Apple's HomePod is finally arriving in stores on Feb. 9, but there are some features that will not come with the smart speaker out of the box. These features will be rolled out by the Cupertino giant through post-launch updates. In case you are wondering what they are, here's a rundown of the things that are coming to the device after its release. When Apple Insider had the chance to check out HomePod during the 2017 Worldwide Developers Conference, the news outlet discovered that the device still didn't have multiple room support. The publication was able to connect two HomePods for stereo through its stereo linking feature, but it wasn't able to access multiple room support.

Like it or not, the machines are claiming new territory. And by "machines" I mean artificial intelligence (AI). Our business and personal lives are touched by AI every day. That friendly lady who took your information and looked up your account when you called your insurance company? That helpful service on Netflix that recommends new shows to watch?

Back in December, the unsavory hobby of a Reddit user by the name of deepfakes became a new centerpiece of artificial intelligence debate, specifically around the newfound ability to face-swap celebrities and porn stars. Using software, deepfakes was able to take the face of famous actresses and swap them with those of porn actresses, letting him live out a fantasy of watching famous people have sex. Now, just two months later, easy-to-use applications have sprouted up with the ability to perform this real-time editing with even more ease, according to Motherboard, which also first reported about deepfakes late last year. Thanks to AI training techniques like machine learning, scores of photographs can be fed into an algorithm that creates convincing human masks to replace the faces of anyone on video, all by using lookalike data and letting the software train itself to improve over time. In this case, users are putting famous actresses into existing adult films.

The robots are coming here. We know -- we've been over this. Messenger and live chat are quickly becoming customers' preferred methods of communication. And for both, bots are often the first line of defense: the triaging system that connects the user to the right human being who can solve the problem ... if it even needs to get to that point. In other words, bots are eliminating some level of need for human labor. It's a hotly-contested point, one that's met with a lot of questions rooted in concern.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. Just take a look at the definitions Google provides for basic tasks, like breathing and eating, and you'll see how robots are already distorting collective knowledge, argues Jacob Brogan. According to Benjamin Frisch, the way we think about robots today owes a big debt to a 1999 music video from Bjork. Twitter is trying to crack down on hate speech, but its new approach blurs the lines between words and action, argues Thomas Kadri. Will Oremus writes about Facebook's own struggle with online speech and what could go wrong with its new system for combating fake news.

Here is a word of warning to those who infiltrate the content pipeline with information that's not factual. There's heightened demand for new methods to distill the mountains of information we are presented with daily down to the unadulterated facts. People crave a way to cut through the opinions, marketing speak and propaganda to get to the truth. And technology just might be the solution we need to become data-driven decision makers to objectively understand the information. There are reasons why we struggle under the weight of fake or worthless content.

'Optical trap display' projects graphics into the air, where they are visible from all angles We still don't have flying cars, brain-computer interfaces, or an artificial intelligence (AI) you can hold a conversation with, but one classic science-fiction technology is on our doorstep: true 3D displays which are capable of projecting an image into "thin air". A new paper in the journal Nature reports a breakthrough from a group of researchers at Brigham Young University in Utah: the first creation of a "free-space volumetric display", capable of reproducing full-colour graphics floating in the air, visible from all angles. The technology, dubbed the "optical trap display", works using a technique that sounds like it was ripped from the cinema screen. "You capture a particle in an invisible, or almost invisible'tractor beam'," explains the lead researcher, Daniel Smalley, "then you drag that around to every point of an image. When it's in the right place, you shoot it with red, green and blue lasers to make it illuminate, and build up an image point by point, dragging this cellulose particle around as you go."

Given her incredible skill at narrative economy, Ursula K. Le Guin could probably do a much better job of summing up her own achievements as a writer than I could. Then again, Le Guin could do most things better than most writers. An undisputed master of science fiction and fantasy, she also successfully dabbled in alternative history, metafictional gambits, and even straightforward realism. Her essays reveal an astute and acerbic commentator on our world, whether writing about adopting a cat or the rapaciousness of capitalism. The galaxy of Le Guin's fiction is vast, filled with habitable worlds in which any reader could get lost.

After winning Jeopardy and designing cancer-treatment plans, IBM Watson is now strutting off to the red carpet of the 60th Annual Grammy Awards. The tech giant's versatile AI system will be curating and distributing award-show content and images of everyone's favorite music stars in real time, straight from the red carpet to people's social media feeds. IBM and the Recording Academy announced their partnership to use the Watson Media Suite at the Grammys today. Want to quickly see who has the coolest looks on the red carpet? Want to gain AI-generated insights into the "emotional tone" of songs by this year's nominees?

Getting a review unit late, as is the case with the Google Home Max, gives me the benefit of reading a lot of people's opinions of a product before I formulate my own. And reviewing a lot of similar speakers before I evaluate the one at hand gives me a broad base of experience upon which to formulate mine. Based on those two fronts, the Google Home Max has been praised just a wee bit overenthusiastically. That said, the Google Home Max is the best smart speaker I've heard. Amazon certainly has nothing close to it in terms of audio performance, and neither do any of the manufacturers building Echo clones.