USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham says Google Home is improved but is still a work in progress with some gaping holes. LOS ANGELES -- Typing is so yesterday. Why write it when you can say it? This week we turned our attention to a different way of talking -- to our phones and home speakers. And if Google's any guide, that will be the story (digitally synthesized in a computer's best dulcet tones) for the next months and probably, years.

As well as beating us at board games, driving cars, and spotting cancer, artificial intelligence is now generating brand new sounds that have never been heard before, thanks to some advanced maths combined with samples from real instruments. Before long, you might hear some of these fresh sounds pumping out of your radio, as the researchers responsible say they're hoping to give musicians an almost limitless new range of computer-generated instruments to work with. The new system is called NSynth, and it's been developed by an engineering team called Google Magenta, a small part of Google's larger push into artificial intelligence. "Learning directly from data, NSynth provides artists with intuitive control over timbre and dynamics and the ability to explore new sounds that would be difficult or impossible to produce with a hand-tuned synthesizer," explains the team. NSynth takes samples from about a thousand different instruments and blends two together them together, but in a highly sophisticated way.

Between 1967 and 2005, 684 hour-long episodes of live-action Star Trek and 22 half-hour episodes of the animated series aired on TV. Allowing for commercial breaks, that gives us 521 hours of Star Trek, give or take. Add in the 13 movies, from 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture to Star Trek Beyond in 2016, and you wind up with more than 48 full days of Star Trek--not counting books and comics, which, if you want to argue about canonicity and amount of content, my DMs are open. In-world time runs even longer--by a lot. The prequel series Star Trek: Enterprise begins in the year 2151, roughly, and the last movie set in that same timeline, Nemesis, takes place in 2379 or so. But Voyager traveled back to the Big Bang in one episode and Next Generation reached into its own future, to 2395.

UC Berkley researchers, lead by Richard Zhang, have developed an innovative app that uses artificial intelligence to colorize black and white photos near instantly. It begins by automatically colorizing the image, and then offers "suggested colors" to let users manually fix any mistakes, while the computer analyzes the markers in real-time to create the final product. Click here to view the first image in this week's funny Facebook status updates gallery.

An AI algorithm developed by researchers at Salesforce generates snippets of text that describe the essence of long text. These tools can help writers skim through a lot of articles and find relevant topics to write about. "Since new semantic technologies are now mature enough to read human language, journalists and professional writers can finally go back to writing for people," Cuofano says. "The next revolution (which is already coming) is the leap from NLP to a subset of it called NLU (Natural Language Understanding)," Cuofano says.

As a blogger, journalist or reporter, you have to meet several challenges to stay at the top of your trade. You have to stay up to date with the latest developments and at the same time write timely, compelling and unique content. The same goes for scientists, researchers and analysts and other professionals whose job involves a lot of writing. With the deluge of information being published on the web every day, things aren't getting easier. You have to juggle speed, style, quality and content simultaneously if you want to succeed in reaching your audience.

Beyond membership in the Pantheon of Famous Brits, Winston Churchill and George Orwell would seem to have little in the way of common ground. Orwell was a journalist and novelist. Churchill had money and pedigree; the young Orwell lived on the street and raised his own vegetables during World War II. Churchill's political leanings were conservative; Orwell flirted with communism until he witnessed the betrayal of his Republican comrades by Soviet agents in the Spanish Civil War. In "Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom," Thomas E. Ricks gets beyond these differences and finds the iron core of both men.

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BENGALURU: On July 2015, a journalist named Sarah O' Connor tweeted about a robot killing a worker at a car plant in Germany. Immediately, the internet went into a frenzy. Many pointed out how this incident matched the plot of the dystopian sci-fi movie, Terminator where an artificial intelligence (AI) program ultimately takes over humans. The protagonist in the movie also incidentally had the same name as the journalist. While most of the chatter was of a humorous nature by movie buffs, there were those who seemed alarmed at what they believed was the fulfilment of a prophecy of sorts.

Spotify's editorial selection and music discovery process are hard to beat (ahem, Google Play Music) and it might get a little better with the company's latest acquisition. The music streaming service has just picked up Niland, a Paris-based machine learning startup that focuses on music search and recommendations. "The team from Niland will join our New York office and help Spotify continue innovating and improving our recommendation and personalization technologies resulting in more music discovery, which benefits both fans and artists," a press release says. "The best part of our journey was hearing from our clients how they were using Niland API to create innovative products that help musicians cut through the noise," Niland writes. Spotify has absorbed AI-minded companies in the past, and its Discover Weekly playlists have proven pretty popular with listeners.