On a post-apocalyptic 2077 Earth, Tech 49 named'Jack' (played by Tom Cruise) works with drones to protect the fusion generators fueling colonists relocating to Saturn's moon. Hostile aliens capture, reprogram and arm one of the drones with a nuclear weapon. "You can't blame yourself… Drones are unreliable… Sometimes things go wrong." Sixty-two years earlier (in 2015), Google's new CEO Sundar Pichai (below) inherited the home planet of the Alphabet universe from Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Per Pichai, the post-mobile Google is "normalizing" home and car computer interactivity.

Amazon's Echo speakers have a ton of smart capabilities, but until recently, playing music from any service other than Prime Music required telling the device which service to use each time. Now, users may have noticed an option to set Pandora or Spotify as its default music player. If you have one of the Alexa-connected devices, then you can go into its control app on the web or a mobile device and look under settings to switch the default away from Amazon. Once it's set, just talk normally to the speaker, "Amazon/Alexa play (artists/song/etc.)" and it will play from the proper service.

The official handle for the Cortana Intelligence. Follow for news and updates from the team and the community.

Facebook's new Deep Text system, launched last month, promises to revolutionise the social media experience for both individual users and brands. According to the company, its artificial intelligence (AI) engine can analyse and understand the meaning and sentiment in the text of thousands of posts per second across 20 languages. It is said to be able to achieve "near human accuracy" in understanding the deeper meaning behind written words and distinguishing between slang, colloquialisms and brand names. Facebook has already used the technology in its Messenger app to help users hail taxis and on its main site to advise users who are making sales. But Deep Text could also have a huge impact on the way brands target and communicate with their customers.

S. Somasegar is a venture partner at Madrona Venture Group and the former head of Microsoft's Developer Division. Daniel Li is an investor with Madrona Venture Group. Application intelligence is the process of using machine learning technology to create apps that use historical and real-time data to make predictions and decisions to deliver rich, adaptive, personalized experiences for users. We believe that every successful new application built today will be an intelligent application. The armies of chat bots and virtual assistants, the e-commerce sites that show the right recommendations at the right time and the latest dating apps are all built to learn and create continuously improving experiences. In addition, legacy applications are becoming more and more intelligent to compete and keep pace with this new wave of applications.

The folks at Amazon are clearly attempting to entice you into the dangerous world of shopping with voice commands. They're doing Alexa-exclusive deals for customers who shop through the company's Echo, Echo Dot and Tap speakers, starting today until July 12th. The team is also adding more items to the list (including gadgets and smart home products) on the 12th, which the company has designated as "Prime Day." You simply have to ask your faithful voice assistant: "Alexa, what are your Prime Day deals?"

Machine learning enhances Oracle's enterprise offerings. At a recent meeting of the Oracle Product Architects Community, Stephen Green, head of the Information Retrieval and Machine Learning Group within Oracle Labs, was prepared to give a general overview of his organization's activities. He got through only his first three slides, and then spent the rest of the hour answering a barrage of questions about machine learning and how this specialized programming technique might be applied to the product areas for which attendees were responsible. The interest reflects an extraordinary surge in experimentation and investment in the technology category known as artificial intelligence (AI), of which machine learning is a building block. AI in the form of self-driving cars, game-show-playing computers, and smartphone personal assistants may have grabbed the public's attention.

Artificial Intelligence is a fascinating topic for many people nowadays, no matter if they are a consumer or an influencer. Today, I'm happy to be joined by Ilya Gelfenbeyn, CEO and co-founder of Api.ai, a conversational UX platform used to embed natural language understanding capabilities into connected devices, apps and services. Regular readers of SitePoint may recognize the service, as we have covered Api.ai in the past with a series earlier this year on getting started with the platform. Ilya has a background in machine learning, natural language processing and conversational interfaces. Elio: We have covered Api.ai in the past, but could you briefly explain the concept behind it?

At the International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging in Prague this past April, a Harvard-based artificial intelligence system won the Camelyon16 challenge, a competition comprised of participants introducing their individual AI system and its ability to facilitate automated lymph node metastasis diagnosis. Referred to as PathAl, the computing system identifies cancerous cells through deep learning--an algorithmic technique that accumulates copious amounts of unstructured data and organizes it into clusters before analyzing it for patterns. Deep learning is predominately used in speech recognition systems like Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana. According to one of the challenge's organizers, Jeroen van der Laak of Radboud University Medical Center in Netherlands, the technology featured in the competition went "way beyond" his expectations, as the AI's accuracy proved strikingly close to that of human beings. In addition, van der Laak said AI technology has the propensity to intrinsically redefine the way histopathological images are handled in the medical community.

S. Somasegar is a venture partner at Madrona Venture Group and the former head of Microsoft's Developer Division. Daniel Li is an investor with Madrona Venture Group. You can hardly talk to a technology executive or developer today without talking about artificial intelligence, machine learning or bots. While everyone agrees on the importance of machine learning to their company and industry, few companies have adequate expertise to do what they wanted the technology to do. Here are some insights into what we can expect in the coming years around ML and AI.