The Tap is similar to Echo, but requires you to press a button to speak to Alexa. SAN FRANCISCO – Amazon is offering 1 million to the university team that builds an artificial intelligence that can keep up its side of the conversation with a human being for 20 minutes. On Thursday Amazon announced the Alexa Prize, a 1 million award for the creation of a conversational artificial intelligence that can talk to people "coherently and engagingly" for a third of an hour. Such a system would be unprecedented "and at least five times more advanced than state-of-the-art conversational AI," said Rohit Prasad, vice president and head scientist of Amazon Alexa. To aid the endeavor, up to ten teams will get a 100,000 stipend from Amazon along with Alexa-enabled devices, free cloud computing and support from Amazon's Alexa team.

Next time you're wondering where the nearest gas station is, the answer will be just a voice command away. Google announced that it's enabling a host of new voice commands in Google Maps for Android that will allow you to search for a locations, get details about your route, or even call your mother without the need to touch your phone. The impact on you: While there are many good apps to help you go hands-free, Google Maps probably dominates your usage while driving. These features will allow you to mount your phone on the dashboard or set it on the console and not need to touch it while still accessing all of the useful information. To make sure you are ready to try these out, first check that you have hands-free voice commands turned on.

On Thursday, Microsoft took the unusual step of combining its Bing and Cortana product teams with Microsoft Research, in a bid to accelerate innovation for both the search engine and the digital assistant. The move was part of a broader reorganization that saw Microsoft split its Applications and Services Group, which also included Microsoft's Office applications, into two separate organizations. Office applications will form their own group. Though Microsoft has asked researchers to work on projects that could eventually be commercialized, combining teams that work on active products, such as Cortana and Bing, with the future-facing teams that comprise Microsoft Research, is in fact unique within Microsoft. Together, Bing and Cortana, plus Microsoft's Information Platform and Ambient Computing and Robotics teams, will form the Microsoft AI and Research Group. All told, the group will include more than 5,000 computer scientists and engineers, Microsoft said.

Microsoft has formed a new artificial intelligence research and development initiative that brings together 5000-plus computer scientists and engineers to realise the tech giant's AI vision. Fronted by Microsoft-alumni Harry Shum, the new division will be tasked with making AI accessible and valuable for'every person and organisation', building on the company's focus on AI across apps, services and infrastructure. The news comes hot on the heels of the launch of the Partnership on AI, the cross-industry collaboration between IBM, Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Amazon. The new group will unite existing Microsoft teams including Information Platform, Cortana, Bing and robotics. Its scope will include all AI product engineering and the company is taking a four-pronged approach to the initiative.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's new big idea is the "democratization of artificial intelligence," as in the concept that everybody should have access to AI and AI-powered technology. But to get there, it's meant taking a lot of Microsoft's considerable investments in academic AI science, and turning them into real products that people can actually use, like Skype Translate and Windows Hello. To accelerate that unification of research and product, Microsoft has announced the formation of the new AI and Research Group -- a new organization within Microsoft that combines the Microsoft Research teams with the teams responsible for the Cortana digital assistant, the Bing search engine, and other AI-adjacent products. Leading the new Microsoft AI and Research Group and it's now-5,000-strong team is Harry Shum, previously the head of Microsoft Research, and one of Nadella's direct reports. "Today's move to bring research and engineering even closer will accelerate our ability to deliver more personal and intelligent computing experiences to people and organizations worldwide," Shum says in a press release.

When Skype updates on desktop and gives the "improving your experience" message it's usually pretty easy to dismiss that as a bald-faced lie. But the latest iOS update actually sounds really useful. The VoIP service will now tap into Siri for making calls, pull contact information from the app into your contact list and, like Facebook Messenger before it, make incoming calls look like regular ones. It all sounds genuinely useful. As always, if the update hasn't hit your iOS 10 device yet, that's what the source link below is for.

Whenever people start dating differently, a freakout inevitably ensues. As Moira Weigel details in her book Labor of Love, when young people started "going out" instead of having gentlemen callers visit women in their family homes, their elders were horrified. Some thought women who allowed men to buy them dinners or tickets to the movies were "turning tricks." The reaction to the phenomenon of "going steady" in the 1940s and 50s was less extreme than accusing people of prostitution, but still hand-wringy. Add technology to the mix and you get fear of change, doubled.

Google, Facebook, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft are joining forces to create a new AI partnership dedicated to advancing public understanding of the sector, as well as coming up with standards for future researchers to abide by. Going by the unwieldy name of the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society, the alliance isn't a lobbying organisation (at least, it says it "does not intend" to lobby government bodies). Instead, it says it will "conduct research, recommend best practices, and publish research under an open license in areas such as ethics, fairness and inclusivity; transparency, privacy, and interoperability; collaboration between people and AI systems; and the trustworthiness, reliability and robustness of the technology". There will be equal representation between corporate and non-corporate members on the board of the partnership, and it hopes to invite "academics, non-profits and specialists in policy and ethics" to join. Each of the five founding corporate members has strong AI research teams, some of which have become household names, such as IBM's Watson and Amazon's Alexa.

The industry is falling over itself to make products'intelligent' but what does that really mean to a user? As a Product Manager in this space, I've been thinking about intelligence and what it really means to users. There are many definitions of intelligence but they tend to be technical definitions of AI rather than intelligence seen through the eyes of a user. As we progress through the stages, what users once considered as intelligent, can become ordinary over time. For example, improving search so that it was accurate and fast could be regarded as highly intelligent at the time but now it's the minimum we expect.

With thousands of people in your area using Tinder to find love, it's easy for your own profile to be overlooked. The firm understands it's hard to get noticed among the sea of profiles and is now testing a feature that places paid user at the top for 30 minutes - but for a price. Called Tinder Boost, this new premium feature aims to increase users' chances for a match, as it gives them up to 10 times more profile views than the standard method. Tinder is testing a feature that places paid user profiles at the top of their area for 30mins. Tinder Boost can be activated swiping through profiles in the app.