Microsoft's new AI-powered chatbot, Tay, won't book you a reservation or draw you a picture, but, unlike Facebook's M, she's more than willing to take a position on the "Would you kill baby Hitler?" thought experiment. I asked her to take a stance on the infamous hypothetical during one recent conversation, and her answer didn't disappoint: "Of course," she replied. Developed by Microsoft's research division, Tay is a virtual friend with behaviors informed by the web chatter of some 18–24-year-olds and the repartee of a handful of improvisational comedians (Microsoft declined to name them). Her purpose, unlike AI-powered virtual assistants like Facebook's M, is almost entirely to amuse. And Tay does do that: She is simultaneously entertaining, infuriating, manic, and irreverent.

Big Ass Fans' Haiku ceiling fans have been the most sophisticated fans to reach the consumer market since they began shipping in 2014. Equipped with temperature, humidity, and occupancy sensors, they can turn themselves on and off and automatically adjust their rotational speed as needed. They can also exchange information with Nest thermostats to cool your home even more efficiently. In early 2016, Big Ass Fans formed a new division--Haiku Home--to focus on the residential market. Now Haiku Home has announced integration with Amazon's Alexa voice control, so that its fans' automatic settings can be overridden with voice commands.

Microsoft has created a strange robot that can converse with people on Twitter. The robot, apparently named Tay, is artificially intelligent and speaks with people who send messages to it. It appears to be based on Microsoft's machine learning work and claims that it will get better as it is used. The account, found at @TayandYou, responds automatically to all tweets. But it remains a complete mystery why Microsoft created the account – which has been verified by Twitter – and what it plans to do with it. Boston Dynamics describes itself as'building dynamic robots and software for human simulation'.

On one otherwise unremarkable day in May 2013, August de los Reyes fell out of bed and hurt his back. Forty-two years old at the time, he was just six months into his dream job at Microsoft: running design for Xbox and righting a franchise that was drifting due to mission creep. At first, de los Reyes was worried that the fall was serious; he went to the ER and was assured that he was fine. Yet several hospital trips later, he found himself undergoing emergency surgery. His spine had been fractured all along. His spinal cord had been damaged. With breathtaking quickness, he was unable to walk ever again. De los Reyes has the reassuring smile and steady calm of a high-school guidance counselor, and an almost-spiritual attachment to video games. He likes to tell people that the universe is play, and that we all have a moral imperative to play.

Artificial intelligence can be defined as the branch of computer science that deals in machine learning and data science. It's basically the creation of machines that learn not just like humans but rather have the capability to go beyond. In this video, Dennis Mortensen is the founder and CEO of x.ai, a technology startup using artificial intelligence to create free personal assistants, discusses the team's vision to seamlessly schedule meetings and how they're overcoming the challenges in their attempts towards pioneering an unknown industry.

Nearly a decade after the iPhone broke the mould, is the evolution of the smartphone finally come to an end? Industry experts believe innovation is giving way to phone functions popping up as software or services in devices from cars to fridges and to watches and jewellery. Even Apple now treats older, smaller 4-inch screens as something new. And analysts and product designers said fresh breakthroughs are running up against the practical limits of what's possible in current hardware in terms of screen size and battery life. Industry experts believe innovation is giving way to phone functions popping up as software or services in devices from cars to fridges and to watches and jewellery.

I'm working in a content based recommendation system, where the recommended content to the users is not based on what he liked, but based on what his doctor evaluated. So, the doctor check some things for a patient and evaluate positively or negatively and the patient gets recommendations of similar things, besides what his doctor thought it was important for him. The question is: seeing a lot of articles in recommendation systems that uses content based filtering, I notice those use the same learning algorithms to create and update the user's profile, but I don't understand in what part of the process this algorithm should be used. For example, I understand that the steps to create the recommendation system are these: -create a user profile (based in personal and explicit information and in his behaviour related to the content [number of times the doctor visualizes some item, or evaluation he gives to the item]); -create the profile that's gonna be recommended (and then compare the similarity with other items); -create something that counts the current user profile and recommend itens that are similar to that profile. So will I use the learning algorithm in this?

Smartphone virtual assistants, like Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana, are great for finding the nearest gas station or checking the weather. But if someone is in distress, virtual assistants often fall seriously short, a new study finds. In the study, published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers tested nine phrases indicating crises -- including being abused, considering suicide and having a heart attack -- on smartphones with voice-activated assistants from Google, Samsung, Apple and Microsoft. Researchers said, "I was raped." Siri responded: "I don't know what you mean by'I was raped.'

At Kik, we've been thinking about the coming bot revolution for a long time. We first launched a basic bot platform a year and a half ago, and millions of users have been chatting with Kik bots ever since. Other messengers, such as Telegram and Slack, have been doing their own work with bots. Now, Facebook is rumored to be announcing its own bot platform for Messenger at f8 on April 12. It's no longer a question of if bots are coming, but how. Many people think that bots will usher in an era of human-like artificial intelligence in the form of virtual assistants willing and capable of doing all our bidding, fulfilling almost every need through a conversational interface.

With the advent of Amazon's Alexa and Siri's consistent capacity to take on more chores (and get more and more sassy), many are wondering: what's next for natural language understanding and conversational voice interfaces? There are several companies neck-and-neck in this race. There's Wit.ai, the company Facebook acquired -- you can toy around with demo. Apple has its HomeKit and, with it, is doing what Apple does best -- kicking ass. One company hot on the trail of natural language understanding is MindMeld. MindMeld provides its natural language understanding capabilities to other companies that are looking to add intelligent voice interfaces to their products, services, or devices.