Spotify may be about to take on the smart speaker market. The music streaming site is testing an in-app assistant, dubbed'Spotify Voice', that allows users to control their music with their voice. The trial has sparked rumours that the firm is about to release a smart speaker to take on the likes of Apple's HomePod and Amazon's Echo. If the rumours are true, it would allow Spotify to put a microphone and potentially camera in every user's home. Spotify may be about to take on the smart speaker market.

Virtual reality, as it's been promised to us by science fiction, is a singular realm of infinite possibility. Star Trek's Holodeck, Yu-Gi-Oh!'s Virtual World, Snow Crash's Metaverse: Each is the all-powerful experience generator of its world, able to accommodate a character's any desire. Novelist Ernest Cline sharpened this vision in his 2011 debut, Ready Player One, which hits theaters in March courtesy of Steven Spielberg. While the story is set in the strife-torn meatspace of 2045, most of its action unfolds in a vast network of artificial worlds called the OASIS. And in the tradition of reality playing catch-up to sci-fi, the OASIS has become the endgame for real-world VR developers, many of whom are actively trying to replicate its promise.

Sage (FTSE:SGE) is the global market leader for technology that helps businesses of all sizes manage everything from money to people – whether they're a start-up, scale-up or enterprise. We do this through Sage Business Cloud - the one and only business management solution that customers will ever need, comprising Accounting, Financials, Enterprise Management, People & Payroll and Payments & Banking. Our mission is to free business builders from the burden of admin, so they can spend more time doing what they love – and we do that every day for three million customers across 23 countries, through our 13,000 colleagues and a network of accountants and partners. We are committed to doing business the right way and giving back to our communities through the Sage Foundation.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. A brief scan of the lyrical landscape reveals what the car represents in American culture. There's machismo, naturally, as with the sunny bravado as the Beach Boys bop: "We always take my car, 'cause it's never been beat/ And we've never missed yet with the girls we meet." Commitment: "I drove all night to get to you." Luxury and power: "Pull up in the monster, automobile gangsta/ With a bad bitch that came from Sri Lanka/ Yeah, I'm in that Tonka, color of Willy Wonka/ You could be the king, but watch the queen conquer." There's liberation, "Ridin' along in my automobile/ My baby beside me at the wheel," sometimes salted with limitation, "You got a fast car/ Is it fast enough so we can fly away?"

Spotify is experimenting with a voice-control interface, looking to free itself from reliance on Siri and Alexa and pave the way for the company's forthcoming smart speaker. Users of the service have spotted the new feature hiding in the search bar of Spotify's iOS app. After tapping the magnifying glass to search for a track or playlist, testers see a microphone icon inside a white bubble, according to the Verge. After users tap on the icon, Spotify suggests a number of typical requests for a voice-controlled music system: "Show Calvin Harris", "Play my Discover Weekly" and "Play some upbeat pop", for instance. The move comes as Spotify ramps up its efforts to build a smart speaker to challenge Apple, Amazon and Google in the hardware field, all of which have their own music services. A trio of job adverts posted in February confirmed the company's intentions, with Spotify elaborating on its goals to build a "category defining" product "akin to Pebble Watch, Amazon Echo and Snap Spectacles".

If the robot uprising hasn't put Rosie from "The Jetsons" in every home, and it hasn't taken all our paychecks, what does the future really hold? For years, futurists have been warning anyone who will listen about the impending robot uprising. It's 2018 -- so where are all the robots? Although we still don't have robot butlers in every house, small, single-function robots are everywhere. The real question is, where are all the intelligent robots?

Artificial intelligence is going to make legal work faster and more efficient, but it needs help from lawyers and legal professionals to do so. As a Research Director in Thomson Reuters Research and Development group, I work firsthand with technologies like machine learning, natural language processing and artificial intelligence (AI). Since we work on creating solutions for customers, I also meet many intelligent and experienced legal professionals. I'm often asked whether the technologies we work on – particularly AI – are going to send these professionals to the same part of history books as milkmen and stenographers. To allay any remaining concern, expanding on that short answer may be helpful.

Hmm...well it doesn't really have'layers' per se, as much as just a bunch of neurons. The sinusoidal/gaussian part is simply there to create a continuous property of association between different neurons. That way, since we apply a global threshold on which connections we allow (masking all others to 0), as the network adjusts the structure of the connections between its neurons - we essentially allow it to traverse what would otherwise be a binary change (which is not very conducive to gradient descent methods): ie., whether a given connection is'on' or'off'. Since this thresholded connectivity means that at any given point, many otherwise'possible' connections between various neurons will be turned'off', we are in effect able to enforce sparsity in the structure of it. So that we get fun results like in the example at the bottom where at only 3% of possible inter-neuron connections being'on', the network is continuing to improve accuracy, while still reducing the number of connections required to perform a computation cycle.

Can you spot the truth from the fake news? The new interactive BBC iReporter game - aimed at youngsters aged 11 to 18 - gives you the chance to take on the role of a journalist in the BBC newsroom. It is a "choose your own adventure" game, created by Aardman Animations, which challenges you to make your own decisions on which sources, political claims, social media comments and pictures should be trusted as you contribute to the day's news output. Which should be published, which should be checked and which should be discarded? The game is part of a BBC initiative to help young people identify false stories by giving students and teachers resources to use in classrooms across the UK.

Billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk is already dabbling in the electric car, solar energy, aerospace, tunneling and neuroscience industries. As if those aren't keeping him busy enough, Musk may now have his sights on entering the media industry. The SpaceX boss has poached several writers and editors from satirical news publication The Onion to work on a secret project he's funding, according to The Daily Beast. Possibly giving credence to the report, Musk sent out a pair of cryptic tweets early Wednesday, beginning with one that simply said'Thud!' Rumors are circling that SpaceX boss Elon Musk is planning to launch his own'intergalactic media empire.' The Daily Beast reported that he's poached writers and editors from the Onion for a secret satirical news project.