Of course, robots need to be good company if we are to have them in our lives, sharing our homes and workplaces, having them do things for us. And this requirement applies to all robots, not just the walking, talking ones, but also the artificial intelligence (AI) embedded in larger systems or on the web.

Google's finally interweaving the deep treasure troves of information it holds about the world at large and you, specifically. Google Assistant is a conversational digital assistant built around the company's strengths in deep learning and natural language recognition, summoned at an utterance of "Ok Google" to respond to any queries you may have. It can understand context depending on the topic at hand, too: Holding your camera at a famous sculpture and asking "Who designed this?" will get an answer, as will queries like "Show me his other movies" after asking something like "Who directed The Revenant?" Google Assistant will be able to play music playlists, file reminders, help you buy movie tickets, and a whole lot more. Interestingly, it doesn't appear to be a discrete app; instead, it appears tied to be baked right into Google-y gadgets, in what Google CEO Sundar Pichai calls "an ambient experience that extends across devices." Think of it as a supercharged version of Google Now, mixed with Amazon's Alexa.

Someday soon we'll sit Amazon's Echo and Google Home side by side on the kitchen counter and do the Pepsi Challenge to see which smart speaker is smarter and most helpful. We'll ask each of their voice-powered assistant services a series of questions. Give them a series of tasks to do. They'll read recipes, give traffic reports, talk about the weather, answer trivia questions. Or at least that's my best guess after seeing Home's unveiling at Google's I/O conference keynote on Tuesday.

Google has done well out of its search box. As our collective dependence on computers and the Internet has grown, we have come to use it more and more--helping Google swell to its gigantic size. But on Wednesday Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, said it was time to move on from the conventional search engine that his company was built on. He unveiled Google Assistant, an evolution of Google search designed to act like a virtual concierge. If you search Google for "movies tonight" on your phone today, it will display the films in local theaters.

Sirius [1] is an open end-to-end standalone speech and vision based intelligent personal assistant (IPA) similar to Apple's Siri, Google's Google Now, Microsoft's Cortana, and Amazon's Echo. Sirius [1] implements the core functionalities of an IPA including speech recognition, image matching, natural language processing and a question-and-answer system. Sirius [1] is developed by Clarity Lab at the University of Michigan. Sirius [1] is published at the International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS) 2015. If you're interested in contributing to Sirius, fork our repo or post to sirius-users.

ARTIFICIAL intelligence is a longstanding science fiction staple that is coming into its own. Google, Facebook, Apple and others are all developing A.I. tools. You can try out some apps today that demonstrate fledgling forms of the technology by smartly, swiftly and automatically doing tasks that would otherwise take lots of effort. The Roll, for instance, is a new intelligent app that can help organize the thousands of photos that you take with your phone. The app scans a photo library, analyzing each image and trying to spot which ones are similar.

Building a simple but powerful recommendation system is much easier than you think. This guide explains innovations that make machine learning practical for business production settingsand demonstrates how even a small-scale development team can design an effective large-scale recommender. In this guide, Practical Machine Learning: Innovations in Recommendation, authors and Mahout committers Ted Dunning and Ellen Friedman shed light on a more approachable recommendation engine design and the business advantages for leveraging this innovative implementation style.

When Google unveiled its new smart assistant earlier this week, it revealed the most basic name possible: Assistant. You don't even really call it that -- to summon it from Google's new smart speaker, you'd address it with a simple "Hey, Google" or the same "OK, Google" that you'd use to activate its voice search and predictive service, Google Now. But Assistant's lack of personality was quite intentional, according to Jonathan Jarvis, a former creative director on Google's Labs team. While at the company, he led a team doing concept, strategy, and design on products like the Search app and even Alphabet's logo rebrand. Jarvis worked on Assistant only up until February, so he wasn't there for the final decision to use "Assistant" as the platform's name.

Last month, law firm Baker & Hostetler announced that it would employ IBM's artificially intelligent lawyer, Ross, to help ease its tedious workload. In a statement, the firm's chief technology officer said, "we believe that emerging technologies like cognitive computing and other forms of machine learning can help enhance the services we deliver to our clients." Ross, a system built on the back of IBM's Watson, claims to be able to interpret questions lawyers ask it, and read "through the entire body of law and returns a cited answer and topical readings from legislation, case law and secondary sources to get you up-to-speed quickly." But the first thing I noticed about Ross wasn't how many legal documents it can search at once, or how accurate it claims to be. It was the name: Ross.

Google is set to allow its Chromebook laptops to run Android apps in a bit to take on Apple and Microsoft. The laptops run a version of Google's Chrome browser instead of an operating system like Windows - but until now have been unable to download apps. According to market research firm IDC, in Q1 of this year Chromebook shipments overtook Macs in the U.S. The laptops run a version of Google's Chrome browser instead of an operating system like Windows - but until now have been unable to download apps. Later this year, they will be able to run all android apps, Google said. The machine uses Google's Chrome OS, which is based on the firm's web browser.