When Sonos released the Play:5 speaker in late 2015, the Amazon Echo was still an unproven tech curiosity. But since then, Alexa and the Echo have grown rapidly in both popularity and functionality, inspiring competition from the likes of Google and Apple. Talking to a speaker is totally normal now -- but Sonos users haven't been able to that. They've instead had to choose between the convenience of products like the Echo and Google Home and the superior audio quality that Sonos speakers offer. Sonos has known for some time that this is a problem.

Google Photos can now recognize photos of your furry friends. The feature, rolling out in most countries today, automatically groups photos of the same pet together and allows users to search for photos of their pets by their name. Users can search to quickly find photos of their pets, or even photos of themselves with their pets. To make a movie of your pet using Google Photos, tap on the new photo group of your pet. Select your favorite photos, then tap ' ' and create a movie.

After Celebgate and the Fappening, a new iOS app called Nude is trying to protect iOS users' racy photos from another iCloud leak. The app scans a user's camera roll and pinpoints which photos, videos or documents include explicit content. After the AI scan, the images are locked into the app and erased to avoid hackers from getting their hands on the images. Jessica Chiu, Y.C. Chen and Edgar Khanzandian created the Nude app, which was released Oct. 4. "The app itself is very simple and intuitive to use," Chiu told International Business Times. "Once our proprietary AI technology scans through your camera roll and detects sensitive material, they are then imported into the app, deleted from your camera roll, and erased from iCloud."

In mining terms, banks sit on the Mother Lode of data, with multiple kinds of "ore" to be refined. For example, there are the huge amounts of raw data in the background of customer relationships with their banks--account balances and history and more. But there are also behavioral and transactional data that define customers. For example, when and where you use Uber, and how often, can tell multiple stories. The trick is sifting out the nuggets from the noise, according to Eran Livneh, vice-president, marketing, for Personetics.

Leading stock photo company Shutterstock unveiled a new deep learning-based tool that lets users search photos by their composition. "Built on our next generation visual similarity model, this tool helps you find the exact image you need by placing keywords on a canvas and moving them around where you want subject matter to appear in the image," mentioned Kevin Lester, VP of Engineering at Shutterstock in a related blog. "The patent-pending spatially aware technology will find strong matches based not only on your search terms, but also on the placement of your search terms." Using TITAN X GPUs and the cuDNN-accelerated Torch deep learning framework, the researchers trained their visual model on their own internal image dataset and the language model to match a textual query to the embedding of a corresponding image. Once trained, they leverage Tesla GPUs on the Amazon cloud to give users total control over the image composition on any project – such as being able to use search terms like "wine" and "cheese" and being able to drag it around so photos of "wine" are on the left and "cheese" on the right.

While much of the artificial intelligence focus has been on Amazon (AMZN), Apple (AAPL),Tesla (TSLA), and Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (GOOG), there is another firm in the field making money hand over fist. That would be Netflix (NFLX), which just announced earnings up a mind blowing 64% YOY, sending the shares soaring. The company added a staggering 5.3 million paid subscribers in Q3, largely driven by international sales. Traders went gaga over the numbers. Indeed, the firm tracks every keystroke you make.

You can already use a Google Home speaker to control regular YouTube videos if you have a Chromecast device, but what about YouTube TV? You're set from now on. Google has enabled voice control over its cord-cutting television service from Home speakers, making it possible to change channels without touching your remote. You can ask Google Assistant to play a specific channel or show, and it's smart enough to recognize fuzzier requests. Tell it to "play the MLB game" and it'll switch to baseball without needing a specific channel or team, for instance. Of course, this is only useful if you live in one of the major US cities where YouTube TV is available.

Today I spoke at the WSJDLive global technology conference about cognitive and artificial intelligence (AI) technology, two nascent areas that I believe will be transformative to the industry and world. These systems also offer tremendous market opportunity and are on a trajectory to reach $46 billion in industry revenue by 20201. As part of this, today we announced that Intel will ship the industry's first silicon for neural network processing, the Intel Nervana Neural Network Processor (NNP), before the end of this year. We are thrilled to have Facebook in close collaboration sharing its technical insights as we bring this new generation of AI hardware to market. The Intel Nervana NNP promises to revolutionize AI computing across myriad industries.

The camera on the new Pixel 2 is packed full of great hardware, software and machine learning (ML), so all you need to do is point and shoot to take amazing photos and videos. One of the technologies that helps you take great photos is HDR, which makes it possible to get excellent photos of scenes with a large range of brightness levels, from dimly lit landscapes to a very sunny sky. HDR produces beautiful images, and we've evolved the algorithm that powers it over the past year to use the Pixel 2's application processor efficiently, and enable you to take multiple pictures in sequence by intelligently processing HDR in the background. In parallel, we've also been working on creating hardware capabilities that enable significantly greater computing power--beyond existing hardware--to bring HDR to third-party photography applications. To expand the reach of HDR, handle the most challenging imaging and ML applications, and deliver lower-latency and even more power-efficient HDR processing, we've created Pixel Visual Core.

Google's first Pixel smartphones weren't just smartphones; they were a proclamation that Google was more than just a software giant. They were proof that it could craft first-class devices that showed off what Android was really capable of. The new Pixel 2 and 2 XL continue that new tradition and offer some major changes to the Pixel formula. They're also among the first devices to highlight what's new and notable in Android 8.0 Oreo. While they don't get absolutely everything right, Google's new phones have still managed to further the Pixel's reputation for Android excellence. Rather than build two identical Pixels this year, Google decided to make its new small smartphone a little more conservative. Make no mistake: the Pixel 2 is still an incredibly fast phone, and a clean build of Android 8.0 Oreo combined with Google's intelligent features make the device incredibly capable. Still, if you're looking for a first-rate Android phone that won't make your hands cramp, you'd do well to start your search here. Long story short, the XL is thebigger, more attractive version of the Pixel 2. Just about everything I loved about Google's new small phone applies here too, but the XL has a few distinct advantages -- its battery life is much better, and Android Oreo shines on its bigger screen.