Suzanne, a young woman in San Francisco, met a man--call him John--on the dating site OKCupid. John was attractive and charming. More notably, he indulged in the kind of profligate displays of affection which signal a definite eagerness to commit. He sneaked Suzanne's favorite snacks into her purse as a workday surprise and insisted early on that she keep a key to his apartment. He asked her to help him choose a couch and then spooned with her on all the floor models. He even accompanied her, unprompted, to the D.M.V.--an act roughly equivalent, in today's gallantry currency, to Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the sea monster. As we learn from the podcast "Reply All," which reported the tale, Suzanne was not the only woman on whom John had chosen to bestow his favor. Six months into their relationship, she discovered that he was seeing half a dozen other women, one of whom he'd been stringing along for two years. All of them had received the couch-spooning treatment.

Machine learning is all about process optimisation. With this type of artificial intelligence discipline, machines and other electronic devices are able to learn on the go and adjust their behaviour to make production more efficient. This could go from increasing or reducing processes, to changing operation times. It is a method of data analysis that uses algorithms to learn about hidden information about a machine, process or service. However, contrasting with traditional systems, a machine learning system is not programmed beforehand to find those hidden information data sets.

We like to think we've moved past the workplace sexism of the 1950s, when men were professionals and women were secretaries. But while women have managed to break out of those subservient roles, the genders we assign to artificial-intelligence robots suggests our prejudices haven't made as much progress. After law firm BakerHostetler hired an AI "lawyer" named ROSS, journalist Rose Eveleth noted that the male name was somewhat unusual in the world of AI. I would just like to note that all the assistant AIs are given female names, but the lawyer AI is named Ross. Critics have previously noted that most AI assistants--including Apple's Siri, Google Now, Amazon's Alexa, and Microsoft's Cortana--sound like women.

Last month at its annual software developer conference, Facebook brought customer facing artificial intelligence back into the headlines by announcing that it would be opening up its Messenger platform for developers to build'chatbots'. These'chatbots', more commonly known as Virtual Assistants, could then be employed by companies to simulate conversations by customer service agents. The announcement drove significant debate, with a number of commentators pointing to some existing frustrating platforms, and the Microsoft bot which was recently corrupted on Twitter, as indicators that the world isn't yet ready to rely on artificial intelligence-driven services. But by and large, customers are already well accustomed to using Virtual Assistants. These services have been available in popular consumer devices for more than five years, with arguably the most famous one of all – Apple's Siri – receiving as many as one billion requests a week.

If you look at all the tech giants - Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon - there is one area all of them are keenly interested in. Personal assistants and bots which work on the basis of artificial intelligence (AI). Admittedly, Apple, Google and Microsoft have been in this space for a couple of years, but 2016 is the year when these technologies could start to have a telling impact on the way people use their gadgets and services. In fact, for many including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, "Bots will be the new apps." More than the biggies, start-ups are doing some unique and disruptive things. On Monday (May 9) night, at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, Dag Kittlaus, co-founder and CEO of Viv, showed his new AI-based personal assistant which seemingly was a step above what Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, Google's Search or even Amazon's Alexa are capable of doing.

Lately, there's been a rumble pretty much everywhere about artificial intelligence, digital personal assistants, the Internet of Things, wearables and apps for everything. I've even written about what the rise of digital assistants means to search. There are some who claim that these new technologies will render search obsolete, passed over for the convenience and joy of an always-available digital world. I think they are wrong. Instead of looking at a search engine as an ad platform, we need to remember what it actually does for people.

Today, a few hundred Bay Area Facebook users will open their Messenger apps to discover M, a new virtual assistant. Facebook will prompt them to test it with examples of what M can do: Make restaurant reservations. Find a birthday gift for your spouse. It won't take long for Messenger's users to realize M can accomplish much more than your standard digital helper, suspects David Marcus, vice president of messaging products at Facebook. "It can perform tasks that none of the others can," Marcus says.

What: Kitt.ai, a Seattle software company specializing in natural language understanding as related to artificial intelligence Ph.D.'s galore: The three co-founders, Yao, Guoguo Chen and Kenji Sagae, all have doctorates in computer-engineering related fields. Yao and Chen studied at Johns Hopkins and Sagae at Carnegie Mellon. The idea: Yao came up with the idea for the company while at Johns Hopkins. He flew to Seattle to interview at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), and told Allen CEO Oren Etzioni he wanted to start his own company. AI2 agreed to incubate the startup, and Kitt.ai was formed.

Accenture has announced a new business unit in partnership with IPsoft focused on spurring adoption of artificial intelligence in the enterprise. The systems integration and outsourcing giant plans to use IPsoft's Amelia AI platform as the core of the new Accenture Amelia practice. Amelia is similar to Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa, but is touted as more expressive and capable of empathy than her AI peers. Accenture said it will develop a suite of go-to-market strategies and consulting services based off of the Amelia platform. As Accenture CTO Paul Daugherty explained, the point is to appeal to executives who "are overwhelmed by the plethora of technologies and many products that are advertising AI or Cognitive capabilities".

We like to think we've moved past the workplace sexism of the 1950s, when men were professionals and women were secretaries. But while women have managed to break out of those subservient roles, the genders we assign to artificial-intelligence robots suggests our prejudices haven't made as much progress. After law firm BakerHostetler hired an AI "lawyer" named ROSS, journalist Rose Eveleth noted that the male name was somewhat unusual in the world of AI. I would just like to note that all the assistant AIs are given female names, but the lawyer AI is named Ross. Critics have previously noted that most AI assistants--including Apple's Siri, Google Now, Amazon's Alexa, and Microsoft's Cortana--sound like women.