George Burgess, the founder of Gojimo, a revision app, explores how artificial intelligence can be used within education. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has dominated tech news in 2016, from Google's ground breaking AlphaGo to Microsoft's racist Tay and Amazon's Echo. This has led to a heated debate on what it means for the human race, from socioeconomic concerns about loss of jobs in the fourth industrial revolution to moral, philosophical and even religious questions about our understanding of human consciousness. Rather than stray into these murky waters, I think it is best to concentrate on the sectors where AI can make a quantifiable and significant difference without threatening livelihoods or invoking metaphysics. One such area is education.

Posted by Lance Olson, Partner Director of Program Management in the Data Group at Microsoft. Cortana Intelligence with Bing Predicts preview is an end-to-end consulting program that brings the power of Microsoft's unique corpus of social, search and web data to let customers enrich and augment their Cortana Intelligence Suite solutions resulting in more accurate outcomes across a wide variety of business problems. The program springs from the highly successful and well-regarded Bing Predicts consumer experience, where Bing correctly predicted every knockout game of the 2014 soccer World Cup and 95% of the 2014 US mid-term elections. This program was born when we saw the opportunity to take the unique data assets that we have from our consumer businesses and help our commercial customers. Our team interprets these datasets to help you gain unique insights such as localized consumer preferences, user sentiment, customer demographics, macroeconomic indicators predictions and industry trends.

Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) is reportedly developing two Android Wear watches that will focus heavily on the Google Assistant, the company's artificial intelligence offering. Citing an unnamed "reliable source," Android Police said the watches, codenamed Angelfish and Swordfish, will be released after the launch of the next Nexus phones, likely in the next several months. One model is said to be larger and support LTE, GPS and heart-rate monitoring, while the other will offer fewer features and lack mobile data. It's unclear whether the gadgets will feature Google's Nexus brand. While the report is unconfirmed, Google is clearly showing a renewed interest in developing its own mobile devices.

Apple has released the first public test version of iOS 10 and Sierra, its new MacOS software. The iOS update brings a new look complete with a radical overhaul of the messages app offering new animations and emoji, while Sierra brings Siri to the Mac for the first time. The products, available as free updates, were announced at Apple's WWDC event in September. The iOS update brings a new look complete with a radical overhaul of the messages app offering new animations and emoji, while Sierra brings Siri to the Mac for the first time. To sign up for Apple's beta program, simply visit the beta site.

The popular app is looking to launch a special feature called BumbleBuzz that will aim to match those looking to connect in a professional capacity, a la LinkedIn. You'll be allowed to create a profile for those encounters alone, which will be kept completely separate from your dating profile, which will offer information such as the type of industry you're in, your education level and other tidbits that can be used to help find you a match. A special algorithm will be utilized for these purposes, which will not include gender. This means there may often be same-sex matches in addition to those of the opposite sex. Keeping true to Bumble's origins, however, women are expected to initiate a conversation after a match is made even in this professional mode.

Google is internally building two Android Wear smartwatches, according to Android Police, and they could be Nexus-branded. The report says one of the smartwatches will be larger, with a diameter of 43.5mm, and features LTE, GPS, and a heart-rate monitor. The smaller Android Wear smartwatch will not include LTE nor GPS, and it has a diameter of 42mm. Android Police, citing multiple sources, adds the two smartwatches could feature Google Assistant integration -- the platform Google unveiled at Google I/O 2016 -- as a way of users gaining contextual information through "an ongoing two-way dialogue".

Amazon's voice activated digital assistant Alexa appears to know more about Prime Day than she's letting on. All she'll do at this point is recite a cryptic poem pointing to a possible deal on July 8, 2016.

Every year, Apple fans around the world line up to buy the newest iPhone the minute it goes on sale. But Apple's software updates for the iPhone, which the company usually reveals during its annual developer's conference, are met with far less fanfare. This is largely because Apple's new software releases, as important as they may be for keeping your iPhone fast and secure, have recently been minor upgrades. Apple's iOS 8 introduced iCloud Drive for accessing files across multiple devices and a new Health app to house fitness data from several fitness apps; iOS 9 brought Apple's streaming music service and a slightly improved version of Siri. While helpful, these additions didn't alter the overall iPhone experience in a significant way.

If you've been following the news recently, you've probably heard a few of the breaking stories about robots beating humans in fairly complex tasks. It started with game show contestants, evolved into outperforming human instinct, and now computers are even outperforming fighter pilots in tactical simulations. What does this all mean for you? Although Hollywood loves to depict artificial intelligence as robots out to destroy humans, that's far from the case in the real world. Chances are you've been using artificial intelligence for awhile and haven't even noticed.

"Conversation is the new interface." The tech community's use of this expression does not mean that we are going to start talking to each other more on a human-to-human, face-to-face level. It means rather that we will be talking more to robots, specifically those artificial intelligence programs that pop up on the likes of Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Slack and so on, to help you with tasks from scheduling to shopping. Rather than going to a website to find information or downloading yet another app, we will summon these artificial intelligence assistants to do our bidding. Bark "find me a flight to Chicago on Saturday" into your phone and a "bot", which understands your location and the fact that you mean this Saturday, will return with some choices.