A burger-flipping robot that doesn't require a paycheck or benefits -- and can grill 150 burgers per hour -- is now a cook at CaliBurger. The robot, or more specifically, a specialized industrial six-axis robotic arm bolted to the kitchen floor, works lunchtime shifts at the international burger chain's Pasadena, Calif., location. It takes burger orders through a digital ticketing system, then flips the burger patties and removes them from the grill. It uses thermal and regular vision, as well as cameras, to detect when the raw meat is placed on the grill, then monitors each burger throughout its cooking process. But those worried about a robot takeover of food-industry jobs can find comfort in knowing that Flippy still needs a human guide to place the patties on the grill.

Some Amazon Alexa users were met with deafening silence Friday, with the voice-controlled digital assistant going down across the U.S. According to Downdetector.com, a website that monitors technology outages and service interruptions, issues with Alexa began after 9:30 a.m. Users reported issues with Alexa's voice recognition service on either Amazon Echo devices or third party electronics that run Alexa, reports The Verge. However, users were able to access the digital assistant through Alexa app, notes TechCrunch. The outage appears to be impacting fewer people than earlier in the day, according to Downdetector.com. However, those with mute virtual assistants have been forced to perform mundane tasks like turn on lights, look up the weather, play music, or call friends the old-fashioned way. How do I turn on my lights now?

How many test miles is enough to build a better driver? Waymo has 5 million on-road autonomous test miles and 5 billion simulated miles, and the number keeps rising. Sometime this year Waymo, Alphabet Inc.'s prized driverless car bet, starts a first of its kind revenue-generating robo-taxi service in Phoenix. Ahead of that the unit is maintaining a steady cadence of news underscoring how mature the former Google Self-Driving Car project is – including how big a lead it has over rivals in test miles. Waymo this week said its test fleet has logged 5 million miles driving in autonomous mode on public roads.

The robot arm hovers over a pile of products before it makes its move, snagging a toothbrush with its suction cup. It holds the product up, waits for the red flash of a barcode scanner, then turns and drops the toothbrush in a cubby hole. Next the arm suction-cups a box of Goldfish crackers, turns, and files it, too. At a startup called Kindred in San Francisco, technicians are teaching robots how to precisely manipulate objects like these. Because somebody's got one hell of an online shopping habit.

Pillo is a new healthcare companion robot expected to ship in Q4 2018 that combines voice-first technology with artificial intelligence. The companion robot market will be an estimated $34.1 billion by 2022 according to a 2017 research report by P&S Market Research. The same report noted that global aging population has driven personal robots markets in developed regions. With a growing emphasis on personalized healthcare and better engagement with consumers through technology including customer healthcare apps and augmented reality, virtual reality and artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver more effective and cost-efficient digital therapeutics, a healthcare companion robot could become another tool in the intelligent healthcare market. Pillo Health and Orbita are working on an in-home companion robot that combines artificial intelligence with voice technology expected to ship in Q4 2018.

The Amazon Echo kicked off the smart speaker trend a few years ago, but it's no longer alone. There are dozens of smart speakers already on the market in 2018 and a ton more are coming. You need to decide which voice assistant you prefer (there are now four--Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, and Cortana) and what features are most important to you. Does it need to play Spotify? Does it need to connect to your other speakers and smarthome gadgets?

Annihilation deals in bountiful hallucinogenic imagery, but the image from Alex Garland's sci-fi horror that may prove most remarkable to audiences is one that really ought to be mundane: a poster featuring the film's five female leads. It's an uncommon setup, and not just for a generously budgeted studio picture.

The difference between the two pictures is that the one on the right has been tweaked a bit by an algorithm to make it difficult for a type of computer model called a convolutional neural network (CNN) to be able to tell what it really is. In this case, the CNN think it's looking at a dog rather than a cat, but what's remarkable is that most people think the same thing. This is an example of what's called an adversarial image: an image specifically designed to fool neural networks into making an incorrect determination about what they're looking at. Researchers at Google Brain decided to try and figure out whether the same techniques that fool artificial neural networks can also fool the biological neural networks inside of our heads, by developing adversarial images capable of making both computers and humans think that they're looking at something they aren't. Visual classification algorithms powered by convolutional neural networks are commonly used to recognize objects in images.

Cloud computing is already a huge business, and competition is stiff. But this year, tech firms opened a new front in the battle to win users over in the cloud: the large-scale introduction of cloud-based AI. For small and medium-size companies, building AI-capable systems at scale can be prohibitively expensive, largely because training algorithms takes a lot of computing power. Enter the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, each of which has vast stores of computing power and a big stake in the $40 billion cloud computing industry. For them, adding AI is simply a matter of keeping up with customers, who increasingly are looking for cost-effective ways of building machine learning into their software.

Air Force veteran (1968-1975) Angel Camareno is fitted with a MyoPro device. Angel suffered a brachial plexus injury 40 years ago which led to reduced motion in his arm. Myomo, a spinout from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has created a robotic arm brace for people with limb paralysis from neurological disorders such as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), Multiple Sclerosis (MS) or stroke to help them regain movement with their hands and arms. The robotic arm brace, MyoPro, senses the patient's electromyography (EMG) signals through non-invasive sensors and restores function to their paralyzed arms. Patients who use the device are able to do things they were unable to do or found difficult to do before such as feeding themselves, doing laundry, carrying objects or even returning to work.