Humans are letting down the super smart Google Assistant. SEE ALSO: Google's Pixel smartphones are going on pre-order in India The company is launching its Pixel smartphones in the country today. On the occasion, Google ran a two-page ad on Times of India newspaper, showcasing the power of one of Pixel's most interesting features, Google Assistant. Its only sin: the almighty artificial intelligence bot has got the facts wrong. In the ad, Google Assistant is shown responding to a user's query who wants to know about their flight to London.

Voice assistance on your phone is nothing new. Be it Alice, Cortana or Siri, they have all been assisting us with minor chores through our otherwise busy life. You don't really need to look carefully to figure the monotony in the speech and hence one never banks fully on the assistant. Psychologically, a person has never found a'spark' of sorts with their assistant. Since most systems today need to be trained or taught by humans, it is almost impossible for us to pre-program an assistant who adapts to every consumer.

At Dreamforce this week, Salesforce finally provided details about Einstein, its artificial intelligence technology that it touts as "AI for everyone." For the last couple of weeks, Mark Benioff has been teasing us about Einstein, and yesterday we saw the fruits of that labor. A series of speakers extolled the benefits of Einstein – from being able to predict the sports gear that a consumer might like, to medical uses such as being able quickly diagnose bleeding in the brain. The real impact of Einstein, however, is that it validates the larger trend of Artificial Intelligence or "AI" being applied across a wide variety of both enterprise and consumer tasks. One of my favorite comments from the keynote was that AI is like electricity, and that when it was first incorporated into appliances they were referred to by names such as "the electric toaster."

From chatbots to smart apps, developments in artificial intelligence are changing the way that banks interact with their customers. Like many people who were young in 1997, I had a Tamagotchi and it meant the world to me. Whenever it was hungry, I hurried to feed my digital pet. If it beeped about being lonely, I'd go give it attention. My parents thought it was a little silly to be that devoted to a toy, but in this day and age it's almost impossible to imagine life without interaction between man and machine.

After recently purchasing the artificial intelligence start-up Viv, it looks like Viv's AI could replace Samsung's S Voice in the alleged Galaxy S8, according to the latest leak. The California based Viv was co-founded by Dag Kittlaus, who helped create Apple's Siri. Viv's mission is to create an even better AI assistant than Siri, and its recent purchase by Samsung helped give this goal momentum. Many tech companies are putting effort into stepping up their AI game, as was seen in Google's October press event. It makes sense for a hardware company like Samsung to invest in AI, and this most recent rumor gives us an idea of how Samsung intends to use its new resource.

Recently, Microsoft took the unusual step of placing its Cortana and Bing product teams inside the same organization as Microsoft Research. The new Microsoft AI and Research Group will be led by computer vision pioneer and executive vice president Harry Shum, whose 20-year Microsoft career involves leading Bing's search efforts from 2007 through 2013 and helping launch Microsoft Research China. We asked Shum how this new organization will benefit Microsoft's digital assistant in the following interview, which has been edited for length and clarity. The language of the blog post announcing the formation of Microsoft's new AI division, together with how Satya Nadella has characterized it, suggests that Microsoft thinks it's in a space race of sorts when it comes to artificial intelligence. I just feel that the timing's right to go big on AI.

If you're like many people, you have thousands of photos on your phone, long forgotten after you've posted a few on Instagram or Facebook. They don't have to stay forgotten. Apple and Google are both applying a form of artificial intelligence called "machine learning" to organize your pictures and video -- and along the way, help you rediscover last year's vacation, dinner with close friends and a casual summer outing to the park. Apple's tools are part of last month's iOS 10 system update for iPhones and iPads. The Google Photos app for Apple and Android devices has a digital assistant to automatically organize these memories -- and Google signaled last week that it will only get smarter.

Google scientists have created a computer program that uses basic reasoning to learn to navigate the London Underground system by itself. The same Artificial Intelligence (AI) agent could also answer questions about the content of snippets of stories and work out family relationships by looking at a family tree. Scientists predict that in future a similar approach could pave the way for virtual assistants that would be able to instantaneously scour the internet to answer questions and carry out instructions with precision. Herbert Jaegar, a computer scientist at the University of Bremen, said: "I think this can be described as rational reasoning. They [the tasks] involve planning and structuring information into chunks and re-combining them."

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Amazon is taking on Apple and Spotify in the streaming music market - and hopes undercutting them will give it the edge. Amazon Music Unlimited will cost 8 per month, or 80 a year, for members of Amazon's 99-a-year Prime loyalty program. Non-Prime members will pay 10 a month, the same monthly fee charged by Spotify and Apple Music, while owners of Amazon's Echo smart speaker will be able to get the unlimited music service on one device for 4 per month. This image provided by Amazon Music shows a display of Amazon Music Unlimited, a paid streaming music service Amazon is launching. The music service is being positioned to compete against existing services such as Spotify and Apple Music.