Companies have been trying to drum up enthusiasm for them for years, with little success. Pepper, a humanoid machine carrying the hopes of SoftBank Group Corp.'s billionaire founder Masayoshi Son, was supposed to change that. Promoted as the first robot to be endowed with emotions, the company marketed Pepper aggressively after it was unveiled in 2014, promising the gadget was sophisticated enough for tasks usually handled by shop clerks, receptionists and translators. "It's not there to have a conversation," said Junichi Nishi, a municipal official in Fujieda, Shizuoka Prefecture, a city of about 140,000. "We use it primarily as a tablet," he said, referring to the touch screen attached to the robot's chest.

Stock market cheats, A.I. will soon be looking for you. The sheer volume of transactions conducted in financial markets renders market surveillance by regulatory groups difficult, but machine learning and artificial intelligence tools will soon be employed to ferret out cheaters, according to Reuters. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) is developing A.I. that it will start testing in 2017 along with its existing surveillance and detection mechanisms. NASDAQ and the London Stock Exchange Group intend to start using artificial intelligence to spot trade irregularities and violation patterns this year. Related: Future AI assistants like Siri could be trained by Joey from'Friends' Reuters reports that financial firms already use artificial intelligence for picking stocks and for monitoring their own firms' compliance.

Artificial intelligence is learning to take on an increasing number of sophisticated tasks. Google Deepmind's AI is now able to imitate human speech, and just this past August IBM's Watson successfully diagnosed a rare case of leukemia. Rather than viewing these advances as threats to job security, we can look at them as opportunities for AI to fill in critical gaps in existing service providers, such as mental healthcare professionals. In the US alone, nearly eight percent of the population suffers from depression (that's about one in every 13 American adults), and yet about 45 percent of this population does not seek professional care due to the costs. There are many barriers to getting quality mental healthcare, from searching for a provider who's within your insurance network to screening multiple potential therapists in order to find someone you feel comfortable speaking with.

Scientists have found why amputees feel the sensation of phantom limb pain. It is due to this reorganization pain occurs in the amputated limbs of a vast majority of amputees. The researchers also found a proposed way of treating the affliction through the use of artificial intelligence techniques. The researchers used a brain-machine interface to come up with this conclusion. They trained a group of ten amputees so they could control a robotic arm from their brain. The research team found learning to control the prosthetic through the amputated arm resulted in pain.

"The holy grail of a chatbot or virtual assistant is to help you adjust your behavior, telling you when to save more or spend in order to reach certain goals," said Lex Sokolin, global director of fintech research for Autonomous Research. Could UBS clients soon be serviced by voice-controlled AI? Maybe not yet, but a new pilot program between the bank and Amazon's Alexa service is testing the frontiers of both science fiction and wealth management. UBS' partnership with Amazon will enable clients and non-clients of the bank to get answers to financial and economic questions, ranging from what is inflation to how the U.S. economy is faring. It's the latest example of how wealth management firms are experimenting with new technologies such as data analytics and artificial intelligence to expand or reinvent the business.

With a human voice and mindful mannerisms, she's the first alarm clock you'll be happy to wake up to. A.I. algorithms ease your morning routine by learning about you & what you love. The Bonjour Smart Alarm Clock is like the personal assistant you never had. She's always there early to wake you up and make the most of your day. Bonjour can adjust your wake-up time if certain conditions are fulfilled.

Facebook recently announced a rather scenically named system, Big Sur, designed around Nvidia's Tesla compute cards aimed at helping their neural networks, and obviously machine learning, become faster and more versatile. They are, of course, not alone. IBM Watson has similar visions as does Microsoft. Big Data and analytics have long staked claim to the holiday shopping season, but I sense that this 2015 holiday shopping season the real big winner will be Machine Learning. The big gun in the Machine Learning camp is the aforementioned IBM Watson.

Almost a quarter century ago, a book was written about how organizations would focus on share of customer as opposed to share of market, building a personalized collaboration driven by big data. With advanced analytics, banking may finally getting close to realizing this vision. In 1993, a then revolutionary book, "The One to One Future: Building Relationships One Customer at a Time" was published, proposing the idea that as technology makes it affordable to track individual customers, marketing shifts from finding customers for products to finding products for customers. According to the authors, Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D., a company could use technology to gather information about, and to communicate directly with, individuals to form a commercial bond. The book became a bestseller, and was on every marketer's bookshelf … almost a quarter century ago.

They meet people, go to work, even fall in love, all without leaving the comfort of their own home. Now, for the first time, three people with severe spinal injuries have taken the first steps towards that vision by controlling a robot thousands of kilometres away, using thought alone. The idea is that people with spinal injuries will be able to use robot bodies to interact with the world. It is part of the European Union-backed VERE project, which aims to dissolve the boundary between the human body and a surrogate, giving people the illusion that their surrogate is in fact their own body. In 2012, an international team went some way to achieving this by taking fMRI scans of the brains of volunteers while they thought about moving their hands or legs. The scanner measured changes in blood flow to the brain area responsible for such thoughts.

However, Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX) earnings rocketed, sending the shares up a ballistic 15% in minutes. Are these numbers revealing a major new trend in our society? Are we soon to have our every need catered to without lifting a finger? After spending weeks preparing a major research piece for a private client on artificial intelligence, I would have to say that the answer is an overwhelming "Yes!" Artificial intelligence, or AI, is far more pervasive than you think. Half of all apps now rely on some form of AI, and within five years, all of them will.