Virtual assistants like Amazon Alexa, Microsoft Cortana, Google Assistant, and Apple Siri employ conversational experiences and language-understanding technologies to help users accomplish a range of tasks, from reminder creation to home automation. Voice is the primary means of engagement, and voice-activated assistants are growing in popularity; estimates as of June 2017 put the number of monthly active users of voice-based assistant devices in the U.S. at 36 million.a Many are "headless" devices that lack displays. Smart speakers (such as Amazon Echo and Google Home) are among the most popular devices in this category. Speakers are tethered to one location, but there are other settings where voice-activated assistants can be helpful, including automobiles (such as for suggesting convenient locations to help with pending tasks5) and personal audio (such as for providing private notifications and suggestions18).

Countless dollars and entire scientific careers have been dedicated to predicting where and when the next big earthquake will strike. But unlike weather forecasting, which has significantly improved with the use of better satellites and more powerful mathematical models, earthquake prediction has been marred by repeated failure. Some of the world's most destructive earthquakes -- China in 2008, Haiti in 2010 and Japan in 2011, among them -- occurred in areas that seismic hazard maps had deemed relatively safe. The last large earthquake to strike Los Angeles, Northridge in 1994, occurred on a fault that did not appear on seismic maps. Now, with the help of artificial intelligence, a growing number of scientists say changes in the way they can analyze massive amounts of seismic data can help them better understand earthquakes, anticipate how they will behave, and provide quicker and more accurate early warnings. "I am actually hopeful for the first time in my career that we will make progress on this problem," said Paul Johnson, a fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory who is among those at the forefront of this research.

Self-driving cars are being developed by several major technology companies and carmakers. When a driver slams on the brakes to avoid hitting a pedestrian crossing the road illegally, she is making a moral decision that shifts risk from the pedestrian to the people in the car. Self-driving cars might soon have to make such ethical judgments on their own -- but settling on a universal moral code for the vehicles could be a thorny task, suggests a survey of 2.3 million people from around the world. The largest ever survey of machine ethics1, published today in Nature, finds that many of the moral principles that guide a driver's decisions vary by country. For example, in a scenario in which some combination of pedestrians and passengers will die in a collision, people from relatively prosperous countries with strong institutions were less likely to spare a pedestrian who stepped into traffic illegally.

A small metal droplet can propel a wheeled robot forward with a simple electric current. The technique paves the way for larger robots that can trundle like tumbleweeds through unfriendly terrain. Shi-Yang Tang at the University of Wollongong in Australia and his colleagues started with a plastic wheel about five centimetres across with walls along its edges, shaped like a car tyre. Inside the wheel they placed a drop of liquid metal made mostly of gallium.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he could not rule out that President Vladimir Putin would raise the alleged drone attack with U.S. President Donald Trump. The two leaders are expected to meet in Paris on Nov. 11.

IBM has announced AI OpenScale, a service that aims to bring visibility and explainability of AI models for enterprises. When it comes to adopting AI for business use, there are multiple concerns among enterprise customers. Lack of visibility of the model, unwanted bias, interoperability among tools and frameworks, compliance in building and consuming AI models are some of the critical issues with AI. IBM AI OpenScale provides explanations into how AI models are making decisions, and automatically detects and mitigates bias to produce fair, trusted outcomes. It attempts to bring confidence to enterprises by addressing the challenges involved in adopting artificial intelligence.

A new report says Uber plans to roll out a fleet of food-delivery drones by 2021. A drone flies over a city. Uber's flight ambitions expand beyond just shuttling people. It also includes delivering food. According to a job posting spotted by The Wall Street Journal, Uber is looking to hire an executive to help launch its drone food delivery program known internally as UberExpress.

In a quiet corner of rural Hampshire, a robot called Rachel is pootling around an overgrown field. With bright orange casing and a smartphone clipped to her back end, she looks like a cross between an expensive toy and the kind of rover used on space missions. Up close, she has four USB ports, a disc-like GPS receiver, and the nuts and bolts of a system called Lidar, which enables her to orient herself using laser beams. She cost around £2,000 to make. Every three seconds, Rachel takes a closeup photograph of the plants and soil around her, which will build into a forensic map of the field and the wider farm beyond. After 20 minutes or so of this, she is momentarily disturbed by two of the farm's dogs, unsure what to make of her.

Advancements in robotics are continually taking place in the fields of space exploration, health care, public safety, entertainment, defense, and more. These machines--some fully autonomous, some requiring human input--extend our grasp, enhance our capabilities, and travel as our surrogates to places too dangerous or difficult for us to go. Gathered here are recent images of robotic technology, including a Japanese probe reaching a distant asteroid, bipedal-robot fighting matches in Japan, a cuddly cat-substitute robotic pillow, an automated milking machine, delivery bots, telepresence robots, technology on the fashion runway, robotic prosthetic limbs and exoskeletons, and much more.

Nearly halfway into the NFL season, the Dallas Cowboys are 3–3 and sit 20th out of 32 on ESPN's power ranking index, which gives them a less than 50–50 shot at making the playoffs. So fans of America's Team don't have a whole lot to get excited about. Unless, that is, they like riding in robot cars. Today, startup Drive.ai is launching a self-driving car service in Arlington, Texas, which sits halfway between Dallas and Fort Worth and is home to the Cowboys' AT&T Stadium. The service will run several routes in multiple parts of the city, bustling to and from big venues including that stadium, Globe Life Park (where baseball's Texas Rangers play), and the Arlington Convention Center.