Google Home has come under fire after slipping a promo in for the movie'Beauty and the Beast' while sharing information about several of its owners' days. Many Reddit and Twitter users have reported hearing an'advertisement' for the opening day of the film after using the configuration'My Day' when speaking to the virtual assistant. Following information about the weather, commute and daily reminders, the AI seamless said'By the way, Disney's live action Beauty and the Beast opens today'. Commute: Hear an overview of traffic to work and an estimated travel time. Reminders: Hear a list of reminders that you have set for the day.

Google Home users got a surprise on Thursday when their virtual assistants cheerily mentioned that the live-action remake of "Beauty and the Beast" is opening in theaters this weekend. The ad seems to pop up when users ask for a rundown of their day, which kicks off the Home's "My Day" feature. That feature is supposed to offer users information about the weather, their calendars and relevant news. "By the way, Disney's live action'Beauty and The Beast' opens today," it says. "In this version of the story, Belle is the inventor instead of Maurice. That rings truer, if you ask me. For some more movie fun, ask me something about Belle."

Tune in April 7 and find out how to provide stellar customer care with social media in our free webinar. Artificial intelligence has quickly become part of our daily routine -- it powers everything from simple features like automatic image tagging on Facebook and purchase prediction on Amazon to more complex systems like smart cars and connected homes. We can even thank AI for HBO's hit TV series, Westworld, a sci-fi thriller about an amusement park populated with AI-powered robots called "hosts," that dominated the cultural zeitgeist this past fall. While the AI technology we interact with today gives us a hint at what's to come, it's actually Westworld that spells out the future most clearly. Before I get ahead of myself let me clarify: I don't foresee an apocalyptic robot takeover happening any time soon (or ever for that matter).

There are very few writers and directors like Mamoru Oshii. Having worked in both live action and animation, he has been a pioneering figure in both. What with Ghost in the Shell receiving a lot of attention as of late, I thought it best to discuss some of his work with the man himself. For most viewers of anime, Oshii is known for his early work on things like Urusei Yatsura and Patlabor. However, he is arguably more widely known for directing the 1995 anime movie adaptation of Ghost in the Shell and its subsequent sequel.

The Major's journey to define her own humanity is one of the main thrusts of the movie's narrative. Back in 1995, Mamoru Oshii and his team took on the task of adapting Masamune Shirow's very successful manga Ghost in the Shell into an anime movie. The result was a film that not only captivated the likes of James Cameron but also inspired much of the Matrix trilogy. Well, now it's back on Blu-ray but this release is a bit of a mixed bag. The premise of the movie has the cyber security agency Section 9 try and track down a notorious hacker called the Puppet Master.

With growing criticism over misinformation in search results, Google is taking a harder look at potentially "upsetting" or "offensive" content. SAN FRANCISCO -- With growing criticism over misinformation in search results, Google is taking a harder look at potentially "upsetting" or "offensive" content, tapping humans to aid its computer algorithms to deliver more factually accurate and less inflammatory results. The humans are Google's 10,000 independent contractors who work as what Google calls quality raters. They are given searches based on real queries to score the results, and they operate based on guidelines provided by Google. On Tuesday they were handed a new one: to hunt for "Upsetting-Offensive" content such as hate or violence against a group of people, racial slurs or offensive terminology, graphic violence including animal cruelty or child abuse or explicit information about harmful activities such as human trafficking, according to guidelines posted by Google. The goal: to steer people with queries such as "did the Holocaust happen" to trustworthy websites and not to websites that engage in falsehoods or hate speech.

We've seen many buzzwordy innovations in technology over the last decade, from cloud computing to big data to microservices and beyond - but artificial intelligence (AI) by far has the most buzzword baggage. On the one hand, AI is perhaps the most revolutionary set of innovations since the transistor. But on the other, the bad press surrounding it continues to mount, perhaps even faster than the innovations themselves. We didn't suffer this kind of PR nightmare with the cloud, or the web, or even client/server. In fact, AI has an unprecedented set of PR challenges that threaten to sink the entire movement.

Hangovers are a fixture of South by Southwest. Free branded booze abounds, turning late nights into too-early mornings filled with product demos and repetitive panels. But determined marketers and wide-eyed founders pitch on through the pain, in the unbridled belief they might just be SXSW's next breakout star. But this year, the conference itself feels a lot like a hangover. It's as if the coastal elites who attend each year finally woke up with a serious case of the Sunday scaries, realizing that the many apps, platforms, and doodads SXSW has launched and glorified over the years haven't really made the world a better place.

Adelyn Zhou is a founder and CMO of TOPBOTS, a platform specialising in connecting large enterprise companies and small businesses to bot and artificial intelligence (AI) service providers and vendors. TOPBOTS helps their clients implement an AI strategy and also lead interactive workshops to train personnel in this new hot field. Here she explains how publishers should be developing chatbot strategy. A chatbot is a computer program that you can talk to using your voice (like Siri or Alexa) or text (as in Facebook Messenger or on Slack). Chatbots and bots vary in their levels of sophistication.

I'm a huge fan of the original "Alien" franchise, largely because of Sigourney Weaver's performance and the crucial part technology plays in its lore. Not only does this tech allow humans to traverse immense distances to reach alien-infested worlds, but it provides them with androids: perfect robotic assistants so advanced that it's extremely difficult to distinguish them from human crew. In fact, they're superior to their human companions in many aspects, from their superhuman strength to their refined motor skills. As a part of promoting the upcoming sci-fi horror film "Alien: Covenant," (in theaters May 19), 21st Century Fox unit FOX, 1.34% Twentieth Century Fox released its branded short film "Meet Walter," starring Michael Fassbender. It introduces Walter, the latest synthetic android, with intelligence powered by AMD's AMD, -0.85% Ryzen and Radeon processors and manufactured by the film's fictional corporation, Weyland-Yutani.