Apple has delayed its $349 'HomePod' home speaker until early next year. The gadget will battle Amazon's Echo and Google Home for the lucrative smart speaker market, using Apple music and Siri to do everything from play music to give news and traffic updates. The firm today said it needed'a little more time before it's ready.' The new $349 smart'HomePod' home speaker will go on sale later this year, and use Siri to aplay music and answer questions. Apple also unveiled iOS 11 and new iPads at the event. Apple said: "We can't wait for people to experience HomePod, Apple's breakthrough wireless speaker for the home, but we need a little more time before it's ready for our customers.

Apple has delayed the HomePod, its next big new release. The Siri-enabled speaker is intended to be Apple's response to the increasing popularity of gadgets like the Amazon Echo, Google Home and the Sonos One. But it will have to wait a while before taking them on, since it has been delayed until "early 2018". "We can't wait for people to experience HomePod, Apple's breakthrough wireless speaker for the home, but we need a little more time before it's ready for our customers," a statement from Apple said. "We'll start shipping in the US, UK, and Australia in early 2018."

Apple promised to release the HomePod in December, but the company now says it won't start shipping them until next year. Apple revealed the HomePod at its Worldwide Developers Conference in June and had said it would come out for the holiday season, but that won't be the case anymore. "We can't wait for people to experience HomePod, Apple's breakthrough wireless speaker for the home, but we need a little more time before it's ready for our customers. We'll start shipping in the US, UK and Australia in early 2018." The delayed release date means that people who wanted to buy the HomePod for the holidays won't be able to anymore.

We hope you weren't counting on giving (or getting) a HomePod for the holidays -- Apple has delayed the release of the Siri-powered speaker from December to early 2018. In a statement, the company said it needed a "little more time" before the device was ready for its initial release in Australia, the UK and the US. It's not yet clear how this will affect releases in other countries (we've asked the company if it can elaborate), but we wouldn't be surprised if it pushed back their releases slightly as well. They were already being asked to wait until early 2018. You can read the full statement below.

"Accessibility by design" is an important concept for Microsoft, and one that underpins many of its artificial intelligence-powered products, including Seeing AI. Announced on Wednesday among a series of other AI tools, Seeing AI is a free mobile application designed to support people with visual impairments by narrating the world around them. The app -- which is an ongoing research project bringing together deep learning and Microsoft Cognitive Services -- can read documents, making sense of structural elements such as headings, paragraphs, and lists, as well as identify a product using its barcode. It can additionally recognise and describe images in other apps, and even pinpoint people's faces and provide a description of their appearance, though camera quality and lighting might influence its description. At the Microsoft Future of Artificial Intelligence event in Sydney, Kenny Johar Singh, a Melbourne-based cloud solutions architect at Microsoft, demonstrated Seeing AI, which he uses to help navigate the physical world.

Researchers from our group at QUT and the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision have had six papers accepted to the upcoming Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation to be held at The University of Technology Sydney. This year the conference trialed a dual submission process with the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, meaning work can be presented at both conferences but only published in the proceedings of one. The papers cover ongoing research in our lab spanning topics including robotics, positioning and AI for applications in mining, construction safety and autonomous vehicles. I'll give an overview here of the research we're doing, and a wrap up at the end. Despite very high safety standards, work sites of all varieties around Australia still cause large numbers of injuries and occasional fatalities.

The following blog is an abstract of an article I wrote for the Government of New South Wales, Australia, for use as part of a symposium on Education for a Changing World. To see the full article and a companion piece I wrote on the implications of these technologies for education, click here. I'd like to thank the New South Wales government for prompting me to return to an interest in artificial intelligence and its implications for education that first preoccupied me in the 1980s and for permission to reprint this abstract here. It is not a law of nature that new technologies will put a lot of people out of work in the short term, but then create just as many new jobs that are even better in the long term. What is distinctive about artificial intelligence technologies is that they embody the very thing that makes us so different from any other thing animate or inanimate on earth: high intelligence. It is now clear that intelligent agents already exceed human capacity in some domains of intelligent behavior.

Ensemble techniques are powerful approaches that combine several weak learners to build a stronger one. As a meta learning framework, ensemble techniques can easily be applied to many machine learning techniques. In this paper we propose a neural network extended with an ensemble loss function for text classification. The weight of each weak loss function is tuned within the training phase through the gradient propagation optimization method of the neural network. The approach is evaluated on several text classification datasets. We also evaluate its performance in various environments with several degrees of label noise. Experimental results indicate an improvement of the results and strong resilience against label noise in comparison with other methods.

The world's first floating nation is set to appear in the Pacific Ocean off the island of Tahiti in 2020. A handful of hotels, homes, offices, restaurants and more will be built in the next few years by the nonprofit Seasteading Institute, which hopes to'liberate humanity from politicians'. The radical plans, bankrolled by PayPal founder Peter Thiel, could see the creation of an independent nation that will float in international waters and operate within its own laws. In a new interview, Joe Quirk, president of the Seasteading Institute, said he wants to see'thousands' of rogue floating cities by 2050, each of them'offering different ways of governance'. The world's first floating nation is set to appear in the Pacific Ocean off the island of Tahiti in 2020 (artist's impression).

While you may believe you could easily figure out that the email from your grandma who is desperately asking you for money is not really an email from your grandma, not all phishing scams are that obvious and many people fall for them. In fact, a 2015 survey done by Intel Security covering 19,000 respondents from 144 countries, revealed that a staggering 80% misidentified at least one phishing email. Now, Netsafe, a non-profit organization in New Zealand with a focus on online safety, is fighting back. With their new initiative called Re:scam, Netsafe has deployed a well-educated, artificially intelligent chat-bot that can take on multiple personalities and engage in correspondence with scammers, wasting their time indefinitely or until the scammers themselves realize they are being scammed. The exchanges can be hilarious.