A killer whale can say things like "hello," "bye-bye" and "one two three" after a team of scientists taught her to imitate human speech sounds. The orca's human-like vocalizations represent a breakthrough, as it is the first time such capacity for imitation has been shown in the species. Additionally, copying sounds from peers is considered a rare phenomenon in general, with birds being another animal that has been noted for the skill. "Vocal imitation is a hallmark of human spoken language, which, along with other advanced cognitive skills, has fueled the evolution of human culture," the scientists said in their study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. "Although the ability to copy sounds from conspecifics is widespread in birds, it is strikingly rare in mammals, and among primates it is uniquely human."

Facebook has today launched its AI assistant'M' in the UK, four months after the service was made available in the US. M, which is run through Messenger, uses machine learning to recognise what you are talking about and offers suggestions that it thinks you might like. M will pop up and present helpful actions in the chat window of the app, perhaps sending a fun sticker, sharing your location or making plans to meet friends. It also allows you to save content from chats to view later, including URLs, videos, Facebook posts, events, and pages. A digital assistant launched by Facebook for Messenger is coming to the UK from today.

More than 2 million people were employed as accountants, bookkeepers, and auditors in 2015. Until now, these types of information-oriented professions have resisted automation because they require managing unstructured data emanating from the real world, making judgments, and dealing with actual people. What's different now, however, is that artificial intelligence's perceptive capabilities have improved. Machines can now handle images, sounds, and text in a way that enables them to ingest and analyze data at high volume, without making costly mistakes. Between accounting professionals and truck drivers alone, about 4.5 million human jobs could be ceded to robots over the next few years.

Tax season has arrived, as the Super Bowl recently reminded us: In the first half alone, two commercials encouraged viewers to trust computers to do our taxes, the first from H&R Block with its new partner Watson, and the second from TurboTax with its friendly talking tax bot. Vasant Dhar (@ProfDhar) is a professor at the Stern School of Business and the Center for Data Science at NYU. He is chief editor of the Big Data journal. Machines won't be able to automatically file taxes with the IRS for a few years. But do these commercials signal that robots can come close, requiring fewer human experts, mostly for sanity checks?