The president of Microsoft has called for greater government regulation of AI facial recognition technology, because of the risk of it discriminating against women and people of colour. In a rare incident of a tech giant calling for greater government scrutiny, Brad Smith said such regulation would help avoid "a commercial race to the bottom, with tech companies forced to choose between social responsibility and market success". The comments of Mr Smith, 59, which were released at the same time as a report by a research group consisting of both Microsoft and Google employees also calling for more regulation, are especially noteworthy because of the controversy the company triggered earlier this year over its AI work. In June, the company's general manager Tom Keane, wrote how proud Microsoft was to be working with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) to use facial recognition technology to help identify immigrants and process applications. In a blog post about Azure Government, a programme designed to allow government agencies upload information to the computing cloud, he said: "The agency is currently implementing transformative technologies for homeland security and public safety, and we're proud to support this work with our mission-critical cloud." The comments were made as the Trump administration and ICE were facing intense criticism from human rights advocates and others for the way migrant families were being broken up and separated at the US-Mexico border.

Almost ten years after Google secretly started work on technology that would allow a vehicle to operate without a human driver, the company has launched the nation's first commercial self-driving robo-taxi. Waymo, a subsidiary of Google, introduced a small fleet of ride-hailing vehicles in Phoenix, Arizona, asking people to pay, just as they would to travel by Uber or Lyft. For now, the project will also feature a human driver behind the wheel, just in case the robotic vehicle malfunctions. "Over time, we hope to make Waymo One available to even more members of the public Self-driving technology is new to many, so we're proceeding carefully," Waymo's CEO John Krafcik, wrote in a blog post about Wednesday's run-out. He added: "Almost 10 years ago, we were founded as the Google self-driving car project to explore one simple question: how can we best use fully self-driving technology to make roads safer? We've been focused on building the world's most experienced driver ever since."

Virtual assistants such as Amazon's Alexa and Google Home have the capacity to analyse how happy and healthy a couple's relationship is, research has found. In-home listening devices will soon be able to judge how functional relationships are as well as interrupt an argument with an idea for how to resolve it, the study said. The research, by Imperial College Business School, stated that within the next two to three years, digital assistants could predict with 75 per cent accuracy the likelihood of a relationship or marriage being a success. The technology would reach a verdict through acoustic analysis of communication between couples – examining everything from everyday encounters to arguments. The virtual assistants would then be able to provide relationship advice and what researchers refer to as democratising counselling.