Conversational bots, which can understand complex voice commands and complete tasks for you, are quickly becoming the rage. Earlier this month, the inventors of Siri showed off their creation Viv, which ordered flowers and booked a hotel in under a minute. Google Assistant, revealed this week, promises similar capabilities. Microsoft has now let slip that it's also working on a bot to help get things done, reports ZDNet off of a job posting from the company that's now been removed. Our biggest ever edition of TNW Conference is fast approaching!

Tinder is reportedly suing 3nder, a rival dating app targeted at people who want threesomes, over the similarity between their names. The company claims to have been "ordered to immediately cease operations" by Tinder, which reportedly believes the similarity between the apps' names could cause confusion for users. In a statement, 3nder said it was "confident" none of its members would ever confuse the two apps, and drew attention to Tinder's lack of ownership of the '-nd(e)r' suffix, used by similar services like Grindr and Adult Friend Finder. Dimo Trifonov, the founder of 3ndr, said: "Our mission and our values could not be more distinct from those of Tinder." "With so many sexualities and relationship structures left out of Tinder and the Match Group [Tinder's parent company] offerings, there is room for all of us."

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This has spurred speculation that Google will release a virtual-reality device to compete with Facebook's new Oculus Rift headset, as well as Samsung's Gear VR. Analysts also believe Google may release an artificial-intelligent gadget to compete with Amazon's Echo, which is a cylinder-like device that includes a virtual assistant named Alexa.

Computers and other machines have and will continue to change the way people do business and how we live. Many researchers use the term artificial intelligence (AI) to describe the thinking and intelligent behavior demonstrated by machines. While AI can be helpful to human beings, scientists warn, it can also be a threat. We live with artificial intelligence all around us. A few examples are iPhone's personal assistant Siri, searches on the Internet, and autopilot programs on airplanes.

Google revealed a handful of slick new products this week that showed off its impressive artificial intelligence and machine learning tech chops. Its new conversational assistant, for example, will take its traditional search product to the next level, letting users ask it questions, find suggestions, or book services through text chat in its new messaging app Allo or voice, in its new smart speaker, Home. Google's building on many years of research, development, and data collecting here and it shows. Although Home is essentially a follow-up to Amazon's Echo speaker, Google has much more experience with voice search and natural language processing. Ask Home a question, like "How tall is Steph Curry?" and you can follow-up with "What's his jersey number?" and Home will know who you're still talking about, where Alexa can only handle single queries.

Marco Arment, the former lead developer for Tumblr and creator of Instapaper, this weekend (May 21) argued in a blog post that Apple risks succumbing to the same fate as BlackBerry, which saw its business evaporate when Apple's iPhone changed the game. Arment contends that Apple is unprepared for the shift if consumers begin favoring services rooted in artificial intelligence being developed by other internet giants. "Today, Amazon, Facebook, and Google are placing large bets on advanced AI, ubiquitous assistants, and voice interfaces, hoping that these will become the next thing that our devices are for. Today, Apple's being led properly day-to-day and doing very well overall. But if the landscape shifts to prioritize those big-data AI services, Apple will find itself in a similar position as BlackBerry did almost a decade ago: what they're able to do, despite being very good at it, won't be enough anymore, and they won't be able to catch up."

"I don't know what you mean - how about a web search for it?" If you want the latest football scores, to add meetings to your calendar or launch an app, today's virtual assistants are relatively good at understanding your voice and doing what's asked. But try to have the type of natural conversation seen in sci-fi movies featuring artificial intelligence systems - from HAL in 2001 to the sultry-voiced operating system Samantha in Spike Jonze's Her - and you'll find your device about as smart as a waterproof teabag. "Google and Apple are painfully aware that their systems are not getting better fast enough because right now Siri and Google Now and the other personal assistant type applications are all programmed by hand," says Steve Young, professor of information engineering at the University of Cambridge. "If you speak to Siri about baseball it seems relatively intelligent, but if you ask it something much less common it doesn't really do anything except for a web search. "That's an indication that the programmers have been busy trying to anticipate what people want to ask about baseball but haven't thought about people who ask about, for example, GPU chips because you don't get many queries about that." Microsoft doesn't yet have a virtual assistant on its Windows Phone platform, but the company is experimenting with AI in lifts and reception desks at its headquarters. Eric Horvitz, managing director of Microsoft's research unit, believes part of the solution involves allowing computers to look beyond questions posed. "The ability of a system to understand more broadly what the overall context of a communication is turns out to be very important," he told the BBC. "There are some critical signals in context.

Michael Schmidt recently wrote in TechCrunch, "Artificial intelligence. But despite all the talk around AI, no one seems to really understand what it is or how companies can use it… Many people think of AI as the blending of humans and machines. They're not far off, but AI is an incredibly broad term -- more of an umbrella term, really -- that simply means making computers act intelligently. It is one of the major fields of study in computer science and encompasses subfields such as robotics, machine learning, expert systems, general intelligence and natural language processing." Schmidt goes on, "Apple's Siri, Google's self-driving cars and Facebook's image recognition software are standard examples of AI. While these applications are all powered very differently and achieve different goals, they all roll up into the umbrella term of artificial intelligence."

As if the communication and messaging apps ecosystem wasn't already bursting at its seams, Google has added three more--Spaces, Allo and Duo. Spaces can be downloaded on Android and iOS devices now, while Allo and Duo will be "available this summer". But wait, what's so different with Allo, in a world that has Whatsapp, Facebook's Messenger, Apple's iMessage and not to forget, Google's own Hangouts app? Allo is essentially designed to be a smarter instant messaging app and offer features which no rival does, yet. And most of those are based on the integration of machine learning, also known as artificial intelligence. What Allo does is it pre-empts what your response to a particular message might be, with some suggestions that show up as you are about to respond.