When a group of museums and researchers in the Netherlands unveiled a portrait entitled The Next Rembrandt, it was something of a tease to the art world. It wasn't a long lost painting but a new artwork generated by a computer that had analysed thousands of works by the 17th-century Dutch artist Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn. The computer used something called machine learning to analyse and reproduce technical and aesthetic elements in Rembrandt's works, including lighting, colour, brush-strokes and geometric patterns. The result is a portrait produced based on the styles and motifs found in Rembrandt's art but produced by algorithms. This is just one example in a growing body of works generated by computers.

Despite the massively larger size of the Google Home speaker, the winner of "who can actually hear a user" is the Echo Dot, which was able to hear me from farther away and without me having to look at it. After seeing the poor feedback of Watson in Bridge Crew, I decided to take my four digital assistants for a spin. After 21 questions across four assistants, I learned that Alexa cannot give basic information about Amazon Prime videos, none of them can properly understand which movie you're looking for information for, and none of them can actually recommend stuff. Also, Google still needs to learn how to round up. I also learned I'm going to need a bigger set of questions. First, the purpose of this test is to test the assistants on the one skill that is a must-have for a disembodied speaker: Information retrieval and processing. This is not a comprehensive test, but is indicative of the types of questions that one might ask based on conversation, i.e. two or more people are having a conversation and they reach a question that needs an answer. To begin with, I summarise the results, mostly for fun. After that, you can browse what I found the most interesting 40 questions, and the varied (or non-varied) answers offered by each assistant for those. This piece is not intended to be illustrative on who is the "best" assistant.

The fourth industrial revolution is underway and it's threatening to wipe out nearly half the jobs in Australia. This latest round is characterised by intelligent robots and machine learning and PricewaterhouseCoopers economist Jeremy Thorpe said it's going to completely reshape the Australian jobs market. "Over the next 20 years approximately 44 per cent of Australia's jobs, that's more than 5 million jobs, are at risk of being disrupted by technology, whether that's digitisation or automation," he said. Stefan Hajkowicz, who is the principal scientist at the CSIRO, says it's white collar workers who are about to feel the pain. "The sort of job losses that we did see in the manufacturing sector in Australia -- the car manufacturing sector -- are going to get into the administrative services and financial services sector in downtown CBD postcodes and that's the big challenge that lies in front of us," he said.

Australia Post has quietly created an email add-on tool that uses machine learning to find unpaid bills and itemise when they need to be paid. The Bill Scanner tool is currently in open beta and is "available for Gmail, Outlook, Hotmail and Live accounts". Users must sign in with their Google or Microsoft credentials. Once connected to the email account, the tool scans the inbox for bills bearing the Postbillpay logo and barcode and "pulls [any] we find into Bill Scanner", which is hosted on AWS. The postal service said it would use undisclosed machine learning techniques to extract data from the bills and itemise them according to due date.

Apple seems to have big plans for its voice assistant Siri, as was evident from its launch of the Apple HomePod, Siri-based smart speaker at the World Wide Developers Conference last month. A new patent has revealed that the company has more plans for Siri, including integrating it in a smart home setup. Patently Apple on Saturday discovered an Apple Patent titled "Intelligent automated assistant in a home environment" which was filed in Australia on June 22. The patent seems to be in line with the company's 2015 report titled "Apple Invents Siri for Home Automation ." Both the patent and the report are focusing on Siri and home automation, but the patent also contains information about Siri's home automation usage filed between 2014 and 2016.

Volvo, like seemingly every other company, has been working on their autonomous vehicle technology and it has run into an interesting problem. While testing its cars in Australia, the company found that kangaroos were both a nuisance and very confusing to its cars. The vehicles' detection system has been exposed to large animals before -- it came across moose while being tested in Sweden and it can respond to deer, elk and caribou. But kangaroos move much differently than other animals and their hopping is throwing off the system. "When it's in the air it actually looks like it's further away, then it lands and it looks closer," Volvo Australia's technical manager David Pickett told the ABC.

The BBC points out that the problem would hardly be a trivial one for self-driving cars in Australia, since kangaroo collusions are a significant problem for regular cars. About 80% of vehicle collisions with animals in Australia involve kangaroos, adding up to more than 16,000 kangaroo-related collisions every year.

But by effectively automating part of the job of the observer by using cameras to record what creatures are caught and sophisticated software to classify them by species, regulators would be able to get a fuller picture of legal harvests and detect unlawful operations. Just as automation and machine learning have given internet companies detailed records and predictions of how users behave online, they can potentially enable scientists and government agencies to build similarly detailed models of the world's fisheries. "Today it's estimated that what's called illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing costs the region between a half billion dollars and $1.5 billion a year," Zimring says. And even low rates of accidental capture and killing of important predators such as sharks can have significant impacts on aquatic ecosystems, he says. "We really need to understand, from a kind of science perspective, when at-risk species like sharks and turtles are being caught, and what really happens to them," he says.

Volvo's self-driving car is unable to detect kangaroos because hopping confounds its systems, the Swedish carmaker says. The company's "Large Animal Detection system" can identify and avoid deer, elk and caribou, but early testing in Australia shows it cannot adjust to the kangaroo's unique method of movement. The managing director of Volvo Australia, Kevin McCann, said the discovery was part of the development and testing of driverless technology, and wouldn't pose problems by the time Volvo's driverless cars would be available in 2020. "Any company that would be working on the autonomous car concept would be having to do the same developmental work," he said. "We brought our engineers into Australia to begin the exercise of gathering the data of how the animals can move and behave so the computers can understand it more."

A leading futurist is urging Kiwi companies to prepare for a tech-transformed future where machines have replaced many of today's jobs. This might mean a robot tractor repairing a fence line, a robotic plumber fixing a toilet, artificial intelligence scanning and approving a contract, a holographic projector can let you visit any place in the world - or even a drone delivering a coffee made by an automatic barista. The call comes as a new report, launched today to mark the start of Techweek NZ, has revealed nearly half of all surveyed small and medium businesses in New Zealand expect to see "significant" disruption from technology within the next decade. Yet the findings of the MYOB Future of Business Report: The Age of Change showed two thirds were adopting a "wait-and-see approach" to change. The company's chief technical advisor Simon Raik-Allen said although businesses were expecting tech-driven change to come quickly, it was less clear how well prepared they'll be for it.