Imagine owning an Amazon Echo, only it was in robot form and could perform tasks like entertaining kids or keeping tabs on seniors. On Tuesday, tech company unveiled the Zenbo home robot, a 599 tech companion capable of roaming your home and assisting users with requests from sharing recipes by voice to controlling the lights or air conditioning. The Zenbo was revealed during the tech conference Computex in Taiwan. "Our ambition is to enable robotic computing for every household," said Asus Chairman Jonney Shih in a statement. The robot's face doubles as a touchscreen users can tap or swipe for a variety of tasks, but it can also respond to voice commands. It also plays music, respond to questions, take pictures or make video calls and even tell stories to kids.

You no longer have to buy'Alexa' Echo hardware to test out its software. Amazon's voice-powered personal assistant can now be accessed on a browser. The technology answers questions, read audio-books and even reports on weather in response to voice commands. You no longer have to buy'Alexa' Echo hardware to test out its software. Amazon's voice-powered personal assistant can now be accessed on a browser.

The Taiwanese electronics manufacture Asus has unveiled a home robot called Zenbo that can talk, control your home and provide assistance when needed – all for the cost of a top-end smartphone. It is capable of independent movement, can respond to voice commands and has both entertainment protocols for keeping kids amused and home care systems to help look after older people. Jonney Shih, the Asus chairman, said: "For decades, humans have dreamed of owning such a companion: one that is smart, dear to our hearts, and always at our disposal. Our ambition is to enable robotic computing for every household." Zenbo will remind older people of doctor's appointments or medication schedules, and will monitor the home for emergency situations such as falls.

IBM Watson burst onto the scene in 2011 as a Jeopardy-playing computer and quickly became synonymous with artificial intelligence. Since then, AI has become a lot more commonplace thanks to the rise of digital assistants like Siri, Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant, but Watson is still chugging away in more ways than you might think, powering everything from cancer treatment software to hotel concierge robots (pictured above). I had a chance to talk to Maya Weinstein, Senior Interaction Design and Creative Director at IBM Watson, about everything from the current crop of AI assistants to how the technology can help save lives. Check out the full interview (with some light edits for clarity) below. Jacob Kleinman: What do you think of the rise of consumer AI products like chatbots or Amazon Echo?

Apple, Amazon, and Google say their virtual helpers--Siri, Alexa, and the less snappily named Google Assistant--can make our lives easier by acting on our commands to book cabs, order pizza, or check the weather. But like all the other free-to-use goodies that tech giants offer up, these new personal assistants must also earn their keep. The companies aren't saying much about exactly how their automated personas can boost their bottom lines, but they have clear potential to open up new lines of revenue. Perhaps most importantly, they could significantly increase the data that companies have on our preferences and everyday lives. "A deeper profile of the customer is possible," says Sridhar Narayanan, an associate professor of marketing at Stanford.

In today's guest post, Alex Casalboni and Giacomo Marinangeli of Cloud Academy discuss the design and development of their new Inspire system. Our Challenge Mixing technology and content has been our mission at Cloud Academy since the very early days. We are builders and we love technology, but we also know content is king. Serving our members with the best content and creating smart technology to automate it is what kept us up at night for a long time. Companies are always fighting for people's time and attention and at Cloud Academy, we face those same challenges as well.

At Computex today, Asus revealed the Zenbo home robot. Kind of like Echo meets Keecker with a bit of Pepper sprinkled in the mix, it's been created to offer busy modern family members a helping hand with everyday tasks like keeping the kids entertained, controlling connected smart devices and providing recipe inspiration for mealtimes. The company also sees it acting as a remote guardian for the elderly. The Zenbo is being pitched as an entertainment center, personal assistant and home automation controller. It's able to move around the home on its own thanks to large wheels on its sides powered by electric drive, or listen out for voice commands from its owner.

Classical collaborative filtering, and content-based filtering methods try to learn a static recommendation model given training data. These approaches are far from ideal in highly dynamic recommendation domains such as news recommendation and computational advertisement, where the set of items and users is very fluid. In this work, we investigate an adaptive clustering technique for content recommendation based on exploration-exploitation strategies in contextual multi-armed bandit settings. Our algorithm takes into account the collaborative effects that arise due to the interaction of the users with the items, by dynamically grouping users based on the items under consideration and, at the same time, grouping items based on the similarity of the clusterings induced over the users. The resulting algorithm thus takes advantage of preference patterns in the data in a way akin to collaborative filtering methods. We provide an empirical analysis on medium-size real-world datasets, showing scalability and increased prediction performance (as measured by click-through rate) over state-of-the-art methods for clustering bandits. We also provide a regret analysis within a standard linear stochastic noise setting.

I have spent time lately exploring Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Assistants (VA) & Chatbots and how these can be used within a bank – after all I invest in fintech so this revelation should not shock anyone. The purpose of this post is not share my findings on these discoveries, what works, what does not, what a bank should do, what hot trends I believe in and which startups I am interested in backing. Rather, my purpose is to share my personal views on how I would like "technology" to augment me. Note that I refrain from writing "how I would like AI to augment me" as I am unsure if AI is the right term for what I am seeking. I do not differ from the majority of my fellow human beings in as much as I want to be better.

With the Hollywood blockbuster Transcendence playing in cinemas, with Johnny Depp and Morgan Freeman showcasing clashing visions for the future of humanity, it's tempting to dismiss the notion of highly intelligent machines as mere science fiction. But this would be a mistake, and potentially our worst mistake in history. Artificial-intelligence (AI) research is now progressing rapidly. Recent landmarks such as self-driving cars, a computer winning at Jeopardy! and the digital personal assistants Siri, Google Now and Cortana are merely symptoms of an IT arms race fuelled by unprecedented investments and building on an increasingly mature theoretical foundation. Such achievements will probably pale against what the coming decades will bring.