Australia's biggest pizza chain is now trying to take their operation to the next level by having any pizza ordered ready in three minutes and delivered in ten. The company is hoping to cut baking and delivery times by more than half in a trial scheme using high-speed cooking technology and military-grade delivery robots, the Sydney Morning Herald reports. Dominos chief executive Don Meij has called the innovative move Project 3-10 - pizza ready to take away in three minutes, and at your door in 10. Domino's Australia has been working with start-up company Marathon Robotics to create the world's first autonomous delivery vehicle - a robot that delivers pizza to your doorstep Meij knows the enormity of the task at hand and said making fresh pizza from scratch in three minutes will mean new ovens that blast heat in several directions. The latest technology has already been used to halve cooking times to four minutes, and Meij reckons that the goal of 10-minute deliveries in Australia could come to fruition within three years.

Browse through your Facebook News Feed and you'll see photos play a prominent part, meaning visually impaired users are missing out on a lot of updates from their friends. Now Facebook's engineers have harnessed the power of an artificial intelligence network to describe these pictures to blind or partially blind users. Facebook is calling the system "automatic alternative text" and it's based on a neural network primed with billions of parameters and millions of examples. Such neural networks – vast, complex databases designed to mimic the human brain as closely as possible – are playing an increasingly important role in modern computing. The AI software doesn't actually "see" the picture, but it can compare the objects in it with its vast internal database of similar photos and make an educated guess about what's being shown.

In an effort to improve the social networking experience for users with visual impairments, Facebook has introduced a new feature in its iOS app to help them'see' photos. With the help of AI, the app automatically generates a description of each photo a user comes across. When they're using a screen reader on iOS, they'll be able to hear a list of items in the pictures, such as "Image may contain three people, smiling, outdoors." Get your company on stage at TNW Europe. The descriptions, called Automatic Alternative Text, are generated as image alt text.

Superfast quantum computers could transform the world of finance, advocates say. In a world where how fast you can assimilate and analyse data then act on it, makes the difference between profit and loss, computing speed is key. This is why banks, insurance firms, and hedge funds invest millions on technology to give them an edge when trading, and to offset human error. Quantum computers, that owe more to nuclear quantum mechanics than electronics, promise to be exponentially more powerful than traditional computers, holding out the tantalising prospect of near-perfect trading strategies and highly accurate forecasting and risk assessments. "Financial services is a data-rich environment," says Kevin Hanley, director of design at the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS).

Similarity metrics are a core component of many information retrieval and machine learning systems. In this work we propose a method capable of learning a similarity metric from data equipped with a binary relation. By considering only the similarity constraints, and initially ignoring the features, we are able to learn target vectors for each instance using one of several appropriately designed loss functions. A regression model can then be constructed that maps novel feature vectors to the same target vector space, resulting in a feature extractor that computes vectors for which a predefined metric is a meaningful measure of similarity. We present results on both multiclass and multi-label classification datasets that demonstrate considerably faster convergence, as well as higher accuracy on the majority of the intrinsic evaluation tasks and all extrinsic evaluation tasks.

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The world's first social robot went on show at the South by Southwest (SXSW) function in Austin on Saturday. JIBO has been specifically designed to serve in the home, offering various useful functions which accommodate to a domestic setting, including home security, storytelling and entertainment. Commenting on the robot's qualities, software developer Jonathan Ross said that "JIBO is a social robot for the home he can recognise you by your face by your voice" adding that "he can understand what you are saying and it can talk back to you." He went on to explain that humans "are hard wired to be responsive to social interactions. So by having a piece of hardware that actually acts like a person and can acknowledge you and can have a social presence, we can tap into that."

Today, Facebook has apologised for a Safety Check error that led to people around the world being texted in the wake of the Sunday's bombing in Lahore, Japan's Hitomi X-ray satellite has lost communication with Earth, Microsoft has issued a formal explanation for the actions of its short-lived machine learning chatbot, Tay, and more. Get WIRED Awake sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning by 8am. Click here to sign up to the WIRED Awake newsletter. In the wake of a suicide bombing that left at least 69 people dead in the Pakistani city of Lahore on Sunday, Facebook has apologised for an error in its Safety Check disaster response system that saw people around the world being asked to check in as safe (The Guardian). Users in areas as geographically diverse as Australia, Egypt and Belgium received text messages asking if they'd been affected by the explosion, without any information on where the incident had occurred.

It wasn't even April 1, but being the overachievers they are, Google had already started releasing its April Fools' Day announcements. Starting yesterday, we spotted a disco-clad pegman on Google Maps, a Google sock-finding app on Google's Australia blog, and a new "Flick" keyboard from Google Japan. There were also two Gmail hacks that rolled out: an emoji-powered smart reply feature and a "Send Mic Drop" option. The Gmail mic drop feature had a number of users up in arms after they unwittingly inserted a mic-dropping Minion gif into emails. By this morning, Google had disabled the prank and apologized for causing more headaches than laughs.

Whether you define artificial intelligence as a sophisticated being that is convincingly "human" and can pass a Turing Test, or simply an algorithm that dictates which stories you see in your Facebook feed, the rise of smart machines will see more and more of the jobs we do today transformed and even replaced. Where mechanisation replaced a large swathe of manual labour jobs, now we're going to see more and more white-collar jobs overtaken by algorithms. "In the past we were removed from the limitations of our muscles; now we'll be removed from some of the limitations of our brains," says Toby Walsh, a prominent Australian AI expert who has taken a global campaign against the development of autonomous weapons (aka "killer robots") to the United Nations. As with previous cycles of technological advancement, the rise in productivity is expected to bring a rise in living standards. But there will be pain, too, at least in the short term.