Dennis Mortensen, CEO and founder of x.ai, is on the cusp of revolutionising the way we arrange meetings with his AI Personal Assistant, Amy. Chris Sykes, CEO and founder of Volume Global, is working on Theodore, the IBM Watson-driven Virtual Consultant that could transform our experience of customer service. AIBusiness.org met up with Dennis and Chris to find out more about these exciting projects. In 2013, Dennis and his team at x.ai in New York decided it was time to cut out the'email ping pong' involved in setting up a meeting. Many have tried and failed to ultimately solve the problem, through extensions, plug-ins and various apps.

Business agility is becoming a strategic necessity. Companies cannot be competitive if they're not staying ahead of their customers' expectations. You can see the effect of this when Apple introduced Siri in 2011 with the release of iPhone 4S, changing the customer experience. Since then, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have all come up with their own A.I. concierge services to assure that they are meeting the customer expectations. Look at the current robotic interactive voice response (IVR) systems that require you to navigate through layers of menus to retrieve a simply answer: "Has my claim been paid?"

PROVO, Utah – Madeline MacDonald says she was an 18-year-old freshman at Brigham Young University when she was sexually assaulted by a man she met on an online dating site. She reported the crime to the school's Title IX office. That same day, she says, BYU's honor code office received a copy of the report, triggering an investigation into whether MacDonald had violated the Mormon school's strict code of behavior, which bans premarital sex and drinking, among other things. Now MacDonald is among many students and others, including a Utah prosecutor, who are questioning BYU's practice of investigating accusers, saying it could discourage women from reporting sexual violence and hinder criminal cases. Some have started an online petition drive calling on the university to give victims immunity from honor code violations committed in the lead-up to a sexual assault.

Deep partnerships between humans and technology mean that machines are informing decisions we make in our daily lives already. From personalised advertising programmatically served based on the accrued understanding of what you like, to the localisation of search results, intelligent data analysis is core to our online experience today. Predictive models learn from how people interact with technology in order to suggest what action we should take next - whether it's informing stock levels, distribution plans, future product lines or multi-channel marketing strategies. And of course, there are communications services like virtual personal assistants – true evidence of humans and machines working in concert. This is the realm that is leading synergy between humans and machines creating, conversation as the new'user interface' for creating more personal computing - informing the creation of new digital experiences that interact more naturally through bots, text, voice and video.

When I reviewed the Amazon Echo last July, I said I believed we were all going to have something like this in our homes in the future. After a few months of owning my own Echo, I'm convinced I'm right. The 180 Echo is a wireless speaker combined with a virtual assistant called Alexa. The Echo is finally getting everyday use in our house, but I found we don't really need all the Echo's functionality. One of the Echo's main features is as a wireless music player, but in our house, a Sonos wireless speaker system pipes music to several rooms.

It was a weeknight, after dinner, and the baby was in bed. My wife and I were alone--we thought--discussing the sorts of things you might discuss with your spouse and no one else. I was midsentence when, without warning, another woman's voice piped in from the next room. "I HELD THE DOOR OPEN FOR A CLOWN THE OTHER DAY," the woman said in a loud, slow monotone. It took us a moment to realize that her voice was emanating from the black speaker on the kitchen table. We stared slack-jawed as she--it--continued: "I THOUGHT IT WAS A NICE JESTER." Was that," I said after a moment of stunned silence. Alexa, the voice assistant whose digital spirit animates the Amazon Echo, did not reply. She--it--responds only when called by name. Or so we had believed. We pieced together what must have transpired. Somehow, Alexa's speech recognition software had mistakenly picked the word Alexa out of something we said, then chosen a phrase like "tell me a joke" as its best approximation of whatever words ...

The terminators from Skynet, the agents of the Matrix, the Decepticons…Hollywood has done a good job portraying artificial intelligence (AI) as an existential threat to the human race. The scary thing is that this idea may not be purely science fiction. In fact, many leading technologists today seem to share the concern that at some point in the not-too-distant future, human kind could be beholden to super-intelligent computer overlords. That is a scary thing to think about, and even if the worse does not come to pass, AI will certainly impact everyone's life in some form or another. So let's look at some history of AI, its current state, and potential risks and possible outcomes.

Matrix factorization is a key component of collaborative filtering-based recommendation systems because it allows us to complete sparse user-by-item ratings matrices under a low-rank assumption that encodes the belief that similar users give similar ratings and that similar items garner similar ratings. This paradigm has had immeasurable practical success, but it is not the complete story for understanding and inferring the preferences of people. First, peoples' preferences and their observable manifestations as ratings evolve over time along general patterns of trajectories. Second, an individual person's preferences evolve over time through influence of their social connections. In this paper, we develop a unified process model for both types of dynamics within a state space approach, together with an efficient optimization scheme for estimation within that model. The model combines elements from recent developments in dynamic matrix factorization, opinion dynamics and social learning, and trust-based recommendation. The estimation builds upon recent advances in numerical nonlinear optimization. Empirical results on a large-scale data set from the Epinions website demonstrate consistent reduction in root mean squared error by consideration of the two types of dynamics.

Go ahead and ask Siri, "When is WWDC?" The AI will happily tell you the event "will be held June 13 through June 17 in San Francisco. The keynote will be held the first day of the event, and that's when we expect to hear about new Macbooks and operating systems. It's expected the beta version of iOS 10 will be released around the time of the event with the official launch of iOS 10 in the Fall. Expectations for the latest iOS are definitely high; here's the ten features we want to see in iOS 10.

Apple has just agreed to settle a long-running patent lawsuit for almost 25 million. The lawsuit, filed by a company called Dynamic Advances, claimed that Apple had infringed on a patent involving "user interfaces that recognize natural language." The patent describes a method for "providing, through a user interface, a result of [a] search" using natural language queries of a number of connected databases. The patent had been originally granted as far back as 2007 to the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York. Rensselaer, an engineering-focused university, then licensed the patent to Dynamic Advances. When Apple came out with Siri in 2011, Dynamic Advances sued the tech giant the following year, saying it had infringed on the patent.