Fifteen minutes after "hanging up" with Sesame's new "lifelike" AI, and I'm still freaked out. So-called "conversations" with AI don't do a lot for me, especially where text is concerned. With voice chats, such as the new options for Google Gemini and Microsoft's Copilot, all voice does is save some typing. While Google and Microsoft designed its assistants to be helpful, they're not especially personable -- or sometimes, they're just artificially cheery. Sesame's model, however, is a simple one: "We believe in a future where computers are lifelike," according to the company's mission statement.

You could be looking at the ultra-realistic and creepy future of sex dolls. A new'companion robot' made its debut at a major tech event in Vegas this week, sporting perfectly shaped breasts, a pert buttocks, thick lips and features of a youthful 20-something. Its creators, Realbotix, claim the 175,000 bot is to keep elderly gentlemen from being lonely. Asked why it had been shaped in an appealing way, the creators said it was because men wanted something nice to look at. Dressed in a black tracksuit, when asking the robot questions it gives long responses while having slightly jerky hand and body movements.

A collateral beneficiary of the feverish pace of generative artificial intelligence development appears to be the humanoid robot. A Norwegian company called 1X Technologies, formerly Halodi Robotics, which describes itself as a manufacturer and inventor of androids, recently attracted $23.5 million in a round of funding led by the OpenAI Startup Fund -- the same OpenAI that got the AI snowball rolling with its ChatGPT generative AI bot. "1X is at the forefront of augmenting labor through the use of safe, advanced technologies in robotics," Brad Lightcap, OpenAI's COO and manager of the OpenAI Startup Fund, said in a statement. "The OpenAI Startup Fund believes in the approach and impact that 1X can have on the future of work." With the funds, 1X said it intends to accelerate the development of its bipedal android model NEO and expand manufacturing of its first commercially available wheel-based android, EVE, in Norway and North America.

An object found on the surface of the moon that was dubbed a'mystery hut' is actually a rabbit-shaped rock, scientists have revealed. China's Yutu 2 rover spotted the object on the far side of the moon in December, thanks to its panoramic and infrared on-board cameras, and approached it for closer inspection. Now, the Yutu 2 team have confirmed that it is an oddly-shaped rock that they claim looks like a small but'lifelike' crouching bunny like a statue set in stone, surrounded by its own rocky'droppings' and morsels of food. The finding is a coincidence as the name of the rover, Yutu, happens to be Chinese for'Jade Rabbit'. China's Yutu 2 team say the an oddly-shaped rock looks like a small but'lifelike' crouching bunny like a statue set in stone, surrounded by its own rocky'droppings' and morsels of food Yutu-2 is the robotic lunar rover component of China's Chang'e 4 mission to the far side of the Moon.

Electronic Arts is researching ways to use AI to make its characters move in more believable ways. There's always that moment in every video game when the character does something you didn't expect and breaks the immersion. Maybe a bad guy you just shot falls to the ground with arms flailing like a rag doll. Electronic Arts is among the companies hoping to turn to artificial intelligence to help fix that problem. The gaming giant plans to discuss its latest research at the Siggraph computer graphics conference this week, showing off new computer programs it built to make characters in sports games move in more realistic ways. The research video demonstration, called Neural Animation Layering for Synthesizing Martial Arts Movements, showed the results of AI programs that can make characters jump or punch in realistic ways.

A system that tracks your eye movements could help make video calls truer to life. Shlomo Dubnov at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), was frustrated by the inability to smoothly teach an online music class during the coronavirus pandemic. "With the online setting, we miss a lot of these little non-verbal body gestures and communications," he says. With Ross Greer, a colleague at UCSD, he developed a machine learning system that monitors a presenter's eye movements to track who they are …

Chatbots will be more proactive, says Zor Gorelov, chief executive of Kasisto, a company creating conversational AI for banking and finance clients. They'll be able to anticipate individuals' needs and offer advice before users even ask a question, though there is still a long way to go before many of these features become a reality. Instead of pointing you to a resource such as a phone line or FAQ page, chatbots could one day be resources themselves, able to offer highly personalized responses to individual questions and scenarios. A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. Daria Zabój, product marketer at ChatBot, an AI software developer, says chatbots will be able to analyze investment questions, such as whether to invest in gold or bitcoin, in real time.

"How does that make you feel?" In the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, many people are missing a sympathetic ear. Would a response like that make you feel heard, less alone, even if it were a machine writing back to you? The pandemic has contributed to chronic loneliness. Digital tools like video chat and social media help connect people who live or quarantine far apart. But when those friends or family members are not readily available, artificial intelligence can step in.

For anyone who has followed CES 2020, one of the announcements that created the most buzz was Samsung's NEONs (neo-humans), or AI assistants that resemble humans. These NEONs are extremely lifelike--so much so that when you look at them, it can be hard to believe they aren't real people on the other end of the video. But will lifelike AI assistants really be the future? What practical use will they have if they are? And will these AI assistants find their way into the enterprise or just become nothing more than a consumer-focused gimmick?

Thieves used voice-mimicking software to imitate a company executive's speech and dupe his subordinate into sending hundreds of thousands of dollars to a secret account, the company's insurer said, in a remarkable case that some researchers are calling one of the world's first publicly reported artificial-intelligence heists. The managing director of a British energy company, believing his boss was on the phone, followed orders one Friday afternoon in March to wire more than $240,000 (roughly Rs. 1.7 crores) to an account in Hungary, said representatives from the French insurance giant Euler Hermes, which declined to name the company. The request was "rather strange," the director noted later in an email, but the voice was so lifelike that he felt he had no choice but to comply. The insurer, whose case was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, provided new details on the theft to The Washington Post on Wednesday, including an email from the employee tricked by what the insurer is referring to internally as "the false Johannes." Now being developed by a wide range of Silicon Valley titans and AI startups, such voice-synthesis software can copy the rhythms and intonations of a person's voice and be used to produce convincing speech.