After more than a year of rumors and vague comments from Samsung leadership, the Galaxy Home, Samsung's Bixby-powered smart speaker, is finally official. Samsung briefly showed off the device at today's Galaxy Note 9 launch event in Brooklyn, but the company left us with more questions than answers. We don't know when it'll launch; how much it'll cost; what music services, if any, it supports besides Spotify; and, perhaps most importantly, what Bixby will be capable of when the Galaxy Home goes on sale. Like Apple did with the HomePod, Samsung is touting the Galaxy Home first and foremost as an excellent listening speaker, with multidirectional tweeters and a full subwoofer as well as some neat audio-optimization tricks. Spotify is Samsung's new streaming-music partner, which means you'll be able to control Spotify music playback with Bixby.

Samsung is wading into the smart-speaker market with an entirely new product called the Galaxy Home. The speaker has a large, rounded body and sits on a tripod -- a very different design from competing speakers offered by Amazon.com, Samsung announced a partnership with Spotify, which is the default music player for the Galaxy Home. The speaker will be able to pick up streams from a Galaxy phone and hand it off to the speaker. The company didn't say much about the Galaxy Home apart from acknowledging its existence, and promising more details will come at its developers conference in November.

It uses artificial intelligence to identify elements of a photo, such as scene and subject, to automatically classify it into one of 20 categories and instantly optimise it based on the category. If the first shot doesn't come out right, the Galaxy Note9 lets users know there's something wrong, so they can take another picture without losing the moment. An immediate notification will appear if the image is blurry, the subject blinked, there is a smudge on the lens, or there's backlight impacting the quality of the image. It also comes with advanced noise reduction technology, and a Dual Aperture lens, which adjusts to light just like the human eye. That mans that, no matter the lighting conditions, the camera should deliver a crystal-clear shot. The Galaxy Note9 builds on Samsung Electronics' legacy of innovative camera technologies with an intelligent camera that takes the work out of capturing a photo New functions including Scene Optimizer and Flaw Detection utilize artificial intelligence to help users get the most out of the device's advanced camera Galaxy Note9's Flaw Detection automatically scans it for flaws and notifies you if any are found.

Thursday's announcement in New York comes about a month before Apple is expected to unveil new iPhones. There's been speculation -- unconfirmed by Apple -- that all new iPhones will ditch the home button and fingerprint sensor and rely entirely on facial-recognition technology found in the iPhone X. The Note 9 will still have a fingerprint sensor on the back of the phone. In a jab at Apple, Samsung executives also frequently emphasize that their phones have standard headphone jacks, which newer iPhones no longer do.

Getty Images has released an artificial intelligence (AI) tool for publishers that recommends the best choice of images to accompany a news story. 'Panels by Getty Images' uses customisable filters and a self-improving algorithm that learns how an editor selects an image and optimises its performance over time. "The AI starts working for you as soon as you copy/paste your article into the tool," says Getty Images senior vice president of data and insights Andrew Hamilton. Artificial intelligence allows natural language processing, an established technique used to understand written text and interpreting or deriving insights from it. The tool works like a picture editor -- it reads the text and tries to understand what the story is about. It then offers the first round of picture suggestions based not only on individual keywords but the meaning of sentences and paragraphs.

What will happen when we've built machines as intelligent as us? According to the experts this incredible feat will be achieved in the year 2062 – a mere 44 years away – which certainly begs the question: what will the world, our jobs, the economy, politics, war, and everyday life and death, look like then? Fortunately, Toby Walsh, Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence (AI) at UNSW has done the research for us. An avid sci-fi fan from childhood, Walsh, who also leads the Algorithmic Decision Theory group at Data61 – Australia's Centre of Excellence for ICT Research, has long been fascinated by robots, machines and the future. In 2017, he published his first book, It's Alive!, in which he tells the story of AI and how it is already affecting our societies, economies and interactions.

Someday, Boris Sofman wants families to sit down and debate: cat, dog or robot? Sofman is the chief executive and founder of Anki, a robotics company that's made its mark in the toy world since launching its first product in 2013, a set of smart racing cars. It followed that product's success with a toy robot called Cozmo in 2016, which the company says is the best-selling toy on Amazon in the United States, the United Kingdom and France. A new product, Vector, launched Tuesday on Kickstarter and offers the first hint of Anki's broader consumer robotics ambitions. "Our north star . . . is to have a robot in every home," Sofman said in an interview with The Washington Post.

In my many years testing all sorts of gadgets, few things have elicited as much spontaneous joy as Anki's Cozmo, its adorable robot for kids. Mostly, that was because it had a personality. Behind all of the sensors, cameras and other hardware, there was a team of animators breathing life into it. Now, Anki is taking everything it learned from Cozmo and putting it in a bigger, more powerful home robot: Vector. And unlike Cozmo, you won't need a phone to play with it.

Avocado toast is the hottest lunch trend to hit my apartment in years, and Lenovo just kicked it to a new level. After sticking Lenovo's Smart Display in my kitchen this week, my snack of choice has only gotten better, and I couldn't be happier. With the screen's built-in recipe search and step-by-step guide to cooking, I learned that rubbing the bread with some cut garlic adds a lot of flavor, and finishing it off with a sprinkling of parsley, lime, and chopped tomatoes does wonders. I may even toss a fried egg on my green toast this week. I could have looked up all these avocado toast recipes on my Android phone, but I never did.

Twitter will not suspend Alex Jones or Infowars because they have not broken any rules, its CEO has said. Just about every other major technology company – including Apple, Facebook, YouTube and Spotify – have all acted to either completley ban or punish the controversial conspiracy theorist radio host. But Twitter says that his posts are not in contravention of any rules and so he will stay up. That is despite Jones having used the platform to amplify his beliefs, which include claims that the Sandy Hook school shooting did not actually happen at all and that those mourning murdered loved ones were paid actors. 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.