Ten years ago, a company called Agrobot demonstrated a strawberry-harvesting robot in a field in Davis, California. Today, Agrobot's strawberry picker remains a prototype. The long wait underscores the challenge for any berry-picking robot: Identify a berry that is ripe enough to pick, grasp it firmly but without damaging the fruit, and pull hard enough to separate it from the plant without harming the plant. Agrobot CEO Juan Bravo said his company's machine can't compete with people who can pick fruit by hand and pack it into clamshells. Still, growers are looking ahead to a day when it will be hard to find people willing to stoop in the fields all day, and expensive to pay them.

It has been quite a year for legal tech startup Evisort. Twelve months ago this week, the company introduced its flagship product, Document Analyzer, a cloud-based AI and text-mining application that helps enterprises analyze and manage their contracts. At the time, I wrote that it "might just be the hottest legal tech and AI company you've never heard of." After launching with angel funding from Amity Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm, and Village Global, a VC firm whose backers include Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Reid Hoffman, the company earlier this year raised another $4.5 million in seed funding. Now today it is announcing that it has closed a Series A funding round of $15 million.

Artificial intelligence has huge potential to transform care, but the healthcare system needs to crawl before it can walk, according to a panel of speakers from IBM Watson, the Mayo Clinic, and the American Medical Association at an after hours dinner at HIMSS18 Monday. "I think this AI stuff is absolutely real, but at the same time we haven't finished the first job, which is creating systems that are usable by clinicians," Mayo Clinic Chief Information Officer Cris Ross said. The panel talked a lot about EHRs which are still the number one pain point for physicians, who are spending twice as much time entering data as seeing paper. That documentation, for the benefit of the payer, reflects a set of priorities that need to be changed according to AMA President James Madara, MD. "We have to flip this model, starting at the point where we think the truth of the healthcare system is," he said. "Because what we're doing today would be the equivalent of General Motors making cars and paying attention to the dealers but not caring at all about the drivers or the mechanics. No other field would do that and yet that's where we've ended up."

This year was a fun one for futurists, sci-fi fans and health IT professionals fascinated by artificial intelligence, cognitive computing and machine learning. The excitement started building ahead of HIMSS17 in Orlando and the show floor was abuzz with AI talk -- much the way pop health dominated the discourse at HIMSS16 and HIMSS15 before that. Several things became clear this year: AI is real and it's here with 86 percent of hospitals using some form of it and others like NewYork-Presbyterian already embarking on significant projects, there are two types of machine learning to understand now (those being supervised and unsupervised), and machine learning engineers are among the hottest emerging careers, and early practical applications include claims collection, clinical decision support, cybersecurity and radiology, just to name a few. AI this year also sparked questions about ethics and emotional intelligence, notably that hospitals and companies outside healthcare need to create standards, obligations and metrics before deploying the technologies. If a machine learning algorithm can be proven more effective than humans at reading radiological images will it be unethical to continue letting people do that job?

Samsung's Bixby digital assistant hasn't been received well by Galaxy S8, S8 and Note 8 users. And now Samsung is reportedly replacing the head of the Bixby team and might even launch a new version of the assistant next week. Samsung's Rhee In-jong is being replaced as the head of development of the Bixby digital voice assistant by Chung Eui-seok, the head of service intelligence at the company's South Korean headquarters, according to The Investor. The Chung's service group is in charge of developing Bixby and other services related to artificial intelligence. Chung worked for Ericsson before joining Samsung in 2011 and is credited for being the software specialist behind Samsung's security program Knox and Samsung Pay.

The company confirms its AI assistant will have its own side button on the S8. Eventually, you'll be able to boss it around on more than just a phone. What's Samsung planning to do with you?" Bixby is Samsung's new digital voice assistant, and it will debut on the upcoming Galaxy S8. It will have its own dedicated button on the side of the phone, letting you communicate with the artificial intelligence in a sort of a walkie-talkie way. But Samsung's plan for Bixby, which it views as a "bright sidekick" to control your phone, doesn't stop there, said Injong Rhee, head of R&D for Samsung's mobile software and services operations. Injong Rhee, Samsung's head of R&D for mobile software and services, has led the development of Bixby. "We start off with the phone and can quickly expand into other devices," said Rhee, a Samsung exec known for his loose locks and casual style. Bixby is the latest entrant in the crowded field of digital assistants that already includes Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant and Microsoft's Cortana. Every tech heavyweight is investing in these assistants because they're heralded as the future of how we'll interact with our gadgets. The hope is to build a relationship with you now and ultimately get you to buy more of their products later. Samsung believes artificial intelligence is the next major wave of computing, and Bixby is the manifestation of that belief. Gartner reckons that by 2019, digital assistants will be the primary way consumers interact with their smart homes. Instead of being able to answer questions like "What's the weather today," Bixby will help you control your phone. You'll be able to do things like say, "Find a photo of the Sagrada Familia.

Samsung unveiled Bixby, its own virtual assistant, designed to make using your next phone easier. Starting with the Galaxy S8, which is slated to be unveiled March 29, Samsung is positioning Bixby different than Apple's Siri, Google Assistant or Amazon's Alexa in that it can learn and adapt to the needs of its users. "[I]nstead of humans learning how the machine interacts with the world (a reflection of the abilities of designers), it is the machine that needs to learn and adapt to us," Samsung's executive vice president and head of R&D for software and services InJong Rhee wrote on the company's blog. "With this new approach, Samsung has employed artificial intelligence, reinforcing deep learning concepts to the core of our user interface designs. Bixby is the ongoing result of this effort." Unlike Siri, Google Assistanr or Alexa, there is a dedicated physical button on the phone.

Details about the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S8 are leaking so heavily they're causing water damage. The latest spy shots suggest the curvy flagship phones do away with the home button on the front. But the new phones won't be entirely touchscreen-operated. This week, Samsung announced there will be a dedicated button for summoning Bixby, the company's brand-new voice assistant. Bixby represents a major reboot for S Voice, the voice assistant you probably forgot Samsung already has.

The Galaxy S8 with Bixby will be the successor to last year's the S7 handsets. NEW YORK--Ahead of the March 29 launch of its next flagship smartphone, Samsung has confirmed that the Galaxy S8 will have a new voice-driven digital assistant named Bixby, molded by artificial intelligence. S8 owners will be able to summon Bixby on the phone at the press of a button. Samsung revealed some general details on Bixby in a blog posted Monday by InJong Rhee, the company's executive vice president and head of R&D, for software and services. Rhee did not mention in his post whether Samsung will leverage the conversational-based voice technology developed by Viv Labs, a startup Samsung bought in October.

Spoiler alert: Do not read if you haven't watched the current season of "The Walking Dead." Steven Yeun has gone from "The Walking Dead" to an animated life. The actor, who was horribly dispatched in the seventh-season opener of the AMC drama, can currently be seen in "Voltron: Legendary Defender," flying a red metallic lion into space as he helps save the universe. Yeun had already taken on the role of the mysterious Keith, the orphaned paladin (pilot) of the red lion, in Netflix's reboot of the '80s cartoon series, aware of the brutal end that was going to befall Glenn Rhee, his "Walking Dead" character. "It's all a little bittersweet," says Yeun. "I feel great, though. It feels good to have completed something."