Google achieves that by pulling together the best features from Apple, Samsung and other phones and offering them at prices comparable to iPhones -- starting at about 650 for the regular, 5-inch model and 770 for the 5.5-inch "XL" edition. Both versions go on sale Thursday through Verizon, Best Buy and Google's online store. We tested the Pixel XL model; the regular version has identical features except for its smaller display and battery -- still enough for 13 hours of Internet use, according to Google. With either, you get an excellent camera and a strong voice assistant that promises to get smarter. The Pixel isn't quite an iPhone replacement, as Google wants you to believe; hardware is just part of what makes an iPhone an iPhone.

Microsoft has made a major breakthrough in speech recognition, creating a technology that recognizes the words in a conversation as well as a person does. In a paper published Monday, a team of researchers and engineers in Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research reported a speech recognition system that makes the same or fewer errors than professional transcriptionists. The researchers reported a word error rate (WER) of 5.9 percent, down from the 6.3 percent WER the team reported just last month. The 5.9 percent error rate is about equal to that of people who were asked to transcribe the same conversation, and it's the lowest ever recorded against the industry standard Switchboard speech recognition task. "We've reached human parity," said Xuedong Huang, the company's chief speech scientist.

This blog post covers 50% of what I'm going to be talking about at this year's Museums Computer Group conference at the Wellcome Trust in London, held on the 19th of October. The follow-up post will go live on the 20th - you can sign up here to be notified. I'll examine each one - it'll be interesting to see what you think. Artificial intelligence, as a concept, has been around for a long time. From Hephaestus building the "fighting machines of the gods" to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, humans have thought about and created stories around our desire to replace the mighty gods with ourselves for several thousand years.

BENGALURU: Freshdesk, a cloud-based customer service software provider, has acquired Chatimity, a social chat platform based on artificial intelligence used for integrating chat within mobile apps. Chatimity is the company's sixth acquisition in the past 12 months. Founded by former Google employees, Tarkeshwar Thakur and Aravind Murthy in 2011, Chatimity platform is a Bengaluru-based startup. "Chat will play an important role in the future of communication for customer service but scaling that infrastructure continues to be a challenge," said Girish Mathrubootham, Founder and chief executive of Freshdesk. "With their focus on artificial intelligence and chatbots, the Chatimity team, now part of Freshdesk, has already started to create a scalable customer engagement chat platform that is future ready."

Position yourself for growth in 2017--join us live at the Entrepreneur 360 Conference in Long Beach, Calif. on Nov. 16. We're all growing familiar with the ways in which automation, big data, AI and machine learning are slowly replacing human jobs. While the general tone up until now has been somewhat negative toward this sort of change, there is a growing number of entrepreneurs who have looked at the landscape and been prompted to think differently about the issue. Will Lee, founder and CEO of Verlocal, an online marketplace for freelancers, says, "AI is going to take most of our jobs... but it won't be the end of the world." Lee, an Artificial Intelligence expert who studied at Stanford, created Verlocal to teach and assist people in monetizing their passions to prepare for this shift in employment.

Google's fascination with hardware stretches back years. Remember the early days of Android and the G1? It took Google a while, but that fascination turned into a sort of experimental hobby, and now into something far more serious. Software is Google's art, and the company has been working for a long time to craft the right canvases. Google has more control over the development -- and destiny -- of these two smartphones than it ever had with any Nexus phone. It's not surprising, then, that the company has turned to close friends to help chart this new course. Former Motorola Mobility CEO Rick Osterloh is back at Google heading up hardware after the search giant sold his company to Lenovo. HTC, which most recently worked with Google on the Nexus 9 tablet, is handling the Pixel phones' production and assembly. There's a palpable sense that Google wanted to round up its A-team for this project.

Highly maneuverable and silent, this miniature robotic tank, built at the Degtyarev Plant in Kovrov, will sneak up on its target totally unnoticed and take the enemy by surprise. "The Nerekhta system has been put on the list of future fighting robots currently being mulled for use by the Russian Armed Forces, a Defense Ministry official told the newspaper. "If the combat platform passes the tests, it will enter service with our army scouts and Special Ops troops." The Nerekhta is built around a light armored rubber-track platform and looks like a miniature tank where the turret is replaced with an explosives-packed container. Weighing 300 kilograms and just over one meter long, the Nerekhta can haul hundreds of kilograms of high explosives at 11 km/h in a silent mode. Before it goes into combat a map of the the battlefield with the coordinates of the designated targets is downloaded to its onboard computer. All its operators need to do is just push a button clicking the number of the downloaded targets and leave the rest to this powerful tank. Receiving the radio command, the Nerekhta will plot its course to the target, approach it and blow it up. This is exactly what the Nerekhta did when it was unveiled to the public during the Army-2016 expo outside Moscow. "A robotic arm will eventually be added on to make the Nerekhta reusable.

The idea of falling in love with a robot is not currently accepted in any society in the world--most likely because robots are regarded as nonliving objects. But as AI evolves, it has the potential to surpass human intelligence, so, at some point, robots may not be perceived as objects anymore, but as equivalent to humans. Many of the companies developing companion robots design them with humanlike functionality, such as the ability to identify their owner's feelings and to evolve their knowledge based on their owner's lifestyle and preferences. The ultimate goal is to ensure the human is happy and satisfied. In this report, we examine how technological advancements could revolutionize relationships and love between human beings and robots.

It's easy to say that it's a boring time for mobile phones: every company has converged on one very similar design, a sheet of glass, metal and curved edges built around a black rectangle in the middle that shows you an increasingly stagnating operating system. And that's true, but also not, because Samsung's phones are blowing up on planes and literally threatening lives. It's into this strange market of stagnation and explosions that Google has released the first phone it had made itself. The stakes have never been higher – as well as Samsung's worries, Apple is also seeing growth in sales of the iPhone slow – but the opportunity has never been bigger. Google has had phones before, of course.

Last month, nuTonomy began allowing the Singapore public to take trips in its self-driving vehicles for free. The company's previously invitation-only trial was launched in August, beating ride-hailing service Uber, which began offering autonomous car rides in Pittsburgh weeks later.