Ever since, the tech industry has been training its machines to make them even better at amassing knowledge and answering questions. And it's worked, at least up to a point. Just don't expect artificial intelligence to spit out a literary analysis of Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace" any time soon. Research teams at Microsoft and Chinese tech company Alibaba reached what they described as a milestone earlier this month when their AI systems outperformed the estimated human score on a reading comprehension test. It was the latest demonstration of rapid advances that have improved search engines and voice assistants and that are finding broader applications in health care and other fields.

Ever since, the tech industry has been training its machines to make them even better at amassing knowledge and answering questions. And it's worked, at least up to a point. Just don't expect artificial intelligence to spit out a literary analysis of Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace" any time soon. Research teams at Microsoft and Chinese tech company Alibaba reached what they described as a milestone earlier this month when their AI systems outperformed the estimated human score on a reading comprehension test. It was the latest demonstration of rapid advances that have improved search engines and voice assistants and that are finding broader applications in health care and other fields. The answers they got wrong -- and the test itself -- also highlight the limitations of computer intelligence and the difficulty of comparing it directly to human intelligence.

FILE - In this Thursday, Jan. 13, 2011, file photo, "Jeopardy!" Seven years after Watson beat two human quizmasters on a Jeopardy! Ever since, the tech industry has been training its machines even harder to make them better at amassing knowledge and answering questions. And it's worked, at least up to a point. Just don't expect artificial intelligence to spit out a literary analysis of Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace" any time soon. Research teams at Microsoft and Chinese tech company Alibaba reached what they described as a milestone earlier this month when their AI systems outperformed the estimated human score on a reading comprehension test.

Ever since, the tech industry has been training its machines to make them even better at amassing knowledge and answering questions. And it's worked, at least up to a point. Just don't expect artificial intelligence to spit out a literary analysis of Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace" any time soon. Research teams at Microsoft and Chinese tech company Alibaba reached what they described as a milestone earlier this month when their AI systems outperformed the estimated human score on a reading comprehension test. It was the latest demonstration of rapid advances that have improved search engines and voice assistants and that are finding broader applications in health care and other fields. The answers they got wrong -- and the test itself -- also highlight the limitations of computer intelligence and the difficulty of comparing it directly to human intelligence.

The tech industry's collection and digitization of huge troves of data, combined with new sets of algorithms and more powerful computing, has helped inject new energy into a machine-learning field that's been around for more than half a century. But computers are still "far off" from truly understanding what they're reading, said Michael Littman, a Brown University computer science professor who has tasked computers to solve crossword puzzles.

The artificial intelligence (AI) component in these programs aims to make create a world in which everyone can have a virtual aide that gets to know them better with each interaction. Google is making a high-profile push into AI, with the internet titan's chief referring to it as a force for change as powerful as powerful as smartphones. Google Assistant software is being built into new Pixel handsets - aiming to outdo Apple's Siri - enabling users to organise and use information on the devices and in the cloud - to check emails, stay up to date on calendar appointments, news or ask for traffic and weather data. Google also offers AI through its Allo messaging application which can be installed on smartphones, and its Google Home hub, a standalone device similar to Amazon's Echo which responds to voice commands to manage tasks and fetch information where people live. The South Korean electronics giant moved to jumpstart its AI efforts by purchasing the US startup Viv Labs, launched by the creators of Apple's Siri.