A quarter of voice technology users say they've had a sexual fantasy about their voice assistant, a new study has revealed. Even more users, 37 per cent, say that they love their voice assistant so much that they wish it were a real person. The findings could have an impact on how brands such as Google and Amazon design their voice technologies for human interaction. Pictured is Theodore Twombly, played by Joaquin Phoenix in the movie Her. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) has recently cited two studies that investigate these allegations, which have discovered that'both women and men find the female voice welcoming and warm,' reports Joanna Stern with WSJ.

Of course, it's true that we all use our phones to record video and shoot photos. The new Clips app lets you make professional-looking video clips in seconds that work brilliantly. When you open the app, the selfie camera is up and running, ready to record when you are. You can shoot in portrait or landscape orientation as the result is a square piece of footage. Choose Live Titles, an icon at the top left of the display, and when you press the red bar the app starts filming.

Streamlining workflows, automating mundane tasks, crunching more data, digging out insights and generating additional outputs are just a few of the mega-wins that can result from putting smart machines to work in the service of journalism. Innovators throughout the news industry are collaborating with technology companies and academic researchers to push the envelope in a number of related areas, affecting all points on the news value chain from news gathering to production and distribution. This report captures some of the major trends and use cases that are emerging so far. First, we address the larger concerns related to implementing artificial intelligence in the newsroom: What are the risks associated with unchecked algorithmic news generation? How will these technologies disrupt workflows?

It is a tide that never recedes. Day by day, year on year it grows. Estimates are currently at trillions of pieces and counting, with over 60% of the oceans being heavily contaminated with plastics. With each piece of plastic taking over 400 years to degrade, our oceans, all marine life, and even our own health and livelihoods are in real danger of drowning. We see evidence of the plastic tide on all our beaches and coastlines by ever growing amounts, with small plastic pieces increasing 2.5 fold in the last decade.

It was an epic date to witness--Wednesday, October 21st, 2015--Marty McFly and Emmett "Doc" Brown arriving in a time-traveling DeLorean from 1985. At least, that's what happens in Back to the Future: Part II, which debuted in theaters 26 years ago. In the movie, Michael J. Fox's iconic character, Marty, steps out of the time machine and into a futuristic 2015 filled with flying cars, hoverboards, self-drying jackets, and power-lacing Nikes. From the perspective of the real 2015, most of the things depicted in the movie's fanciful future still seem delightfully implausible. But one thing the film did get right is the use of artificial intelligence (A.I.) in 2015 as a customer service tool.

PR Content Social Search – With Trump's first full month in office behind us, we look at the rise of fake news and why mainstream media needs an urgent PR reboot; learn more about how to accurately measure top of funnel content engagement; and discover the latest trends on voice activated search and its impact on SEO best practice. Fake news and PR: why mainstream media needs an urgent reboot The rise of fake news – the practice of disseminating authentically packaged but false information in the expectation that it will be virally shared online – should be viewed with more than a sense of passing scepticism. According to The Edelman Trust Barometer 2017, released last month, levels of faith in traditional media have fallen, down 5% from 48% to 43% in just one year. Add to that, the increasing numbers according to a report by Reuters who turn to sites such as Facebook (1.13 billion daily active users) for their daily news, and we face the possibility of a misinformed decision-making majority with disastrous consequences for the nation, or world, at large. Some would argue that is already happening.

"Dimension 404" has been compared to "Black Mirror," but it seems the two shows may have more differences than similarities. "Dimension 404" and "Black Mirror" were both inspired by "The Twilight Zone," and they both tackle issues related to technology. For this reason, the two shows have been compared to each other, but they have a distinct difference. For one, Hulu's new science fiction drama is not as dark as Netflix's show. "Dimension 404" aims to give a lighter take on the science-fiction-horror genre.

We are excited to announce our new RL Tuner algorithm, a method for enchancing the performance of an LSTM trained on data using Reinforcement Learning (RL). We create an RL reward function that teaches the model to follow certain rules, while still allowing it to retain information learned from data. We use RL Tuner to teach concepts of music theory to an LSTM trained to generate melodies. When I joined Magenta as an intern this summer, the team was hard at work on developing better ways to train Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) to generate sequences of notes. As you may remember from previous posts, these models typically consist of a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network trained on monophonic melodies. This means that melodies are fed into the network one note at a time, and it is trained to predict the next note in the sequence.

Scared and confused – how consumers feel about the impending AI revolution. Government and industry are rushing to develop, deploy and adopt AI, with talk of robots taking over the world firmly regarded as tongue-in-cheek and the stuff of Hollywood movies. However, a new study has revealed that some robot fears are very much a reality among consumers, with these fears causing consumers to shy away from using AI-based technology. The Pegasystems survey of 6,000 customers across six countries found that close to three quarters (68%) of Brits express some sort of fear about AI, with almost one quarter (23%) worried about robots taking over the world. Further findings revealed the potential impact of these deep-rooted fears on businesses, with less than one in three (28%) of British consumers comfortable with businesses using AI to engage with them.

The Amazon Fire TV Stick has just been treated to an upgrade, pushing the best cheap streaming device on the market even further ahead of the competition. It was launched in the US some time ago, but has only just come to the UK, and brings with it a number of improvements that make it well worth buying, even if you already own an Amazon Fire TV Stick. Its headline feature is support for Alexa, Amazon's excellent voice assistant. This doesn't just enable users to track down TV shows, films and apps much, much faster than ever just by speaking to the voice-controlled remote, but also to accurately control playback without having to fiddle with any buttons. 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.