I'll be the first to admit that the outlook was a little bleak. When you consider the fact that these machines may be allowed to make decisions that affect mankind, without having or after evolving past the innate ethics that (most) people operate by, the future can look scary. It's time to scope out the positives now, because when it comes to AI in the workplace, there are HUGE benefits in store. Tech giants are racing to get their slice of the AI pie, and are adding more fuel to the fire - Google bought DeepMind in 2014. Facebook's planning to use neural networks to'narrate' photos to blind users, and using deep learning to find out what their users actually want.

Amazon Echo, Google Home, Siri and the myriad of other "assistants" that are out there are slowly but surely getting smarter and could, one day, be your doctor if researchers from New York University's Langone Medical Center have their way. According to new research, short voice clips can be used to diagnose a variety of diseases and conditions which means we just might be saving lives and catching diseases way sooner than we are currently. Prevention usually means big money saved and that interests a lot of different parties from billion dollar industries like pharma, fitness, government services and NGOs. Using complex algorithms and machine learning the researchers hope to find vocal patterns that might signal illness and more complex disorders via a five-year study. Researchers at New York University's Langone Medical Center believe post-traumatic stress disorder and even heart disease could be detected in a few years rather than decades.

Tucked within Google's unremarkable Allo messaging app is a real treasure: Google Assistant, which injects Google Now with an eager-to-please personality that finally provides the give-and-take other digital assistants lack. We've always talked about Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, and Google Now as the three digital assistants from the top smartphone platforms. But the truth is that Google Now was little more than a series of informative cards, while Siri and Cortana preferred a text-based approach with a bit of sass. Google Assistant retains its visual approach, but within a messaging context that really nails it in how you interact with the app itself. Google announced Google Assistant this past May, and the preview version of it is live in Allo, which itself can be used on Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) on up.