There are two ways to think about Google's Chromecast streaming dongle in 2018. You could consider it as your only streaming device, committing to Google's vision of using a phone or tablet as your only TV remote. This unconventional approach has its upsides, but it's less appealing than it used to be as low-cost streamers from Roku and Amazon have become faster and more versatile. Alternatively, you might view Chromecast as a secondary streamer, living alongside the Roku, Fire TV, or Apple TV that you already own. You won't have to give up a proper remote control, but can still use Chromecast to launch videos from your phone, screen-share from an Android phone or laptop, view Google Photos on the big screen, and control your TV with Google Assistant voice commands.

To capture the perfect lighting, Rasmus Furbo directed Spider-Man to crouch on top of a queen-size bed. The web-slinger sat there, facing the end of the bed, against a black studio-like backdrop for the hero's classic red and blue suit. The photo shoot was not for some kind of magazine promo for the next Marvel Cinematic offering. Rather the scene unfolded all within a video game. Furbo, 33, has played video games practically his entire life, but over the summer he found what he calls "a hobby within a hobby" -- what's known by some as in-game photography.

Audiology, the leading programmatic audio marketplace, announced that it has opened its New York City headquarters. With a reach of 140MM unique listeners, the company, which is headed by David Krulewich, SVP, and Head of Programmatic Sales, is operating at scale with multiple clients, agencies and partners to provide data-driven audio solutions that reach highly targeted audiences in an omni-channel media world. "When you talk about online radio, there have been just two gold nuggets -- Pandora and Spotify. Audiology allows us to break those barriers and lets us access all the mom-and-pop radio people are listening to," explained David Feman, Vice President, Publicis' Spark Foundry unit, to MediaPost – which covered Audiology's launch. "According to eMarketer, digital audio is now the number one form of mobile media consumption, having surpassed even social media. And the trend is growing," said Mr. Krulewich.

Starting today, Google is allowing Chromecast owners to add the streaming device to speaker groups along with Home speakers. The addition of the dongle to the Home ecosystem will allow you to queue up a song, playlist, podcast or audiobook and have it play in sync across all of the speakers and Chromecast-connected devices in your home. XDA Developers spotted the functionality in Google's Preview program that gives an early look at upcoming features. Google confirmed to Engadget that the capability is starting to roll out to users today. The feature makes good on Google's promise to integrate Chromecast into speaker groups, which can be set up through the Google Home app.

An American rapper is planning to pursue legal action against the makers of Fortnite, after the hugely popular video game introduced what appears to be his signature dance move. Brooklyn-based 2 Milly claims the'Swipe It' dance emote in Season 5 is a direct copy of the Milly Rock, a viral dance that he created. Fortnite developer Epic Games charges players around $5 for the Swipe It emote, allowing them to use it in the game as a taunt or celebration. Uber has halted testing of driverless vehicles after a woman was killed by one of their cars in Tempe, Arizona. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

With recent breakthroughs in artificial neural networks, deep generative models have become one of the leading techniques for computational creativity. Despite very promising progress on image and short sequence generation, symbolic music generation remains a challenging problem since the structure of compositions are usually complicated. In this study, we attempt to solve the melody generation problem constrained by the given chord progression. This music meta-creation problem can also be incorporated into a plan recognition system with user inputs and predictive structural outputs. In particular, we explore the effect of explicit architectural encoding of musical structure via comparing two sequential generative models: LSTM (a type of RNN) and WaveNet (dilated temporal-CNN). As far as we know, this is the first study of applying WaveNet to symbolic music generation, as well as the first systematic comparison between temporal-CNN and RNN for music generation. We conduct a survey for evaluation in our generations and implemented Variable Markov Oracle in music pattern discovery. Experimental results show that to encode structure more explicitly using a stack of dilated convolution layers improved the performance significantly, and a global encoding of underlying chord progression into the generation procedure gains even more.

Amazon Alexa's repertoire of on-demand music services appears to be growing by the day. Hot on the heels of Tidal's support, Pandora has enabled Premium streaming on Alexa-equipped devices like Amazon's Echo speakers. You no longer have to be content with Pandora's radio feature -- you can access your playlists and play albums like you would anywhere else. You can set the service as your default music option as well. It's not quite complete when Personalized Soundtracks support is "coming soon," but you otherwise won't be hurting for choice.

USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham takes a look at three new connected speakers that all have video features. Amazon has enlarged and enhanced its Echo Show device, which brings video to its line of smart speaker, Google counters with the Home Hub, adding video to the Home line of speakers, and Facebook is in there as well, with its controversial Portal video speaker. We've taken all for intensive test drives. Which one is for you? The Google speaker, ($149, on sale for $99 during Black Friday sales) is our all-around favorite of the trio because it does more than the others.

Computers aren't going to replace creative pros -- but machine learning and artificial intelligence can be powerful tools in the storytelling process. The 60-second spot was directed by Oscar-winner Kevin Macdonald, working from a script that was developed by IBM's Watson AI system. To produce the spot for the Lexus ES executive sedan launching in Europe, the automaker enlisted its creative agency, The&Partnership London, along with technical partner Visual Voice. The agencies collaborated with the IBM Watson team to use AI to analyze 15 years' worth of footage, text and audio for car and luxury brand campaigns that have won Cannes Lions awards for creativity, as well as a range of other external data. Watson identified elements common to award-worthy commercials that were "both emotionally intelligent and entertaining," according to IBM.

Mark Zuckerberg fiercely defended Facebook in a question-and-answer session with employees on Friday afternoon, pushing back against criticism of the company in the wake of a New York Times investigation into how it reacted to Russian influence operations. In an hour-long video-conference broadcast to Facebook offices around the world, Mr Zuckerberg responded to questions from employees on a range of topics, from Facebook's behaviour over the past 18 months to how it should handle leaks to the media, according to three people familiar with the discussion but not willing to discuss it publicly because it was a private meeting. The idea that Facebook tried to "cover up anything" was wrong, an impassioned Mr Zuckerberg said, using an expletive in his response, according to these people. Some employees responded with muted applause and cheers. The session came at a fraught time for the social network, as executives mobilised to deal with a torrent of criticism of the company.