Surface Go is Microsoft's big bet on a tiny-computer future Lauren Goode, Wired At the top of the list is Wired's detailed piece on the $399 Surface Go, Microsoft's long-rumored smaller Surface device. Smart speakers (and the virtual assistants they house) offer voice control for so many connected devices it's hard to keep count. Those audio gadgets can also assist with a range of questions -- that is, if they can understand you. The Washington Post took a close look at the performance of Alexa and Google Assistant when it comes to understanding people with strong accents. The results show that while these devices are certainly handy and increasingly popular, there's still a lot of room for improvement.

Each new year brings a frisson of excitement among book lovers as they anticipate the happy hours ahead absorbed in a library's worth of fresh reads. And 2019 looks to be bumper year. To whet your appetite we've picked a selection of fiction titles from a range of established and new authors. The list is by no means exhaustive. It may not even end up tempting you.

An Amazon customer got a grim message last year from Alexa, the virtual assistant in the company's smart speaker device: "Kill your foster parents." The user who heard the message from his Echo device wrote a harsh review on Amazon's website, Reuters reported - calling Alexa's utterance "a whole new level of creepy". An investigation found the bot had quoted from the social media site Reddit, known for harsh and sometimes abusive messages, people familiar with the investigation told Reuters. The odd command is one of many hiccups that have happened as Amazon tries to train its machine to act something like a human, engaging in casual conversations in response to its owner's questions or comments. The research is helping Alexa mimic human banter and talk about almost anything she finds on the internet.

The notch enables slimmer display borders and features like Face ID on the new iPhones and a dual selfie camera system on Google's Pixel 3 XL. But if you prefer a phone without the notch, your choices are limited – at least among the best smartphone picks. Fox News has compiled a list of five of the best. The Pixel phone line was first introduced just a little more than two years ago. The third generation Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL (the latter now with a notch) are among the best smartphones on the planet.

If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA TODAY's newsroom and any business incentives. Christmas is just a few days away, and you haven't bought all (or maybe any?) of your gifts yet. Okay, that doesn't sound great, but don't panic--there are still a ton of wonderful gifts available on Amazon, the king of expedited shipping, that can make it to your doorstep in time for the big day. Lucky for you, many of our favorite products here at Reviewed are their lowest prices of the season.

Cutting cable TV is certainly a forward-thinking move, but controlling your streaming TV device by voice is even more futuristic. Using voice commands can be a lot faster than fiddling with a remote, and with smart speakers such as the Amazon Echo and Google Home, you don't even need to use your hands. Still, not all streaming devices are on the same level when it comes to voice control. In the interest of sorting it all out, here's a rundown of everything you can and can't do, sorted by streaming platform: Not every Roku player has voice controls built into its remote, but for those that do, you can hit the microphone button to control playback, launch apps, search for things to watch, and launch music from Pandora, iHeartRadio, or TuneIn. Roku's biggest limitation is its inability to launch specific TV shows, movies, or live channels with voice alone.

NASA has released several stunning new images of Mars captured by the InSight lander's robotic arm as it snapped a photos of its new workspace. A winter wonderland sits amid a sandy Martian surface -- at least, that's the story new images released by the European Space Agency (ESA) from the Red Planet seem to tell. The stunning photos, which reveal a 50-mile-wide crater filled with ice, were shared by the ESA's Mars Express spacecraft on Thursday. The Korolev crater is located on the northern lowlands of Mars, and it's consistently covered in a blanket of ice about a mile thick, the ESA said in a recent news release. "A beautiful #winter wonderland... on #Mars!" the ESA announced in a tweet, which was shared nearly 10,000 times as of Friday afternoon.

When a person using Amazon's voice assistant in Germany requested to listen to his archive of recordings, he got much more than he was expecting. Along with receiving his own audio history captured by a home microphone, the user also gained access to 1,700 audio files from a person he did not know. Amazon sent the man a link that contained a stranger's recordings, allowing him to listen to another man speaking inside his home with a female companion, Reuters reported Thursday, citing a German trade magazine, c't. Here's which one you should pick.] "This was an unfortunate case of human error and an isolated incident," Amazon told The Washington Post in a statement Thursday.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has entered our daily lives with a bang. From marketing to medicine, every business and industry seems to be affected. Technology companies are competing for dominance in the race to lead the market and acquire the most innovative and promising AI businesses. You may already be using AI in everyday life, with applications such as speech recognition, virtual assistance on your smartphone, the recommendation algorithms of shopping websites and music or video streaming services, or even when you visit the doctor and he compares an X-Ray or other medical images with other medical data. And then there are the terms machine learning and deep learning, which seem to confuse many people.

Last July, photographer Reuben Wu and a crew of around 30 people hiked from the Peruvian city of Huaraz, nestled in the Cordillera Blanca region of the Andes, to the 16,000-foot-high Pastoruri glacier. The hike took around four hours and the crew arrived after sunset, finding the melting glacier lit only by a full moon. These Stitched Photos of Greenland's Icebergs Are Sew Great Wu has shot conceptual landscape photography in some of the world's most remote locations--East Java, Patagonia, Chile's Atacama Desert, Norway's Svalbard Archipelago--but this shoot, part of a mini-documentary about Wu's photography done as part of a Coors Light ad campaign, gave him the opportunity to highlight global warming by photographing a fast-receding glacier, one of the last in South America. "There were parts of the glacier where you could see evidence of pretty extreme breakdown and melting of the snow," Wu says. "Parts of the glacier no longer had the epic, jagged chunks of ice."