Which is the best iPhone voice control technology? And which is the best Mac voice control? Which mobile platform - or speaker setup - offers the best voice control technology: Siri, Cortana, Google Now or Amazon Echo's Alexa? Siri has made a lot of progress in the last couple of years, developing into an impressive digital assistant that can handle all sorts of tasks on your iOS devices, on the latest Apple TV and - once macOS Sierra launches in the autumn - on Mac as well. This last step is long overdue: Siri's absence on the Mac has been a glaring omission for years, especially as Microsoft has had its own Cortana voice-tech running on Windows PCs since the launch of Windows 10 last year.

Last year at the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals, NASA announced a new challenge for humanoid robots: the Space Robotics Challenge (SRC), which will "prepare robots for the journey to Mars." Just like the DRC, the first stage of the SRC will consist of a virtual challenge, run in the Gazebo simulator, followed up by a physical challenge using NASA's R5 Valkyrie robots. As of yesterday, NASA has opened registration for the SRC, and we'll take a look at the format of the competition, the challenges that teams will need to complete, and what they can take home for winning. The Space Robotics Challenge focuses on developing software to increase the autonomy of dexterous mobile robots--particularly those of humanoid format--so they can complete specific tasks during space travel or after landing on other planets (such as Mars), as well as on Earth. In the not too distant future, R5 has arrived on Mars along with supplies ahead of a human mission.

Sometimes it feels like we're on a quest to amass more and more data, filling graphs and spreadsheets like there's no tomorrow. We know that it's increasingly possible to track people, and we're told that arranging and rearranging information might just help in the elusive hunt for killer insights. But, at Contagious, we're hearing far more people ask: 'What if data wasn't just used as a way to gain understanding of demographics or to more accurately target someone, but as a starting point for creativity?' Some of the major winners at this year's Cannes Lions festival, as well as a few other brands, have already put this approach into practice and are developing pieces of work that take data to the next level. We're seeing tangible projects that use ones and zeros as a creative spark to give people a way of grasping a complex idea in an emotional way, so that they can feel and experience as well as understand. From graphs to art One staggering way that data was brought to life recently was on behalf of Australia's Transport Accident Commission.

Professor Jürgen Schmidhuber has pioneered self-improving general problem solvers since 1987, and deep learning neural networks since 1991. The recurrent neural networks developed by his research groups at the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA (at the Università della Svizzera italiana and University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Italian Switzerland) and the Technical University of Munich were the first to win official international contests. They have revolutionised handwriting recognition, speech recognition, machine translation, image captioning and are now available to over a billion users through Google, Microsoft, IBM, Baidu and many other companies. DeepMind is heavily influenced by his lab's former students. His team's Deep Learners were the first to win object detection and image segmentation contests and achieved the world's first superhuman visual classification results, winning nine international competitions in machine learning and pattern recognition (more than any other team).

We asked the representatives of Strategic Technologies Department "Microsoft Russia" to tell us how a new device Pix works and what services were used creating it. Professional photographers are familiar with the feeling when you take million shots expecting a perfect one, when it is essential to capture the moment because in a split second the shot will change forever. We all remember the feeling when we want to feel ourselves a pro and get a unique perfect shot using a smartphone, which is always with us, but unfortunately lacks some functions of a professional camera. Microsoft scientific-research team offered a solution of this problem and developed Microsoft Pix, an app for iPhone aimed at adjusting the settings for taking the best shots (ISO, exposition, focus) using the technologies of artificial intelligence. In this article we are going to consider it from a user's and developer's perspectives.

Last year, a parking-ticket-fighting robot, called DoNotPay, was released in London, where it has since successfully disputed over 160,000 tickets. Now, the helpful bot, which was also launched in New York this year, has turned its skills to tackling homelessness, providing basic legal advice. The updated DoNotPay bot will help people to apply for emergency housing with their local council, without charging hundreds of pounds in fees. Users can log in to DoNotPay.co.uk, The bot will then ask various questions about their situation, such as: 'Why were you made homeless?' and'Are you vulnerable as a result of old age or disability?'

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

The discovery by Tufts University biologists presents the first model of regeneration discovered by a non-human intelligence and the first comprehensive model of planarian regeneration, which had eluded human scientists for over 100 years. The work, published in the June 4, 2015, issue of PLOS Computational Biology, demonstrates how "robot science" can help human scientists in the future. In order to bioengineer complex organs, scientists need to understand the mechanisms by which those shapes are normally produced by the living organism. However, a significant knowledge gap persists between molecular genetic components identified as being necessary to produce a particular organism shape and understanding how and why that particular complex shape is generated in the correct size, shape and orientation, said the paper's senior author, Michael Levin, Ph.D., Vannevar Bush professor of biology and director of the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology. "Most regenerative models today derived from genetic experiments are arrow diagrams, showing which gene regulates which other gene. That's fine, but it doesn't tell you what the ultimate shape will be. You cannot tell if the outcome of many genetic pathway models will look like a tree, an octopus or a human," said Levin.

The latest news about Google's head of search, Amit Singhal, to leave the company he spent 15 years with, had the shocking effect on the SEO community. And what is more surprising - his successor, John Giannandrea, is the one who has worked on artificial intelligence at Google (including RankBrain - the part of search algorithm which uses AI to work with a queries search engine was not able to understand before). With this change of executives, we may be on the verge of a new era - the era of transition from the algorithm-based search to AI-based search. To power its artificial intelligence, Google uses deep learning (also known as neural networks) - one of machine learning methods, which uses a mathematical model to mimic the way as human brain neurons work. Deep learning is built on the concept of digital neurons, organized into layers.

The marriage of computing power and data is finally bearing fruit in the field of cognitive computing, sometimes called machine learning or, more controversially, artificial intelligence. In its most everyday form, we see it in tools such as Google Translate or Microsoft's Bing Translate, which can translate phrases and documents effortlessly across multiple languages. More futuristically, the promise of self-driving vehicles, which can complete entire road journeys without driver intervention, is already being realised. Yet the biggest revolution in work is happening at some of the most basic levels, such as reading and dissecting legal documents to extract meaning and useful information. The tedious slog of work can be transformed by computers which are able to read and parse legal phrases, and summarise them or enter relevant details into a database or spreadsheet.