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"Today we announce Google Duplex, a new technology for conducting natural conversations to carry out "real world" tasks over the phone. The technology is directed towards completing specific tasks, such as scheduling certain types of appointments."

Google DeepMind claims to have significantly improved computer-generated speech with its AI technology, paving the way forward for sophisticated talking machines like those seen in sci-fi films like "Her" and "Ex-Machina."

Google answers these questions with the help from deep neural networks, a form of artificial intelligence rapidly remaking not just Google's search engine but the entire company and, well, the other giants of the internet, from Facebook to Microsoft.

Or why would I use Wave and what for.

A computer program has beaten the world champion of one of civilisation's oldest board games for the first time in history.  Lee Se-dol, a 33-year-old South Korean, resigned the first of five matches of the fiendishly complex strategy game against the AlphaGo program, which is built by the Google-owned British company DeepMind.

Google Sheets is getting smarter. After adding the machine learning-powered "Explore" feature last year, which lets you ask natural language questions about your data, it's now expanding this feature to also automatically build charts for you. This means you can now simply ask Sheets to give you a "bar chart for fidget spinner sales" and it will automatically build one for you.

"The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by"-metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them."

New Scientist article on 'Knowledge Engines'. Provides further confusion between definitions of information and knowledge. Wolfram Alpha revealed as Apple's SIRI answer engine. 

"Thinking is hard - yet barely a waking moment passes when we're not labouring away at it. A few of us may be natural geniuses, able to work through the toughest tangles in an instant; others, blessed with reserves of willpower, stay the course in the dogged pursuit of truth. Then there's the rest of us. Not prodigies and a little bit lazy, but still aspiring to understand the world and our place in it. What can we do? In Intuition Pumps, Daniel Dennett, one of the world's most original and provocative thinkers, takes us on a profound, illuminating and highly entertaining philosophical journey. He reveals a collection of his favourite thinking tools, or 'intuition pumps', that he and others have developed for addressing life's most fundamental questions. Along with new discussions of familiar moves - Occam's Razor, reductio ad absurdum - Dennett offers cognitive tools built for the most treacherous subject matter: evolution, meaning, consciousness and free will. In his genial style, Dennett guides readers around the pitfalls in arguments, and reveals easier ways to better understand the world around us and our place in it. An enlightening and practical store of knowledge, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking will teach you to think truly independently and creatively."

Many companies are seeing that the future of deep learning is here, and that it doesn't require a lot of money or resources to take advantage of this new industrial science. IBM's Watson Analytics offers a freemium service that allows you to upload up to 500MB, and enables you to explore your own real-life applications for deep learning. Inputting Google Adwords or other sales metrics into this tool can help even startup companies find relational and predictive information in their data.

Amazon Web Services announced that it was selling to the public the same kind of software it uses to figure out what products Amazon puts in front of a shopper, when to stage a sale or who to target with an email offer. The techniques, called machine learning, are applicable for technology development, finance, bioscience or pretty much anything else that is getting counted and stored online these days. In other words, almost everything.