They cooed, flapped their wings and stared at me, as if begging for a treat. My dreams of being surrounded by the adorable alien birds from Star Wars have come true. Okay, there were only two porgs. They were actually a part of Lucasfilm's ILMxLAB demo at LeapCon, Magic Leap's inaugural developer conference, where I managed to try out several different augmented reality experiences with the company's recently revealed AR glasses. I watched a Shakespearean play, interacted with a digital human, planted seeds on a planet, rode a robot into the stars and, yes, I played with porgs.

The BBC had to replace live broadcasts with recorded material on its TV news channels for about an hour on Wednesday following a technical glitch. The News at Six was also presented from the BBC's Millbank studio instead of its usual home of New Broadcasting House. The issue affected OpenMedia, a new computer system rolled out across BBC News outlets over the past six months. OpenMedia supplier Annova has been helping to investigate the fault. Engineers believe they have now addressed the problem.

Court is now in session, and author Robert J. Sawyer makes the case for leveraging AI to improve ethics and fairness in civil society. With 23 novels under his belt, as well as scores of short stories, scripts, treatments and more, Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Robert J. Sawyer is not shy about exploring the technological and cultural landscape of our future. Among the many works in his remarkable and widely regarded career, he authored the trilogy WWW (as in Wake, Watch and Wonder) in which a blind teenage girl uses advanced medical technology to augment her vision, only to discover a super-AI consciousness called Webmind that uses the Internet to grow. During the series, Sawyer investigates the possible consequences that such a super-AI could unleash upon society, and how humans might respond. For his perspective on how humanity might relate to future artificial intelligences and what shape those interactions may take, we asked Sawyer about the dynamics of judgment and control; he also shared his overall sentiment on AI development.

In the coming battle of the talking video speakers, Google is selling YouTube, Amazon looks to Prime Video and with Facebook, it's about the social network. Google and Facebook have joined Amazon in offering the next wave of home speakers, Alexa with a twist, with a video display. Facebook came out on Monday with its video portal. On Tuesday, Google introduced Google Home Hub, an update to its popular Google Home speaker, a new device with a video screen that's all about Google. Amazon will be first to stores, with the revamped and larger Echo unit available Thursday, while Google's Home Hub, an extension of the Home speaker line, will be released on October 22nd.

There are plenty of toy robots out on the market, but few are as endearing as the upcoming Anki Vector. Its big bright eyes are most reminiscent of the Pixar character Wall-E. But as cute as its Wall-E-like personality is, it doesn't mean much if the robot isn't smart. That's where Alexa comes in. In a blog post by CEO and co-founder Boris Sofman, he notes one of the top requests on the Vector Kickstarter was to integrate Alexa.

The Pixel 2 had arguably the best smartphone camera on the market, and Google wants to make sure it stays that way. During its Pixel unveiling today, it introduced a raft of new camera features for the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3XL smartphones, including an improved zoom, wider-angle camera, smile and blink detection, bokeh control and more -- all with just a single lens on the back. The quality is apparently good enough for Terrence Malick, who shot a video that was featured at the event, so it might be good enough for the rest of us, too. Some of the features are enabled with the fresh hardware, to be sure. There's a brand new 12.2-megapixel sensor on the back, with a sharper wide-angle lens to allow for zooming.

With over 2 billion active Android devices and over 1 billion active iOS users, the mobile market provides the most engaging and profitable market to build and sell new digital solutions. There are less than 4 million unique applications for each of these operating systems, with most of them performing the same or related functions. However, the arrival of cloud-based and device-based artificial intelligence tools provides a unique opportunity to recreate the mobile experience for existing apps, as well as build entirely new mobile apps that can only be possible through the use of AI-powered tools. There are a few challenges with harnessing this opportunity of mobile apps with AI capabilities, some of which include knowing what problems to solve, what applications to build, and how to tailor these applications so that existing app users can have improved mobile experiences. Below, I'll be sharing 5 exceptional mobile apps ideas made possible by integrating AI into the mobile experience.

Google's new Pixel 3 smartphones attempt to push the computational photography envelope, challenging Apple's new iPhone XS and Samsung's Galaxy S9. As with last year's Pixel 2, Google is further flexing its artificial-intelligence muscle, with more and more local AI-driven features across every facet of the device, from the camera and smart Gmail replies to battery life and device control. "We've been very thoughtful about how we design phones, thinking about their purpose for consumers," said Mario Queiroz, head of Google's Pixel. "We want to make sure we have a the right balance between being really helpful but not intrusive, being delightful but not controlling, simple but not cumbersome." The Pixel devices look familiar on the outside, with a two-tone back that is now all glass with two finishes – polished at the top and etched at the bottom.

When Samsung revealed the Galaxy Note 9 back in August, it showed off new AI-powered camera features, like flaw detection and a scene optimizer to tune the exposure and color of a shot before you've captured it. When Apple launched the iPhone XS and XS Max last month, it talked a lot about how the new phone's AI-specific neural processor enabled better photos, especially Portrait pics. Now, it's Google's turn to boast about its AI-enhanced smartphone camera--and show how its software smarts and access to vast networks of data give it a leg up on the competition. Earlier today Google announced its new Google Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL smartphones. The new phones were expected (and had been leaked weeks beforehand), but since Google makes the vast majority of its revenue from digital advertising, any new hardware launch from the company piques a particular kind of interest. Google may not sell nearly as many phones as its flagship competitors do, but it knows that if it's going to compete at all in the high-end smartphone market, it has to have a killer camera.

An artificial intelligence system that can tell the difference between real and fake news -- often with better success rates than its human counterparts -- has been developed by researchers at the University of Michigan. Such a system may hep social media platforms, search engines, and news aggregators filter out articles meant to misinform. "As anyone else, we have been disturbed by the negative effect that fake news can have in major political events [and] daily life," Rada Mihalcea, a UM computer science professor who developed the system, told Digital Trends. "My group has done a significant amount of work on deception detection for nearly ten years. We saw an opportunity to address a major societal problem through the expertise we accumulated over the years."