Artificial intelligence took center stage at Microsoft's AI Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday. Aside from announcing AI smarts for a range of software -- from Bing to Office 365 -- the tech titan is also ramping up its Seeing AI app for iOS, which uses computer vision to audibly help blind and visually impaired people to see the world around them. According to Microsoft, it's nabbed 100,000 downloads since its launch in the US earlier this year, which convinced the tech titan to bring it to 35 countries in total, including the EU. The app now boasts more currency recognition, adding British pounds, US dollars, Canadian dollars, and Euros to its tally. Going beyond the color in a scene, it can also spot the color of specific objects, like clothes.

By beating humans at games of Go and Jeopardy, artificial intelligence engines like Google's DeepMind and IBM's Watson have captured attention for their promise of solving bigger human problems. Watson, for example, is being enlisted to help doctors predict cancer in patients. The American internet pioneer Douglas Engelbart suggests that AI's grandest promise is the amplification of human ability. Whether it's automating rote cognitive tasks like tagging people in photos or assisting in complex work flows like cancer treatment, the human-augmentation promise feels almost inevitable in every product and domain. Self-driving cars rely on massive amounts of data collected over several years from efforts like Google's people-powered street canvassing, which provides the ability to "see" roads.