The HomePod speaker is photographed in a a showroom during an announcement of new products at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference Monday, June 5, 2017, in San Jose, Calif. We're about to find out if the Siri-infused voice-controlled wireless HomePod smart speaker that Apple -- following a lengthy delay -- finally starts shipping on Feb. 9 can lure listeners away from Amazon's Alexa, and to a lesser extent the Google Assistant. Apple starts taking preorders Friday. HomePod is positioned as a high-end speaker, and at $349 priced accordingly. But it is considerably higher than the $199 you'll pay for another sweet-sounding speaker, the Sonos One with Alexa.

Hello World is the first album composed with Artificial Intelligence by SKYGGE, aka Benoit Carré. It started as a scientific project: Flow-Machines, led by François Pachet. Flow-Machines generated many scientific results, as well as the first AI-composed pop song, Daddy's Car. Then many musicians – among them Stromae and Kiesza – met in the lab and under the artistic direction of SKYGGE took control of the Flow Machines tools, giving birth to 15 songs. Hello World, released on January 2018, is the result of this adventure.

The Google Play Store has sold just about every media type for years now, but there's one more category the company is getting into as of today: audiobooks. As a leaked image revealed a few days ago, audiobooks are now on sale from Google Play in 45 countries and nine languages. As with most other Google services, audiobooks are available on pretty much any device you would want to use: Android, iOS, the web and Google Home speakers. To play a book on your phone, you'll need to download the Google Play Books app, which until now has focused on text-only options. If you're a fan of using the Google Assistant, you can simply say "Hey Google, read my book" and your phone or speaker will continue reading the most recent book you were listening to.

The tech industry's collection and digitization of huge troves of data, combined with new sets of algorithms and more powerful computing, has helped inject new energy into a machine-learning field that's been around for more than half a century. But computers are still "far off" from truly understanding what they're reading, said Michael Littman, a Brown University computer science professor who has tasked computers to solve crossword puzzles.

For the next 90 days, data scientists will have the chance to submit algorithms that can identify nuclei in cell samples without human intervention.

Apple's Siri-equipped HomePod smart speaker will be available starting Feb. 9, the company announced Tuesday. Preorders for the $349 device begin Jan. 26. The HomePod is Apple's entry into the highly competitive smart speaker space, first popularized by the Amazon Echo, later joined by the Google Home. At $349, the HomePod is far pricer than many rival devices -- the cheapest Echo, the Echo Dot, can be had for about $49. But Apple is pitching the device as a high-end home speaker more akin to devices like the Sonos PLAY lineup, although with voice-activated capabilities thanks to Siri integration.

Drone company DJI unveiled Tuesday a new foldable, portable drone called the Mavic Air. The Mavic Air, which sits in the company's lineup between the entry-level DJI Spark and prosumer Mavic Pro series, will begin shipping on Jan. 28 for $799. Whereas the Spark's video abilities are more limited, the DJI Mavic Air can capture 4K video at 30 frames per second, making it a more viable choice for people who want to record top-quality footage. At just 430 grams, the Mavic Air is also significantly lighter than the Mavic Pro, which weighs 734 grams fully-loaded. Meanwhile, it's the company's first drone to include a microSD card slot as well as 8GB of onboard storage, meaning users can save photos and videos directly to the aircraft if they don't have a memory card.

The Apple HomePod was supposed to go on sale last month at the height of the holiday season, but Apple pushed back its release date to early 2018. Now, the tech giant has finally announced a HomePod release date. Apple announced in a press release today that the HomePod will be released Feb. 9. The company also confirmed customers will be able to pre-order the HomePod online starting Jan. 26. The Siri-powered smart speaker is also set to arrive in France and Germany this spring.

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Rumors have been swirling as of late that Apple is getting ready to release its new Amazon Echo and Google Home rival very soon, and now we have an official launch date for the HomePod. Apple on Tuesday announced that the $349 HomePod will hit store shelves on Feb. 9. The Cupertino tech giant will start taking pre-orders on its website this Friday, Jan. 26, in the US, UK, and Australia. The Siri-backed smart speaker is slated to arrive in France and Germany this spring. Getting to this point has already been a long road for Apple, which unveiled the HomePod in June and planned to start selling it in December, in time for the holidays.