And now, the technology is being harnessed to streamline the United States Air Force acquisitions process -- an effort that will be undertaken by a small Lawrence business. Lawrence-based KalScott Engineering Inc. announced Wednesday it was selected to finish building artificial intelligence, called SOPHIA, for the Air Force. KalScott, owned by two Kansas University graduates, was chosen last summer to do some preliminary work training a supercomputer -- or "cognitive thinking machine" -- that could understand Defense Department contracting rules and answer questions about them audibly. Suman Saripalli, a co-owner of KalScott, said Wednesday the firm received the final go-ahead to complete the work. The announcement came with 750,000 more in funding. The finished product -- which will act as a "very intelligent assistant," Saripalli said -- is intended to help businesses and government employees navigate the Air Force's complex procurement process, which has been found to discourage small and innovative businesses from partnering with the federal government.

Millions of people in the last year or so have bought microphones so that Amazon.com AMZN 1.42 % could listen in on them at home. And I just got more, built into new speakers called the Tap and the Echo Dot. Some day, Amazon could be embedded in appliances, listening all over your house. Why would you want that?

Here's how you can view and access the history of identified songs via Siri on iPhone, iPad, iPod touch. Imagine yourself in a situation where you're at a restaurant (or club), listening to an extremely fire track, and someone asks you to Shazam it, because that's what regular people do. Just like any other sane person owning an iPhone, you whip our your smartphone, bring Siri to life and utter the magical words'What song is that?' Surely, in a few seconds, Siri identifies the song and throws the result back at you using the power of Shazam in the backend. This process goes on and on till the point you think to yourself – what was that song I identified a few days back using Siri? Now you believe that the ID'd song is completely lost. That's absolutely not the case, and iOS maintains an entire history of it, except that it's not easily accessible for no obvious reason.

Salesforce's recent acquisitions of AI startups including MetaMind will enable it to keep pace with the functions that consumer-focused companies … From Dick Tracy's watch to Wonder Woman's Bracelets to Bat Girls total recall and technopathy, fiction has a intriguing dialog with invention. Enable natural interaction with your app using a conversational interface powered by the Watson Developer Cloud APIs. KPMG LLP and IBM today announced plans to apply IBM's Watson cognitive computing technology to KPMG's professional services offerings. It can answer guests' questions about the hotel and tourist destinations. The hotel has recently welcomed a new concierge named "Connie," you see, and it's actually a Nao robot powered by IBM's AI.

A week later, she was accidentally activated during testing, and within minutes had succumbed to a "kush" induced freakout. Tay is now offline, and her account made private, much like any parent will do when their teenager gets into trouble on the internet. What went wrong with Tay? No one should find it surprising that releasing a machine learning chatbot on social media, in the guise of a teenage girl no less, would result in a wave of interactions designed to test the limits of the technology -- and anyone who has ever spoken to Siri, Cortana or any other virtual assistant knows that one of the first tests involves saying the most profane statements you can think of. Microsoft was certainly aware of this; their VA, Cortana, is often subject to sexual harassment, and so she has been designed to fight back.

First you could swipe until you found a romantic match and now you can swipe until you find the perfect film. MightyTV has launched a new app that gives users the ability to'swipe away the frustration of what to watch next'. Powered by machine learning and collaborative personalization mechanism, an AI matches users with movies and television shows based on their personal preferences, as well as their friends'. MightyTV has launched a new app that gives users the ability to'swipe away the frustration of what to watch next'. Powered by machine learning and collaborative personalization mechanism, the software matches users with new content based on their personal preferences, as well as their friends' Powered by machine learning and collaborative personalization mechanism, the software matches users with new content based on their personal preferences, as well as their friends'.

Facebook launched a concierge service called M through its Messenger app in 2015. M can purchase items, get gifts delivered, book restaurants, and make travel arrangements for the user. There is an element of the Mechanical Turk about it at the moment as it is powered by a combination of AI and real-life people. Siri has been around for a few years but has been upgraded in that time. It's now capable of showing the user specific photos he or she has taken, ordering things via ecommerce apps and giving directions.

Artificial intelligence (AI), one of 20 core technologies I identified back in 1983 as the drivers of exponential economic value creation, is rapidly working its way into our lives from Amazon's Alexa and Facebook's M, to Google's Now and Apple's Siri. An example of how far AI has come is the recent news that a Google supercomputer, using its advanced AI software, was able to win a stunning 3-0 victory in a man vs. machine face-off against Go grandmaster, one of the game's all-time champions. For those who are not familiar with Go, it is a 3,000-year-old game that is widely considered to be the most complex game ever invented because it is reported to have more possible board configurations than there are atoms in the universe. Until just a few months ago, it was thought that a computer could not defeat a human grandmaster for at least another decade due to the game's complexity. How did Google's AlphaGo program advance so much faster than many expected?

Millions of people in the last year or so have bought microphones so that Amazon.com AMZN 1.58 % could listen in on them at home. And I just got more, built into new speakers called the Tap and the Echo Dot. Some day, Amazon could be embedded in appliances, listening all over your house. Why would you want that?

While voice-recognition-powered virtual assistants like Siri, Cortana and Amazon's Echo continue to get more useful and reliable on the march to platform-dom, there is a parallel wave of development underway that has captured the public eye, where machine learning, artificial intelligence and natural language processing are getting corralled for more narrowly purposed means -- by… Read More