Virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa are useful for a lot of things, like telling you what the weather's going to be or reminding you of an upcoming calendar appointment. But they can be entertaining too, providing the occasional fun fact or playing that hit song from Beyonce. Or, when you want a little levity in an otherwise crappy day, telling some really corny dad jokes. You've probably heard them before. Ask Siri, Alexa, Google or Cortana to tell you a joke, and you'll likely hear something like this: "I couldn't figure out why a baseball kept getting larger. "What do you call a talking dinosaur?

Vaio Corp., the Sony Corp. computer spinoff, said Tuesday it will begin showing virtual reality movies in a theater in the capital's Shinjuku district on July 2. Vaio, which took over Sony's personal computer business, is hoping to expand the VR market by combining the realistic visual experience with the theater's powerful audio equipment. It will be the first time for a VR movie to be played in a theater anywhere in Japan, the company said. The technology has been mainly used in conjunction with video game consoles and theme park attractions. VR allows viewers with special goggles to see images in 3D so they feel as if they are part of the movie. Vaio and studio operator Toei Company Ltd. said they will start with short films, including the popular animation "Neon Genesis Evangelion" and a spinoff of "Osomatsu Kun" created by the late manga artist Fujio Akatsuka, when the VR campaign kicks off at the Shinjuku Wald 9 theater. "We want to increase the value of going to a movie theater," Hidenobu Muramatsu, a Toei official, told a news conference in Tokyo.

Last November, we released Portrait, an iOS app that helps create amazing, stylized selfies and portraits instantly. With over a million downloads and many more portrait images created, we had a nice confirmation of our vision. The central component of Portrait is an AI that is trained to clip portraits from the background, a technique we are eager to further improve and refine. In fact, Portrait helped us to explore a novel technique for image editing, as we were able to leverage a new powerful data set in photography: depth data. We began feeding our AI models with the depth data from the iPhone Xs TrueDepth camera and had one goal in mind: to infer depth information for portrait imagery, or bringing three-dimensionality into a two-dimensional photo.

Have you noticed that AI has finally passed into everyday reality? No one needs to reference science fiction apologetically to talk about it. And now that it's real, our questions about it need to get real in response. No, I don't mean, "Will the robots rise up and take over?" Rather, now that AI is growing up and gaining power, our questions have to grow up with it.

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