Google Home is barely six months old, and Google is piling on new features. On Wednesday at its I/O developer conference in Mountain View, the company announced upgrades focused on personalizing your interactions and making them hands-free. Presented by Rishi Chandra, Google's Vice President for Home Products, the new features leapfrog Amazon's popular Echo assistant in some ways, while in other ways Google is just catching up. "A phone call is still the easiest way" to communicate with others, Chandra said, as he announced the availability of hands-free calling for Google Home. "Just ask the Google assistant to make the call and we can connect you to any land or cell line in the U.S. or Canada completely free," he said.

Google is a giant in artificial intelligence. Every day, their exploits in AI make the news. As a result, AI startups can feel overshadowed by this mega-competitor, and their vision can be cloudy. Fortunately, to navigate through those murky waters, they can rely on Dr Fei-Fei Li, Director of Stanford's AI Lab (SAIL). She is also known as the teacher of an online course on neural networks for computer vision.

Google has announced that users can download the beta release of Android O right now. The next version of its operating system will officially launch around October, but consumers can get a taste of the platform's newest features early. As it's still just a test version, some of those features might not work as they're supposed to. It will succeed Nougat, which was released late last year, and will introduce brand new functionality to Android smartphones and tablets. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph.

How can humans stay ahead of an ever growing machine intelligence? "I think the challenge for us is to always be creative," says former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, speaking on stage here at TechCrunch Disrupt New York. It's twenty years since Kasparov lost to Deep Blue, IBM's supercomputer. "I would remind people that I won the first match," quipped Kasparov when the historic defeat was brought up. "There are certain things that we can do that machines are not at all going to be able to replicate," he said.

Ford is confirming plans to cut 10% of its salaried jobs in North America and the Asia Pacific region this year, about 1,400 positions. Company spokesman Mike Moran says voluntary early retirement and separation packages will be offered to about 15,300 workers, including 600 in Canada. He says the automaker expects to meet its job-reduction targets without layoffs. Ford says the positions to be cut include those in human resources and marketing, but exclude other types of skills such as product development, information technology and plant manufacturing. More than half of the affected staff are in the United States, which has 9,600 of the eligible positions.

Ford -- facing heavy costs for new technology and slowing U.S. car sales -- is cutting 1,400 non-factory jobs in North America and Asia Pacific this year in an effort to boost profits and rescue its sagging stock price. The company will offer voluntary early retirement and separation packages to around 10 percent of salaried workers in departments such as sales, marketing and human resources. It expects the actions to be complete by the end of September. The cuts are the biggest to Ford's U.S. white collar staff since 2007, when 7,200 workers took voluntary buyout packages. Ford believes it will meet its targets by voluntary means, spokesman Mike Moran said Wednesday.

Google has announced a new app called Lens at its I/O developer conference. It's not available yet, but is coming soon to Photos and the Google Assistant. With Google Lens, you'll be able to point your phone at real-world objects around you and instantly view useful information about them. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

WhatsApp suffered an outage on Wednesday evening with users across the world reporting problems accessing the messaging service. Issues with the app, which is used by 1 billion people worldwide, included sending and receiving messages and logging in. It comes exactly two weeks after a similar problem affected the instant messenger. Users complained the'Chats' function was not working and the familiar spinning wheel and'connecting' message appeared when app users tried to send messages. Monitoring website Down Detector reported hundreds of people complaining about the outage, which appeared to have started between 5pm and 6pm (BST).

Americans aren't the only ones who have to register their drones. China's Civil Aviation Authority has announced that pilots will have to register any robotic flier heavier than 0.55 pounds starting on June 1st. Online registration will open up on May 18th, and the government will start publishing no-fly zone data for civilian airports on the same day. It's hoping that drone makers will use the info to implement geofencing that prevents drones from venturing into dangerous areas. The initiative will also see regulators working with local government and police to curb drone interference, and will eventually standardize commercial drone use with four main categories: aerial photography, agricultural use, aviation photography and license training.

That's the thin line Tropico dev Haemimont Games is aiming for with its newly announced city builder Surviving Mars. It's a game about surviving on Mars, if you can believe it. This is no SimCity or Cities: Skylines. Nor is it Tropico, with its comical dictator and his near-infinite powers. The consequences of failure are so much greater here.