PayPal users can now send money to friends and family using just their voice, after the payment service announced it was to integrate into Apple's Siri. Siri is the voice-based virtual assistant embedded into the iPhone, and can be used to set reminders, answer questions and help with tasks. From today, PayPal said users running iOS 10 on their iPhone will be able to use commands such as'Hey Siri, send John £25 using PayPal' to transfer money as an alternative to using the official app. From today, PayPal said users running iOS 10 on their iPhone will be able to use commands such as'Hey Siri, send John £25 using PayPal' to transfer money as an alternative to using the official app Apple's software uses voice recognition so only the known owner of the device can use the voice commands. PayPal's Meron Colbeci said consumers in 30 countries would be able to use the new service.

Siri is still very much a walled garden, but Apple has slowly begun opening its voice assistant to third parties. At its WWDC keynote back in June, the company confirmed app makers could let iPhone and iPad users send and receive money via Siri, with Square Cash and Monzo becoming the first to tap into that functionality. Now, bigger players are tapping into hands-free money transfers, after PayPal announced it too now lets users in over 30 countries send and request money via using only their voice. Sending and receiving is very easy, but you'll first need to link Siri with your PayPal account. This involves granting PayPal access to your Contacts and confirming via two-factor authentication (a code sent via text message) that you are who you say you are.

An Australian man's idea to use a drone to bring a hot dog to his hot tub hit a snag when aviation authorities warned he could face fines of up to A$9,000 (about $6,970; £5,600) for breaching drone flight safety rules. The man, named by local media as "Tim", has insisted the stunt was safe but that the sky-borne sausage was "freezing" by the time it reached him.

AI experts build'neural network' to help researchers search for dugongs Dugong expert Dr Amanda Hodgson estimates she has stared at more than 30,000 photographs of blue water. "It's really taxing on your eyes and it's hard to maintain concentration." The researcher from WA's Murdoch University has been scanning pictures captured by aerial drones in a search for dugongs, to work out their population, size and location. Globally dugongs are classed as "vulnerable to extinction" and are found in waters off the northern half of Australia. "There are areas where they're quite vulnerable because their habitat overlaps with coastal development."

The lesson of Trump's victory is not that data is dead. The lesson is that data is flawed. It has always been flawed--and always will be. Before Donald Trump won the presidency on Tuesday night, everyone from Nate Silver to The New York Times to CNN predicted a Trump loss--and by sizable margins. "The tools that we would normally use to help us assess what happened failed," Trump campaign reporter Maggie Haberman said in the Times. As Haberman explained, this happened on both sides of the political divide.

It's one thing to track endangered animals on land, but it's another to follow them when they're in the water. How do you spot individual critters when all you have are large-scale aerial photos? Queensland University researchers have used Google's TensorFlow machine learning to create a detector that automatically spots sea cows in ocean images. Instead of making people spend ages coming through tens of thousands of photos, the team just has to feed photos through an image recognition system that knows to look for the cows' telltale body shapes. An initial version could spot 80 percent of the sea cows that had been confirmed in existing photos.

Can you spot the lone dugong in the image above? Now do that with 45,000 more, and you'll have a general idea of the population of these endangered critters. If that sounds tedious, then perhaps you, like researchers at Murdoch University, would prefer to delegate the duty to a specially-trained computer. Amanda Hodgson, of the school's Cetacean Research Unit, has been using UAVs to capture images of marine animals for years, but the data piles up fast, and there are only so many grad students. Hodgson worked with computer scientist Frederic Maire, of the Queensland University of Technology, to automate the process.

Jean Brillat-Savarin was a 19th-century French lawyer famed for his writings on gastronomy. In his most famous work, he said: "Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es." Or "Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are." This idea--that you are what you eat--has become increasingly popular. Since Brillat-Savarin's time it has been used as the title of various cookbooks and health guides; for some it is a way of life.

IBM Aims Watson at Embodied Cognition By Darryl K. Taft Posted 2016-11-05 Print Q&A: IBM is focusing its Watson cognitive computing technology on the area of embodied cognition, according to Grady Booch, chief scientist of Watson/M. At the close of IBM's recent World of Watson conference in Las Vegas, eWEEK interviewed Grady Booch, Big Blue's chief scientist of Watson/M about the future of IBM's Watson cognitive computing platform and where IBM is taking the technology to benefit enterprise customers, consumers and developers alike. Among other areas, IBM is applying Watson to embodied cognition or putting artificial intelligence (AI) into the physical world. "This is embodied cognition: By placing the cognitive power of Watson in a robot, in an avatar, an object in your hand or even in the walls of an operating room, conference room or spacecraft, we take Watson's ability to understand and reason and draw it closer to the natural ways in which humans live and work," Booch said in a talk. "In so doing, we augment individual human senses and abilities, giving Watson the ability to see a patient's complete medical condition, feel the flow of a supply chain or drive a factory like a maestro before an orchestra."

You might expect the operating theatre to be one of the last places you'd find robotics in action but, increasingly, you'd be wrong. The OT is typically the most labour-intensive and expensive part of a hospital -- which, in this age of spiraling health costs, makes it a priority for any cost-savings that can be achieved through systemisation and standardisation. Robotic surgery, or robot-assisted surgery, has the advantage that it allows doctors to perform many types of complex procedures with more precision, flexibility and control than they could with conventional techniques. Given the speed at which robotics is advancing, how long will it be before robots start making all the decisions on surgery without the need for human control or intervention? OK, you say, that's fine where standard and predictable procedures are required.