Sonos made a big hubbub about its first voice-controlled speaker a few weeks ago, which makes the Sonos One not having Alexa support for Spotify out of the box all the more suspect. That will change by December 21st as the speaker company says it will push an update enabling "full voice support" for Amazon's digital assistant before the self-imposed deadline. Meaning, it could be around seven weeks longer before your free Echo Dot will take advantage of everything a Sonos speaker can offer. It isn't clear if this is the timeline for Alexa control on older Sonos speakers. At the moment, you can only start music with either the Sonos or Spotify apps.

If you want to blame someone for the hoopla around artificial intelligence, 69-year-old Google researcher Geoff Hinton is a good candidate.

But most of them are lightweight--full of platitudes about "public-private partnerships" …

Good morning, or afternoon, wherever you are. Here's a roundup of recent AI developments on top of everything else we've reported over the past week or so. Researchers at Nvidia have developed and described a new way to train generative adversarial networks (GANs) in a more stable manner to generate a series of, what appears at first glance, seemingly realistic convincing photos. In other words, this is a neural network that can produce, at a decent resolution, fairly plausible photos of things – from couches to buildings – on demand from scratch. The computer can invent or fabricate scenes for you or anyone else, from a description: pretty much on-demand fake news. Some of the different types of images generated by Nvidia's software ... Click to enlarge.

This week, the connected world brings artificial intelligence and augmented reality to medicine, robots have a go at music making and Matternet's autonomous drones ditch their human minders and successfully refuel themselves. Autonomous drone delivery service Matternet has developed an automated base station where drones can refuel and swap payloads by themselves. There's no human involvement at all – instead, packages ready for pick-up carry a QR code detailing their destinations, and are collected from a drawer on the Matternet Station by the drones. The startup has been transporting blood and pathology samples to labs in an effort to start commercializing its technology. Computer-assisted surgery has a new player in town: an augmented reality headset specifically designed for surgeons performing spinal surgery.

Update: We've had the iPhone X on test for over a day now, and we've got a video with our early thoughts thus far in our iPhone X 24 hour diary. Early findings show a strong Face ID performance and an impressive screen - does it do enough for iPhone fans though? Apple's long-awaited iPhone X pre-orders are now live, which means the official release date is next week: Friday November 3. You may not be able to buy Apple's highly anticipated smartphone right away. Finding it in stock on launch day is going to be extremely difficult, though we are tracking iPhone X pre-orders in the US, and the best iPhone X deals in the UK. Apple claims that the iPhone X, which is pronounced'iPhone 10', is worth your money and any extra wait time due to its revolutionary new features. The iPhone X wasn't the only smartphone announced by CEO Tim Cook at Apple's recent September 12 launch event.

WGAN has really paved the way for alot of GAN applications both in images and text. However, one problem I primarily see with training WGAN for text is that the generator fails to fully converge. That is, the wasserstein distance still remains large and despite numerous steps, the generator will not converge any further. To aid the generator, one idea is to allow the generator to see the Discriminator's preactivations from hidden layers and allow the generator to revise its outputs. The idea here is that the generator gets a chance to propose a sequence, see how the discriminator will evaluate it, and revise it sequence all in one differentiable calculation.

Apple's most expensive smartphone, the £999 iPhone X, is almost ready to land in stores and a few publications specially selected by Apple have been given early access to the phone. So what do they think? Is the iPhone X really the "future of smartphones"? The iPhone X has an all-screen front design with a 5.8in OLED screen, no home button and an odd looking notch at the top for front-facing camera and sensors. The rest of the device resembles the the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, with a dual camera on the glass back.

Sometimes the scariest place to be is your own mind. Shelley is an AI program that generates the beginnings of horror stories, and it's trained by original horror fiction posted to Reddit. Designed by researchers from MIT Media Lab, Shelley launched on Twitter on Oct. 21. The team behind Shelley is hoping to learn more about how machines can evoke emotional responses in humans. "The rapid progress in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has people worried about everything from mass unemployment to the annihilation of the human race at the hand of evil robots," writes researcher Iyad Rahwan by email.