Q: I'm a 68-year old divorced woman with above-average looks. I'm finally going to post my dating profile online. Last week, you gave wardrobe advice to men around my age who are looking to date--so please furnish some ideas for me? I know men are highly visual and they will pick me based on my pictures, more than anything I write about myself. My pictures need to stand out to make the best first impression.

Millions of people in the last year or so have bought microphones so that Amazon.com AMZN 1.63 % 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?

Mark Zuckerberg's 2016 personal goal is to build an Iron Man-style AI. Eric Schmidt has been musing about a future with "Eric" and "Not-Eric," in which Eric is himself and Not-Eric is "this digital thing that helps me." Phil Libin has been calling AI bots the most important tech trend of the year. I'm pretty excited about AI too. But it's hard to square this enthusiasm with the present-day performance of machine intelligence.

While most of us are aware of Microsoft's digital assistant Cortana, her more unknown little sister Xiaoice, is taking China's social network by storm. Xiaoice, a chatbot, exists on WeChat and Weibo in the form of a chatty teenager. Capable of recognizing emotional the states of the user during the conversation, it is able to offer encouragement and listen well to your troubles. More interestingly, like any other 17-year-old teenager, it can be smart-alecky at times. It's this latter attribute of Xiaoice that allows it to simulate for more natural conversations and to pass off as being human-like.

The French-, German-, Italian- and Spanish-speaking versions of Microsoft's voice assistant Cortana are now much better travel companions. Just like their English- and Chinese-speaking counterparts, these versions can now instantly translate words and phrases into other languages, so long as you're running Windows 10. For instance, you can ask it for help by saying "Hey Cortana, translate where is the toilet in Japanese" in any of the four languages above, and it will quickly respond with the result.

You don't have to be a Go champion to have artificial intelligence change your game. You get in your car, and your Apple iPhone tells you what traffic looks like where you're going--before you ask. We're all on the road with Tesla's self-driving cars, which are redefining what driving means. The artificial intelligence calendar assistant Amy emails three of your friends to figure out a meeting time that works for everyone--and nails it. Thankfully, chatting with Amazon's Alexa is a lot more entertaining than, say, would be Hal, the fictional artificial intelligence from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

If 2015 was the'year of data science' then 2016 is when it's going to take over completely. In the past year, we saw many applications of data science in our everyday lives- from Uber, to Amazon, to Siri, to image recognition, to generally smarter marketing campaigns… data science made its presence felt. But to say that data science is now completely'mainstream' would still not be quite accurate. In 2016, data science plans to become more exciting and impactful. While the finance industry has been one of the earliest adopters of data science, this adoption has not been uniform across all the banking services verticals.

Social-emotional intelligence is an essential part of being a competent human and is thus required for human-level AI. When considering alternatives to the Turing Test it is therefore a capacity that is important to test. We characterize this capacity as affective theory of mind and describe some unique challenges associated with its interpretive or generative nature. Mindful of these challenges we describe a five-step method along with preliminary investigations into its application. We also describe certain characteristics of the approach such as its incremental nature, and countermeasures that make it difficult to game or cheat.

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.

Bots will evolve into a mechanism to help consumers get stuff done both on their mobile phones and with virtual agents (e.g., Amazon's Echo). They will be a tool or an enabler rather than "the next big thing." Forrester recently published a report detailing the future of mobile experiences. In it, we see mobile moving from a collection of apps and web experiences, to the next stage driven by platform experiences. Cortana, Google Now, and Siri have a leg up in the mobile platform wars, but chat platforms will play a critical role in this second stage.