Nao Tokui – a visiting associate professor at Kyushu University in California and a CEO of Qosmo, an AI and music startup – has developed a neural-network-based system that collects about 20 seconds of any sound to produce a custom drum kit, and then automatically sequences rhythms using those utterances and noises. Any snippet of audio can be used as input, from your own voice to improvised percussion. In a video demo of the JavaScript-based code, Tokui gently slaps his cheek, and flicks a plastic bottle. The sounds are recorded by his computer's microphone, and fed into the software to generate a rhythm from the audio: Whatever's recorded by the code is automagically split and assigned to the instruments that make up the virtual drum kit, such as the kick drum, snare, hi hat, and tom-toms. After all this, the model strings together combinations of the kit's components into a sequence to produce a loop that you can bop your head to.

One-quarter of all American households now have an Amazon Echo powered by Alexa. But the surge in popularity of these virtual assistants comes with new questions about convenience, and privacy -- especially as the company looks to make the smart speaker more "human." Alexa has captured 70 percent of the voice market share in the United States, according to Alpine AI, with customers turning to the device for anything from playlists to recipes to finding their phone. It's become a major source of revenue for Amazon, in particular because it generates larger spending from Amazon Prime members, according to a new report by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. NBC News obtained exclusive access to Amazon's Seattle headquarters and an interview with the executive in charge of Alexa, Toni Reid, to learn a little more about the future of this pint-sized device.

After more than a year of rumors and vague comments from Samsung leadership, the Galaxy Home, Samsung's Bixby-powered smart speaker, is finally official. Samsung briefly showed off the device at today's Galaxy Note 9 launch event in Brooklyn, but the company left us with more questions than answers. We don't know when it'll launch; how much it'll cost; what music services, if any, it supports besides Spotify; and, perhaps most importantly, what Bixby will be capable of when the Galaxy Home goes on sale. Like Apple did with the HomePod, Samsung is touting the Galaxy Home first and foremost as an excellent listening speaker, with multidirectional tweeters and a full subwoofer as well as some neat audio-optimization tricks. Spotify is Samsung's new streaming-music partner, which means you'll be able to control Spotify music playback with Bixby.

Samsung is wading into the smart-speaker market with an entirely new product called the Galaxy Home. The speaker has a large, rounded body and sits on a tripod -- a very different design from competing speakers offered by Amazon.com, Samsung announced a partnership with Spotify, which is the default music player for the Galaxy Home. The speaker will be able to pick up streams from a Galaxy phone and hand it off to the speaker. The company didn't say much about the Galaxy Home apart from acknowledging its existence, and promising more details will come at its developers conference in November.

It uses artificial intelligence to identify elements of a photo, such as scene and subject, to automatically classify it into one of 20 categories and instantly optimise it based on the category. If the first shot doesn't come out right, the Galaxy Note9 lets users know there's something wrong, so they can take another picture without losing the moment. An immediate notification will appear if the image is blurry, the subject blinked, there is a smudge on the lens, or there's backlight impacting the quality of the image. It also comes with advanced noise reduction technology, and a Dual Aperture lens, which adjusts to light just like the human eye. That mans that, no matter the lighting conditions, the camera should deliver a crystal-clear shot. The Galaxy Note9 builds on Samsung Electronics' legacy of innovative camera technologies with an intelligent camera that takes the work out of capturing a photo New functions including Scene Optimizer and Flaw Detection utilize artificial intelligence to help users get the most out of the device's advanced camera Galaxy Note9's Flaw Detection automatically scans it for flaws and notifies you if any are found.

Thursday's announcement in New York comes about a month before Apple is expected to unveil new iPhones. There's been speculation -- unconfirmed by Apple -- that all new iPhones will ditch the home button and fingerprint sensor and rely entirely on facial-recognition technology found in the iPhone X. The Note 9 will still have a fingerprint sensor on the back of the phone. In a jab at Apple, Samsung executives also frequently emphasize that their phones have standard headphone jacks, which newer iPhones no longer do.

Getty Images has released an artificial intelligence (AI) tool for publishers that recommends the best choice of images to accompany a news story. 'Panels by Getty Images' uses customisable filters and a self-improving algorithm that learns how an editor selects an image and optimises its performance over time. "The AI starts working for you as soon as you copy/paste your article into the tool," says Getty Images senior vice president of data and insights Andrew Hamilton. Artificial intelligence allows natural language processing, an established technique used to understand written text and interpreting or deriving insights from it. The tool works like a picture editor -- it reads the text and tries to understand what the story is about. It then offers the first round of picture suggestions based not only on individual keywords but the meaning of sentences and paragraphs.

What will happen when we've built machines as intelligent as us? According to the experts this incredible feat will be achieved in the year 2062 – a mere 44 years away – which certainly begs the question: what will the world, our jobs, the economy, politics, war, and everyday life and death, look like then? Fortunately, Toby Walsh, Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence (AI) at UNSW has done the research for us. An avid sci-fi fan from childhood, Walsh, who also leads the Algorithmic Decision Theory group at Data61 – Australia's Centre of Excellence for ICT Research, has long been fascinated by robots, machines and the future. In 2017, he published his first book, It's Alive!, in which he tells the story of AI and how it is already affecting our societies, economies and interactions.

Someday, Boris Sofman wants families to sit down and debate: cat, dog or robot? Sofman is the chief executive and founder of Anki, a robotics company that's made its mark in the toy world since launching its first product in 2013, a set of smart racing cars. It followed that product's success with a toy robot called Cozmo in 2016, which the company says is the best-selling toy on Amazon in the United States, the United Kingdom and France. A new product, Vector, launched Tuesday on Kickstarter and offers the first hint of Anki's broader consumer robotics ambitions. "Our north star . . . is to have a robot in every home," Sofman said in an interview with The Washington Post.