Hollywood filmmakers love to present artificial intelligence as an intelligent agent who's more capable than humans. Luckily, we haven't reached this state -- yet. We still need engineers to develop innovative algorithms and tools to improve human interactions with software and systems. Don't worry -- we can't solve user experience with machine learning, nor are we close. Machine learning has matured over the years, allowing us to gain more insights from the data we collect.

This article was peer reviewed by Wern Ancheta. Thanks to all of SitePoint's peer reviewers for making SitePoint content the best it can be! As of late, it seems everyone and their proverbial grandma is talking about Machine Learning. Your social media feeds are inundated with posts about ML, Python, TensorFlow, Spark, Scala, Go and so on; and if you are anything like me, you might be wondering, what about PHP? Yes, what about Machine Learning and PHP? Fortunately, someone was crazy enough not only to ask that question, but to also develop a generic machine learning library that we can use in our next project. In this post we are going take a look at PHP-ML – a machine learning library for PHP – and we'll write a sentiment analysis class that we can later reuse for our own chat or tweet bot.

Do you want your Slack bot to be able to parse the intent behind your users' messages? This screencast will teach you best practices regarding bot design related to Artificial Intelligence (AI), using wit.ai, to enhance the bot that we created in the Starting out with the Slackbots video. We will give it the ability to understand a simple set of commands in natural language. This capability could be expanded to make truly amazing Slack bots capable of understanding and reacting to all manner of natural language input!

Last week was IoT week on SitePoint which saw us publish a plethora of articles focused on the intersection of the internet and the physical world. We covered some seriously great stuff! Among my favorites was this article by Christopher Pitt on combining an Arduino, Minecraft and PHP (yup, PHP) and this article by SitePoint's Alex Walker and Jude Aakjaer on creating a motion-sensing, meeting-room-reserving Arduino platform. As I've written in the past, it worries me that in the rush to get the latest, greatest IoT products out of the door, security is often an afterthought. I also have zero confidence in those large data-thirsty corporations who, given half a chance, would use my IoT devices to gather as much personal data as they possibly can. Oh wait, they're doing that already, you say?