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. Living in the age of technology is rough. Every day it seems like there's a new product to get behind like a dog treat camera or those hoverboards those kids are riding these days. It can be easy to get lost in the next kickstarter or really not understand what the heck is going on with technology trends.

Walmart may be doubling down on its efforts to compete against Amazon. The retail giant is considering taking a page from Netflix and launching its own video streaming service, in a bid to take on its formidable competitor, Amazon, the Information reports, citing sources close to the situation. In an effort to undercut the competition, Walmart would price its service at a discount to rivals, charging consumers less than $8 a month. That might give consumers a reason to switch or sign up for the service, in addition to the myriad of other platforms out there, like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu and HBO Go, among others. Amazon Prime Video costs users $8.99 per month, while Netflix charges $8 on a monthly basis.

When Meghan Cruz says "Hey, Alexa," her Amazon smart speaker bursts to life, offering the kind of helpful response she now expects from her automated assistant. With a few words in her breezy West Coast accent, the lab technician in Vancouver gets Alexa to tell her the weather in Berlin (70 degrees), the world's most poisonous animal (a geography cone snail) and the square root of 128, which it offers to the ninth decimal place. But when Andrea Moncada, a college student and fellow Vancouver resident who was raised in Colombia, says the same in her light Spanish accent, Alexa offers only a virtual shrug. She asks it to add a few numbers, and Alexa says sorry. She tells Alexa to turn the music off; instead, the volume turns up.

When you go to the movies, how do you decide what you want to see? Maybe you're more likely to purchase a ticket if a movie is part of an established franchise in which you are already invested. Maybe a beloved actor or the buzz of awards-season brings you to the big screen. Or maybe a friend hasn't stopped raving about a recent release and you just have to check it out for yourself. Whichever reason brings you to the movies, the question has now become whether artificial intelligence (AI) can predict what you're most likely to see.

Samsung is set to become the latest technology giant to vie for a place in your living room with a voice-enabled smart speaker, following similar efforts from Amazon, Apple and Google. The smart speaker is anticipated to cost around $300, making it considerably more expensive than the Amazon Echo and Google Home devices, but still cheaper than Apple's $349 HomePod. To justify this price, it will market the speaker as a high-end music player with innovative features like sound shifting, whereby the direction of the audio will be beamed at the person speaking to the device. 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.

When we discuss about artificial intelligence (AI), how are machines learning? What kinds of projects feed into greater understanding? For our friends over at IBM, one surprising answer is movies. To build smarter AI systems, IBM researchers are using movie plots and neural networks to explore new ways of enhancing the language understanding capabilities of AI models. IBM will present key findings from two papers on these topics at the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) annual meeting this week in Melbourne, Australia.

Mark Zuckerberg has defended the rights of holocaust deniers to stay on Facebook – because they are being genuine. The Facebook boss said that he found the belief that the holocaust did not happen was deeply offensive. But he said that the people using his site to promote should be allowed to use it and that the posts should stay up. There are many things that people get wrong and those that claim that the holocaust did not happen are one of them, he suggested during an interview. He claimed that since the people are mistaken in their belief, rather than intending to harm anyone, they will continue to be allowed to post on the site.

In the last two decades, the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) has grown from a very small community of data scientists to something that is woven into many people's daily lives. Machine learning, computer vision, and other AI disciplines--supported by the cloud--are helping people achieve more, from mundane tasks, like avoiding a traffic jam, to revolutionary breakthroughs, like curing cancer. Over the past year, Microsoft has been on a journey to apply these transformative technologies to the world's biggest environmental challenges. On July 12, 2017, Microsoft launched AI for Earth as a $2 million program in London, with a goal of providing AI and cloud tools to researchers working on the frontlines of environmental challenges in the areas of agriculture, water, biodiversity, and climate change. Since that time, AI for Earth has grown into a $50 million over five-year program, with 112 grantees in 27 countries and seven featured projects.

Some would say it's the magic of a festival - stumbling upon a random stage and accidentally discovering your new favourite band. You could call it following your festival instinct. But what if you ditched all that and did the complete opposite? What if you took arguably the most nerdy thing in the world - statistics - and used it to try to have the best festival experience ever? I consulted a stats expert, packed up a giant bar chart, and headed to 2000 Trees in Gloucestershire to find out. And - just a warning - this article is incredibly, incredibly geeky.

On paper Israel and China are unlikely close trading partners. China, the world's second-largest country, is the biggest exporter on the planet. While Israel, a tiny strip of land in the Middle East, is only in 45th place on the global exporting league table. And importantly - Israel has always been a steadfast ally of the US. So given the current trading spat between the US and China, you would expect Israel to be firmly on the American side.