We're all familiar with the Tinder-style selection for potential mates, but that's also led to dating apps gaining a bit of a reputation for hook-ups, rather than providing a chance at a long-term relationship. But don't write online dating off just yet. If dipping a toe in the huge pool of lonely hearts out there sounds intimidating, there are a crop of apps offering to do the tough curation for you. Here are two apps that are geared toward straight people. Coffee Meets Bagel, from Korean-American sisters Dawoon, Arum and Soo Kang, used to only send a match a day, based on the concept of just skimming the best from the top.

This approach tends to teach to machines what humans like to listen to, without understanding what is recommended. It is a deaf approach that's trying to mimic the record dealer's behavior. It's not a DJ that builds a listening experience. It doesn't capture what the soundtrack of your life is. Collaborative filtering also tends to make predictable and familiar recommendations. This favors the rise of a popular artist dictatorship, harmful for the beautiful versatility of music.

For decades, futurists and science fiction writers predicted that smart machines would someday rival the intelligence of humans. Now, their forecasts seem to be coming true. Artificial intelligence, or AI, already exceeds human capability in certain fields. Machines can send and receive signals and analyze vast quantities of data faster than humans. They have learned to drive cars, manage stock portfolios and, through personal assistants such as Siri and Alexa, talk to us.

What's all the fuss about the voice-activated home speaker that Amazon is due to release in the UK and Germany in late September? This gadget has been available in the US for over a year and has proven a minor hit, with sales estimates between 1.6m and 3m. But these figures belie the potential impact this kind of artificial intelligence device could have on our lives in the near future. Echo doesn't just let you switch on your music by voice command. It's the first of what will be several types of smart home appliances that work beyond simple tasks like playing music or turning on a light. It uses an artificial intelligence assistant app called Alexa to allow users to access the information and services of the internet and control personal organisation tools.

Salesforce.com Inc. CRM -0.95 % said it would embed artificial intelligence technology into its software for salespeople, making it the latest in a gaggle of companies racing to enhance workplace tools with human-like abilities. The company will demonstrate the new software at its annual user conference next month in San Francisco. Called Einstein, the new offering is a set of online AI services designed to automate tasks, predict behavior and spotlight relevant information. Einstein is the latest in a long line of AI products branded with human-sounding names including Alexa from Amazon.com Inc., Cortana from Microsoft Corp. MSFT 0.10 % Siri from Apple Inc., and Watson from International Business Machines Corp. IBM -1.17 % IBM and Microsoft, in particular, have spearheaded a push to offer AI services aimed at corporate users.

SAN FRANCISCO - In the consumer universe, artificial intelligence is best known as a nice-to-have if stealthy feature that can suggest movies or book rides. But AI's greater worth could well be in the money-making enterprise arena, where sales, service and marketing initiatives stand to be streamlined by the data-crunching deductive power of machine learning. That's certainly the bet customer relationship management giant Salesforce is making by unveiling Einstein, the no-brainer name given to a suite of advanced AI capabilities. With Einstein, salespeople can focus on leads that statistically show the most promise of becoming clients, and customer service reps may be better prepared to answer a rainbow of consumer queries. "The strongest aspect of Einstein is that it is deeply embedded in the platform, it's just working automatically," says Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, whose company officially rolled out the base product Sunday.

Virtual reality may be generating most of the buzz today, but another major tech shift looms much closer on the horizon: machine learning. The technology has already made inroads with the public through platforms such as Amazon's Echo and Google's Deep Dream Generator. But its influence will extend beyond voice-controlled speakers and AI-enhanced art, effecting a sea of change for businesses of all sizes. It will be a few years before we witness machine learning's breakthrough moment, but it's coming -- and it will change everything. Humans could be incredibly effective given endless timelines, budget, and energy.

When it was first announced to a sceptical tech press months after a flop phone, the Echo was dismissed separately as a joke and a privacy nightmare. Now the latter may still prove to be the case (the Echo is always listening, and logs every sentence spoken to it), but a joke it is clearly not. In fact many analysts now believe that Amazon has one hand on the future that comes after the smartphone. Alexa is not the only, or even the first, voice-activated virtual assistant – Apple, Google and Microsoft have had their own for years – but it is the first that consumers have truly embraced. While taking out a smartphone in public and speaking to it – as one must with Apple's Siri or Google's Assistant – is awkward, and often slower than simply using a touchscreen, talking to a device in the comfort of one's own home is decidedly less uncomfortable.

This technology will affect the quality, pace and structure of daily living for everyone. Believe it or not, robotic personal assistants at home -- particularly for older people -- will be common by 2025. With startling effect, machines increasingly will do the thinking for us. Big data, a computer's ability to gather vast amounts of information in complex databases, will be stored in the limitless spheres of Cloud technology. And the deep learning capability of artificial intelligence software, able to learn from its own mistakes and experiences to improve functionality, will progressively eliminate the need for thousands of tasks now performed by humans.

Earlier this week, Amazon unveiled its 50 internet-connected personal assistant "so you can add Alexa to any room in your home." Alexa is the online giant's artificial-intelligence powered bot that listens to what you say and answers your commands and questions: What's the weather? Can you order me a large pepperoni pizza? And the low priced Echo Dot, about the size of a hockey puck, means many more homes will soon have on-command digital listening devices that eavesdrop on – and store – family conversations, holiday celebrations, and even off-color comments (and also bickering siblings or quarreling spouses). Sure, it has its conveniences and Star Trek-like appeal and maybe you're OK with potential privacy implications.