Google's artificial intelligence research team Magenta has created software capable of generating entirely new sounds. The software uses thousands of instruments to create sounds that are otherwise impossible to produce. The Neural Synthesiser, or'NSynth', invents audio using deep AI neural networks, which blend the sounds of two instruments to create a novel, hybrid sound. The technology uses AI neural networks to blend two sounds together. This is not the same as layering two sounds on top of one another.

Mobile phone customers could soon be able to dump their network provider by text. Ofcom says people shouldn't need to make a potentially long and uncomfortable phone call to their operator in order to switch networks, as they currently have to. Research conducted by the regulator also shows that these calls can often be disrupted, causing further stress. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

Minimalist blogging platform Medium is expanding into audio. Readers who have a $5 per month subscription can now listen to stories published by fellow members, as well as those hand-picked by Medium staff. As TechCrunch notes, more than 50 stories have an audio version at launch, and more will be added over time. It's a small number, however each one has been recorded by a professional voice artist, rather than a robotic text-to-speech service. You'll find them at the top of articles, both on the web and in Medium's mobile apps, with some basic playback controls.

Alien: Covenant is a decent film about android consciousness and ancient secrets wherein Michael Fassbender proves he can play an excellent android. But it has one big problem: In order to earn the "Alien" name, director Ridley Scott was forced to rehash a lot of moments from his 1979 sci-fi classic. Not even Scott, who seems much more interested in making connections to his 2012 prequel Prometheus than in filming another slobbering xenomorph. The result is a movie where the biggest money shots feel largely obligatory--just killers and filler, nothing more. Even documentaries are getting follow-ups now.

While Spotify may still be having a difficult time achieving profitability, the company has the money to continue buying essentially whatever it wants, as the financing and fundraising never seems to stop. In 2016 alone, the powerhouse collected $1 billion in debt financing and another half a billion in a convertible note, and that is to say nothing of the untold millions that weren't revealed in fundraising rounds and the actual revenue brought in by the company on its own.

Over the last few years we've seen more camera drones than we can count, but getting the best footage out of them will take something extra. While many big budget productions are already using drone cameras, a system developed by MIT and ETH Zurich researchers goes beyond mere Steadicam or even subject-tracking, by allowing the director to define exactly how a shot is framed. Specifically, it lets operators specify where an object or face should be in the frame, which direction it should face and how large it will appear, while also accounting for obstacles in the environment. That way the drone can calculate an appropriate flight path on its own, weighing the various factors against each other to get the best shot each time. The researchers will present their findings at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation later this month, but for now, directors will have to keep begging Roger Deakins to shoot their next project.

If you have a Google Analytics account, test it out free here. By 2018, Gartner predicts that 20 percent of all business content will be authored by machines. I wanted to find out more about Quill, so I reached out to Narrative Science, the company that makes the solution. Narrative Science helps enterprises use natural language generation to analyze and tell stories from their data. "We hear all the time that content is king--but what's really helping many of our customers is that AI can help automate a lot of high-quality content at scale," Katy De Leon, Narrative Science's VP of marketing, told me via a Skype interview.

Amy works just like a human assistant, except she's not human. It's an AI bot made by X.ai, a company specializing in scheduling assistants that respond to natural language. Amy is so good at what she does that I find myself thanking her for booking a meeting, forgetting she needs no more thanks than my microwave. It's impossible to ignore all the buzz about AI bots. Last month, Facebook's David Marcus announced that over 30,000 bots have been built since the opening of its Messenger app to bot developers in April.

The answer to the question of what makes deep learning different from traditional machine learning may have a lot to do with how much data you're working with. "When you start getting into true big data, that's when you can really get into deep learning," said Alfred Essa, vice president of research and data science at New York-based publishing company McGraw-Hill Education. Driven by advances in analytics technologies, deep learning processes became a more widely discussed topic last year. Since then, what constitutes deep learning vs. machine learning has been up for debate. They involve a lot of the same tools and techniques, after all.

As with most recent developments in AI, the web erupted with outlandish storylines. Many described the move as bold despite the fact that (Torch), which is maintained by Ronan Collobert of Facebook AI Research, already offers categorically similar open-source deep learning tools and that Yoshua Bengio's lab has long maintained Theano, the revolutionary software package which pioneered the category in the first place, making deep learning easy for the masses. In an article at Wired, Cade Metz described TensorFlow as Google's "Artificial Intelligence Engine". Even this headline stands out as hyperbolic for an article describing an open-source library for performing linear algebra and taking derivatives. A number of other news outlets marveled that Google made the code open source.