Nearly every big tech company now offers a digital assistant powered by artificial intelligence. Apple has Siri, Facebook has M, Microsoft has Cortana, Amazon has Alexa, and Google has, well, Google. The success of these services is heavily dependent on the mountains of data they have at their disposal -- along with massive amounts of computing power to crunch that data, understand user queries, and respond in real time. This reality raises an obvious question: how can startups without their own server farms and massive customer bases hope to compete? Companies like Hound and Viv want to build standalone apps that consumers will use in place of the assistants built into their smartphones.

Key players in machine learning include big cloud players like Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), and IBM. A recent study by AI language company Narrative Science found that 80% of executives believed that AI solutions boosted worker performance and created new jobs. Nuance developed the technology that powers Apple's (NASDAQ:AAPL) Siri, which preceded other voice assistants like Alphabet's (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google Now, Microsoft's Cortana, and Amazon's Alexa. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Alphabet (A shares), Alphabet (C shares), Amazon.com, The Motley Fool owns shares of Microsoft and has the following options: long January 2018 90 calls on Apple and short January 2018 95 calls on Apple.

Unless you've been hiding under a rock, you've no doubt heard about chatbots. However, what's not commonly known is that chatbots have been around for years. What differentiates today's bots is the integration of back-end artificial intelligence, which enables them to do more than simply respond with the basic logic of yesterday. I find that it's important to make distinctions between a bot and today's A.I.-powered intelligent assistants. Chatbots just happen to be conversational.

Last week was IoT week on SitePoint which saw us publish a plethora of articles focused on the intersection of the internet and the physical world. We covered some seriously great stuff! Among my favorites was this article by Christopher Pitt on combining an Arduino, Minecraft and PHP (yup, PHP) and this article by SitePoint's Alex Walker and Jude Aakjaer on creating a motion-sensing, meeting-room-reserving Arduino platform. As I've written in the past, it worries me that in the rush to get the latest, greatest IoT products out of the door, security is often an afterthought. I also have zero confidence in those large data-thirsty corporations who, given half a chance, would use my IoT devices to gather as much personal data as they possibly can. Oh wait, they're doing that already, you say?

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) co-founder Bill Gates recently called artificial intelligence "the holy grail that anyone in computer science has been thinking about" during Vox Media's Code Conference. Gates discussed the rapid progress of speech recognition and computer vision technologies over the past five years, and noted that "the dream is finally arriving." If that dream arrives, tech investors should recognize the major trends and players in this market. To get started, let's examine 10 fascinating facts about the AI industry. Research firm Markets and Markets estimates that the AI market will grow from 420 million in 2014 to 5.05 billion by 2020, thanks to the rising adoption of machine learning and natural language processing technologies in the media, advertising, retail, finance, and healthcare industries.

Cisco announced a partnership Monday with bot-building platforms Gupshup and API.ai that allows thousands of bots to quickly join Cisco Spark and Cisco Tropo platforms. It also turns up the intensity in competition between enterprise team communication chat apps like Skype and Slack. The announcement was made during Cisco Live, a four-day Cisco event taking place in Las Vegas this week. Gupshup built an SMS social network of more than 50 million users, mainly in India, before becoming an enterprise messaging service company in 2010. Today, it processes four billion messages a month.

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.

As important as we all (think we) are, we can't all afford to have assistants scheduling our lives on our behalf. But thanks to the rise of the machine, your busy life might've just gotten a little more manageable. Meet Julie Desk, the artificial intelligence-powered virtual assistant that organizes your meetings. Because you already have to spend your time going to these things -- at the very least, you shouldn't be wasting your time scheduling them, right? Launched in 2015, Julie Desk promises to simplify and humanize your relationships to technology (and other people) by automatically managing all the available information required to go about your day-to-day life.

The comparison revealed that people who are lying are less likely to use personal pronouns - such as "I", "me", "mine" - and tend to use more adjectives, such as "brilliant" and "sublime". Reasons for this language use could be that liars try to dissociate themselves from the content of a message, while clouding its meaning in unnecessary description. Other clues that someone is lying include linking sentences to each other so that thoughts appear to be connected, and mirroring the sentence structure of the person they're communicating with. The algorithm is better at detecting lies than the average human. People manage to spot a lie 54 per cent of the time, according to the researchers, whereas the computer lie detector detects it 70 per cent of the time.

Which authors of this paper are endorsers? Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)