Satya Nadella wasn't kidding when he said earlier this year that he believed in using chat as a platform for computing. Microsoft just bought Wand, a chat app for iOS, to further that vision. The Wand team will be joining Bing's engineering and platform group, Corporate Vice President David Ku wrote in a post announcing the deal Thursday. The company's team members will be working primarily on Microsoft's push to enable the creation of intelligent chatbots and virtual assistants. It's a natural fit for Wand, which had been working since 2013 on apps that let users chat with one another and add outside information from sources like Yelp.

Many of the tech industry's biggest players are currently working to address the chatbot trend, but few are investing more into the effort than Microsoft. The company joined the fray early on with Cortana and is now doubling down by acquiring a low-called startup called Wand Labs Inc. that has developed its own virtual assistant for mobile devices. The software attempts to spare users the hassle of switching between apps by making it possible to interact with every service on their phones through a centralized chat window. The built-in bot can be instructed to find a restaurant on Yelp, add a song to an iTunes playlist and even change the settings on connected devices like the Nest Thermostat. It's an appealing value proposition, but Redmond appears to be more interested in the Wand team.

Student developers at the Apple Worldwide Developer's conference say they're ready to bring Siri to the masses, and make the personal digital assistant more useful. A link has been sent to your friend's email address. Student developers at the Apple Worldwide Developer's conference say they're ready to bring Siri to the masses, and make the personal digital assistant more useful.

IBM has teamed up with Local Motors, a Phoenix-based automotive manufacturer that made the first 3D-printed car, to create a self-driving electric bus. Named "Olli," the bus has room for 12 people and uses IBM Watson's cloud-based cognitive computing system to provide information to passengers. In addition to automatically driving you where you want to go using Phoenix Wings autonomous driving technology, Olli can respond to questions and provide information, similar to Amazon's Echo home assistant. The bus debuts today in the Washington D.C. area for the public to use during select times over the next several months, and the IBM-Local Motors team hopes to introduce Olli to the Miami and Las Vegas areas by the end of the year. By using Watson's speech to text, natural language classifier, entity extraction, and text to speech APIs, the bus can provide several services beyond taking you to your destination.

If there was any doubt that artificial intelligence is the future of technology, look no further than Google. The company announced the new AI research push on Thursday in a blog post. Opening as part of Google's existing Google Research center in Europe, the Machine Learning Research Group will focus on, naturally, Machine Learning, in which computers use vast amounts of data to teach themselves and build rules about the data; Natural Language Processing for speech-systems and conversational queries; and Machine Perception, which is used to understand the contents of images, sounds, music and video. This announcement comes four years after the company began aggressively pursuing machine learning technologies, three months after Google's AI beat one of the world's best Go players and just weeks after Google codified its approach to AI during its annual Google I/O developers conference. During I/O, Google unveiled Google Assistant, a voice-based digital assistant designed the take on Microsoft's Cortana, Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa.

While it already feels that AlphaGo is ancient history in the fast moving AI world, I think it makes a powerful case for how human-machine collaboration could help us improve our own mastery of complex tasks. Google DeepMind also made the headlines for the data sharing agreement they signed with three hospitals that are part of UK's National Health Service. The data on 1.6 million patients includes live and historical medical records stretching back 5 years. Its stated use is for "real time clinical analytics, detection, diagnosis and decision support", with an initial focus on the Company's Streams app for measuring the risk of acute kidney injury. While many engaged in heated debate over data privacy (see this headline, courtesy of The Daily Mail), my view is that medicine should be moving towards real-time monitoring of health and prediction of future conditions.

Pretty much every cinematic portrayal of artificial intelligence has been less than encouraging. HAL 9000 kills the crew members on the Discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey, making us all a little bit afraid of handing the reins over to computers. Sonny kills his creator in I, Robot, increasing worldwide scepticism about the integration of humans and their smart robots. Even real life AI has given us pause. For example, when an IBM computer defeated Russian chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov in the 1990s, it was definitely a cause for concern. For the most part, though, AI has been more accepted in everyday practice.

Analysts are saying that Apple's upcoming updates to its Siri voice assistant should help the company address criticisms that it can't compete on artificial intelligence. Apple is now opening Siri to apps made by other companies, and like Google and Microsoft, it's bringing the digital assistant to desktop and laptop computers. It's also making Siri smarter by using what Apple calls differential privacy. Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy explains it as Apple using non-personal information in aggregate to teach Siri new tricks, then having all the personalization take place on the individual device. It's in contrast to Google's approach of doing everything over the internet -- that is, in the "cloud."

We're a nation glued to our smartphones, according to a 2015 Ofcom report. Sixteen- to 24-year-olds are the biggest user group – 90% of them own one and look at it 387 times each day on average. It's clear that if recruiters are searching for a young, captive audience from which to source talent, they should be thinking mobile. Software companies are seeing growing demand from employers looking for gamified recruitment apps. Whether companies are seeking greater diversity or bubbly shop assistants, there's much in this new breed of digital tools to attract businesses.

SugarCRM has put A.I. at the core of its product plans and is working on a new intelligence service along with a Siri-like agent named Candace. Tapping the company's recent acquisitions of Stitch and Contastic, the new technology will be designed to help businesses spend less time entering data into their customer relationship management (CRM) software, and more time learning from and acting upon it. SugarCRM is scheduled to demonstrate the new capabilities Wednesday at its SugarCon conference in San Francisco. "In the CRM space, we want people to focus on what they're good at: Relating to others, such as customers and partners," Rich Green, SugarCRM's chief product officer, said in an interview last week. "As data becomes more and more available, it typically has required quite a bit of labor to ensure that your CRM system stays up to date," Green explained.