In recent years, a host of Hollywood blockbusters -- including "The Fast and the Furious 7," "Jurassic World," and "The Wolf of Wall Street" -- have included aerial tracking shots provided by drone helicopters outfitted with cameras. Those shots required separate operators for the drones and the cameras, and careful planning to avoid collisions. But a team of researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and ETH Zurich hope to make drone cinematography more accessible, simple, and reliable. At the International Conference on Robotics and Automation later this month, the researchers will present a system that allows a director to specify a shot's framing -- which figures or faces appear where, at what distance. Then, on the fly, it generates control signals for a camera-equipped autonomous drone, which preserve that framing as the actors move.

Amazon announced that its virtual assistant Alexa will soon be able to deliver notifications, including telling you to go for a run if the weather is nice. Users will be able to enable notifications for specific updates about news, the weather and shopping. Skills like AccuWeather will provide weather updates, The Washington Post will provide breaking news alerts, and Just Eat will give food order confirmations. Amazon Echo is a voice-controlled smart speaker that works alongside a smartphone app. Using a virtual assistant called Alexa, the speaker can respond to voice commands from the user, such as setting an alarm or ordering a cab.

The debate surrounding the use of artificial intelligence in marketing is usually a controversial one. In the eyes of pop culture, advanced technology, like artificial intelligence, evokes views of imminent dystopias. One of the most memorable books I read recently was Dave Eggers' chilling dystopia The Circle, which was released as a movie last month. The story revolves around ambitious young go-getter Mae Holland who joins a growing tech company that aims to complete the "circle" of information sharing (which would eliminate any notions of privacy). This is a world in which advanced technology is a ubiquitous and seamless part of everyday life, so much so that we don't stop to question its existence.

USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham says Google Home is improved but is still a work in progress with some gaping holes. LOS ANGELES -- Google announced new features for its Google Home personal assistant product Wednesday, with one key catch-up to rival Amazon -- free phone calls to the United States and Canada mobile and landline phones. Google Home, which is a distant No. 2 in the personal digital assistant speaker market to Amazon's Echo speaker line, announced many new tools for the Home that tap into the Google Assistant. The assistant is Google's answer to Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana and Samsung's Bixby and looks to use voice computing for both search and daily tasks. In Google's vision of the utopian world, we would use Google Home to answer basic search questions.

Google is expected to give the crowd a look at new twists in its Android software for mobile devices. Executives are also likely to detail plans for expanding the reach and capabilities of a voice-controlled digital assistant currently available on some smartphones and an internet-connected speaker called Home. Some of the unveiled products won't be out until later this year.

Google Home is barely six months old, and Google is piling on new features. On Wednesday at its I/O developer conference in Mountain View, the company announced upgrades focused on personalizing your interactions and making them hands-free. Presented by Rishi Chandra, Google's Vice President for Home Products, the new features leapfrog Amazon's popular Echo assistant in some ways, while in other ways Google is just catching up. "A phone call is still the easiest way" to communicate with others, Chandra said, as he announced the availability of hands-free calling for Google Home. "Just ask the Google assistant to make the call and we can connect you to any land or cell line in the U.S. or Canada completely free," he said.

This is the really important work. I know that it's a dirty thing to say here, but there's absolutely no reason that expensive researchers should still be spending time inventing things like ADAM or architecture. I understand the obvious response is "we want to understand why it works!", I will also be very happy once we can teach nets to perform basic business strategy and experiments, but that's another story...

Google announced a host of new features for its Google Home AI assistant at its I/O 2017 keynote Wednesday. New features include proactive assistance, hands-free calling, visual responses and expanded support for various music and video applications. Proactive assistance helps users keep on top of tasks that are already included within other features such as Google Calendar. For example, Google Home will alert users of when they need to leave home to get to an event on time. Hands-free calling allows users to enable a phone call by simply asking Google Home to call a contact.

Google's smart speaker was already handy for a lot of things, but today the company is announcing a ton of new features for the device. At Google I/O 2017, the company said it's adding Bluetooth connectivity to Google Home. This means you'll be able to play music and other audio from any device, including those running Android and iOS. Google also revealed that Spotify's free tier will be available on Home. Previously, you needed a paid monthly subscription in order to beam your tunes to the speaker from that library.

Google, which gets most of its revenue from its dominant search engine, also released a host of new features for Google Home, a speaker released last year. Users will soon be able to make phone calls using the device, and the HBO Now streaming service, owned by Time Warner Inc, will be integrated as well.