LJ Rich looks at some of the best technology news stories of the week.

My friend Mike Carey, who has died aged 71, was a pioneer in the development of speech recognition and digital audio, including digital audio broadcasting (DAB). After a formative period at the Post Office research labs, Keele University and Mitel Telecom, he left in 1985 with Adrian Anderson and me to establish Ensigma, a company that quickly established itself as a leader in the research and development of digital speech and audio applications, with uses in mobile telephony, broadcasting and automated speech recognition systems. Mike was born in Preston, to Ethel (nee Glover), a weaver and housewife, and Stephen, a miner-cum-decorator. At Preston Catholic college, a local grammar, he met Elizabeth Mercer at a school dance, for once beating the cross-country champion across the floor. They married in 1969, by which time Mike was on a Post Office scholarship to study electrical engineering at Imperial College, London, supported throughout by extra work taken on by his parents.

Machine learning, a process used to train artificial intelligences, can take an extremely long time – but a quantum trick could massively speed things up for tasks involving particles of light called photons. In reinforcement learning, an algorithm runs through the same problem over and over again and is given a numerical reward only when it reaches the correct answer. That process teaches it to find the correct answer more quickly when pitted against similar problems later on. Now Valeria Saggio at the University of Vienna in Austria and her colleagues have added a quantum twist to accelerate this process. They set up an experiment involving a photon moving through a wave guide and ending up in one of four possible states.

You might soon have a new use for your Amazon Echo, Google Home or other smart speaker: checking your heart for irregular rhythms. Researchers at the University of Washington have developed an artificial intelligence system using smart speakers to monitor your heartbeat without requiring physical contact. Their findings were published in the peer-reviewed journal Communications Biology. The study had people sit 1 to 2 feet from a smart speaker, which starts playing an inaudible continuous sound. The sound then bounces off the person and back to the speaker, where the AI system is able to detect individual heartbeats.

Imagine, if you will, the home robot of the future. It picks clutter off the floor, sweeps, and does the dishes. And it has to do so perfectly: If the robot has an error rate of just 1 percent, it will drop one dish out of a hundred. In no time, your floor would be covered in shards and the robot would get stuck in a sad, vicious feedback loop, dropping dishes and sweeping them up and dropping more dishes, ad infinitum. To avoid this domestic nightmare, engineers will have to give robots a keen sense of touch.

When Chen Qiufan took a trip to the southwest Chinese province of Yunnan 15 years ago, he noticed that time seemed to slow down as he reached the city of Lijiang. Chen was a recent college graduate with a soul-sucking real estate job in the pressure-cooker metropolis of Shenzhen, and Lijiang was a backpacker's refuge. Wandering through the small city, he was enchanted by the serrated rows of snow-capped mountains on the horizon and the schools of fish swimming through meandering canals. But he was also unnerved by the throngs of city dwellers like himself--burned out, spiritually lost, adrift. He wove his observations together into a short story called " The Fish of Lijiang," about a depressed office worker who travels to a vacation town, only to discover that everything is artificially engineered--from the blue sky to the fish in the streams to the experience of time itself.

Honda launched a self-driving car in Japan on Friday. Japanese automaker Honda has launched a limited roll-out of its new Legend, which it calls the most advanced driverless vehicle licensed for the road, in Japan. The Legend's capabilities include adaptive driving in lanes, passing and switching lanes in certain conditions, and an emergency stop function if a driver is unresponsive to handover warnings. The Legend's autonomy is rated Level 3 on a scale of 0 to 5; analysts said a true Level 4 vehicle, in which a car no longer requires a driver at all, is a long time off.

In recent years, videogame developers and computer scientists have been trying to devise techniques that can make gaming experiences increasingly immersive, engaging and realistic. These include methods to automatically create videogame characters inspired by real people. Most existing methods to create and customize videogame characters require players to adjust the features of their character's face manually, in order to recreate their own face or the faces of other people. More recently, some developers have tried to develop methods that can automatically customize a character's face by analyzing images of real people's faces. However, these methods are not always effective and do not always reproduce the faces they analyze in realistic ways.

Pedestrians should wear radar reflectors to avoid being run over by self-driving cars, says a team of researchers that has created a device to make people more visible to a vehicle's artificial intelligence. Self-driving cars rely on visual sensors, which can be blocked by fog, rain or snow, or radar sensors, which can struggle to pick out objects if they fail to reflect radio waves back to the car. Some cars also use a combination of both sensors.

Jen Copestake looks at some of the best technology news stories of the week.