car computer interactivity.

Amazon's Echo speakers have a ton of smart capabilities, but until recently, playing music from any service other than Prime Music required telling the device which service to use each time. Now, users may have noticed an option to set Pandora or Spotify as its default music player. If you have one of the Alexa-connected devices, then you can go into its control app on the web or a mobile device and look under settings to switch the default away from Amazon. Once it's set, just talk normally to the speaker, "Amazon/Alexa play (artists/song/etc.)" and it will play from the proper service.

The official handle for the Cortana Intelligence. Follow for news and updates from the team and the community.

Facebook's new Deep Text system, launched last month, promises to revolutionise the social media experience for both individual users and brands. According to the company, its artificial intelligence (AI) engine can analyse and understand the meaning and sentiment in the text of thousands of posts per second across 20 languages. It is said to be able to achieve "near human accuracy" in understanding the deeper meaning behind written words and distinguishing between slang, colloquialisms and brand names. Facebook has already used the technology in its Messenger app to help users hail taxis and on its main site to advise users who are making sales. But Deep Text could also have a huge impact on the way brands target and communicate with their customers.

S. Somasegar is a venture partner at Madrona Venture Group and the former head of Microsoft's Developer Division. Daniel Li is an investor with Madrona Venture Group. Application intelligence is the process of using machine learning technology to create apps that use historical and real-time data to make predictions and decisions to deliver rich, adaptive, personalized experiences for users. We believe that every successful new application built today will be an intelligent application. The armies of chat bots and virtual assistants, the e-commerce sites that show the right recommendations at the right time and the latest dating apps are all built to learn and create continuously improving experiences. In addition, legacy applications are becoming more and more intelligent to compete and keep pace with this new wave of applications.