Pretend for a minute you're the captain of a ship that's being attacked by enemy cannons. Now – say something funny. Making up jokes on the spot is a real test of wits. Yet two comedians have developed an improv show in which many of the ad-libbed gags are delivered by a toy robot. In the last couple of years this unlikely comedy trio – known as HumanMachine – has performed 30 times to nearly 3000 people at comedy festivals in the UK and Canada.

If you've become fond of Alexa, a new pair of wireless headphones lets you take Amazon's digital assistant with you on the run -- literally. "When (Apple co-founder) Steve Jobs announced the iPod, the pitch was: A thousand songs in your pocket. Now, it's 20 million songs at the sound of your voice," said 66 Audio CEO and founder Kristian Kay. "You can ask Alexa to play you any song from multiple services ... and instantly, without ever touching your phone, you have this unlimited jukebox where you now can listen to any music that you want, on demand." This is just the latest evolution of Alexa-enabled technology.

Carmaker Nissan plans to test self-driving taxis on Japanese roads from March next year. The company is partnering with Japanese software company DeNA, which operates online services for the gaming, healthcare and automotive industries. It will adapt a Nissan Leaf electric car, which passengers will summon using an app. Nissan joins a growing band of carmakers trialling self-drive cars, including General Motors and Volvo. The free trials will be held over a two-week period in March in Yokohama.

Billionaire tech entrepreneur Mark Cuban has seen a ton of change since he first got in the technology business in 1982, but he argues that artificial intelligence (AI) is going to "change everything, 180 degrees." He warns that if the U.S. allows other countries to take the lead in AI, then it'll be "SOL," an acronym that employs profanity to communicate urgency. "All these things have happened that have changed how we do business, changed how we lived our lives, changed everything, right, the internet. But what we're going to see with artificial intelligence dwarfs all of that," Cuban said in an interview with hedge fund manager J. Kyle Bass of Hayman Capital on RealVision Television, a subscription financial video service. AI is expected to soon bring an increase in productivity, resulting in fewer jobs all while the population continues to grow. "It's not a question of how it plays out over 100 years.

The chatbot craze began in 2016 with Facebook's announcement of a developer-friendly platform to build chatbots on Facebook messenger. Soon, chatbots were heralded as the next stage of the conversational revolution. Toolkits that helped you build a bot in five minutes grew popular, companies raced to the market with new bot announcements and technology conferences headlined buzzword-driven keynotes about how bots would take over human jobs. The hype that bots would become the next great thing can be attributed directly to app fatigue. Consumers currently spend most of their time using apps created by Apple, Google and Facebook.

Researcher groups at the University of the Basque Country in Spain, and at Facebook, have separately developed unsupervised machine-learning techniques for teaching neural networks to translate between languages without requiring parallel texts. Researchers at the University of the Basque Country (UPV) in Spain and Facebook have separately developed unsupervised machine-learning techniques for teaching neural networks to translate between languages with no parallel texts. Each method employs as training strategies back translation and denoising; in the first process, a sentence in one language is approximately translated into the other, then translated back into the original language, with networks adjusted to make subsequent attempts closer to identical. Meanwhile, denoising adds noise to a sentence by rearranging or removing words, and attempts to translate that back into the original. The UPV method translates more frequently during training, while the Facebook technique, in addition to encoding a sentence from one language into a more abstract representation before decoding it into the other language, also confirms the intermediate language is truly abstract.

The U.S. official said armed drone flights could begin as early as next week or at least by the end of December. The memorandum of understanding limits the drones to defensive missions, the official said. The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and so spoke on condition of anonymity.

Smart speakers are set to be the hottest Christmas gift this year. On Black Friday, Amazon dropped the price of its core Echo product to £79 (it is back up to £90 now), while Google slashed the cost of its Home device from £129 to £77.50 at most outlets (it is also back up now). Meanwhile, Apple is promising to launch its version, HomePod, although the price point is rumoured to be significantly higher. With the pre-Christmas launch of the Echo Show, which ups Alexa's game with a built-in screen, are they the next must-have device? A simple voice command can fill your room with music – and change tunes whenever you wish. They will answer questions on a vast range of topics, set alarms, tell you the weather and what your commute holds in store.

When Waymo, the autonomous car company once known as Google's self-driving car outfit, announced it was suing Uber for trade secret theft in February, the action seemed to center on a single person: Anthony Levandowski. According to Waymo, the former Google engineer downloaded 14,000 secret documents from its system and used the contents to launch his own self-driving truck startup, Otto, in January 2016. By August, Uber had acquired Otto for an alleged $680 million, and Waymo says the ridehailing giant was in on the theft from the start. Well forget Levandowski and say hello to the litigation's newest and most unlikely star: former Uber intelligence employee Richard Jacobs. Last weekend, the US Attorney's Office pulled the very unusual move of forwarding a piece of evidence to Judge William Alsup, who is overseeing the lawsuit in the Northern District Court of California.

NEW YORK (November 29, 2017)--Technology-driven competition is becoming fierce and unrelenting. Companies today can deliver seamless, high-quality customer experiences across the whole of their marketing, commerce and supply chain function. With the ability to tap multiple data sources while interfacing with knowledge workers using natural language, "augmented intelligence" systems leverage business rules, machine learning and advanced analytics to comb through mountains of data and help teams deliver end-to-end optimization. According to a new report by Forbes Insights, in association with IBM, "Industry-Leading Customer Experiences: How to Identify Opportunities, Bridge Silos and Accelerate Results With Augmented Intelligence," the use of myriad, single- or limited-purpose, and thus disconnected, technologies lead to a severe lack of interoperability. Processes remain optimized by function as opposed to enterprise-wide.