When Texas-based copywriter Dustin Ballard released a cover of Aqua's 1997 Europop hit "Barbie Girl" this summer using an AI-generated version of Johnny Cash's voice, he was surprised by its reception. "I actually expected more of a backlash," he says. Earlier this fall, when he followed up with AI Johnny Cash singing Taylor Swift's "Blank Space," the feedback was unexpectedly positive once again. "This is hauntingly beautiful," the top comment reads. "It absolutely slaps," Futurism wrote.

The Telegraph has proclaimed the end of apps is here, mobile applications as we know them are a dying breed. Today, these resemble smart AI-powered assistants that can help us with many tasks, all within one application. But there are also a number of standalone chatbot mobile apps. Let's see what they're all about! The Luka app is a place where humans and bots can meet and talk about things like restaurants, weather, and recent news.

In part 1 we looked at using linear regression, with the aid of a spreadsheet, to see if we could predict within a reasonable tolerance predict what Darcey Bussell's scoring would be based on Craig Revel Horwood's score. No big deal, it worked quite well, it took less thank five minutes and didn't interfere with me making a cup of tea. Linear Regression is all well and good but this is 2016, this is the year where every Northern Ireland company decides it's going to do artificial intelligence and machine learning with hardly any data…. So, we're going to upgrade the Darcey Coefficient and go all Techcrunch/Google/DeepMind on it, Darcey's predictions are now going to be an Artificial Neural Network! They're good but held with a small amount of skepticism.

Early Wednesday morning, a new Twitter user named Tay met the world. She was a Microsoft-designed experiment in artificial intelligence that would develop an increasingly human-like persona by engaging with Millennials online. Early this morning though, Tay abruptly withdrew from the world. It seems she learned too indiscriminately, repeating all sorts of language that had been directed at her--including racial epithets, political conspiracy theories, and all-caps Trumpisms (Microsoft has since deleted the tweets, though The Guardian was kind enough to take screenshots). If you're like me, your initial reaction to Tay was excitement. It seemed like a neat experiment.