Now you can use Chatbots to get news and information in a personalized pattern. Famous media companies like CNN and Fox news have already launched their News Chatbot on platforms like Facebook Messenger, Line and Kik as well as on voice-activated devices like Amazon's Alexa. Facebook has unveiled new capabilities for businesses and publishers on Messenger, enabling users to chat with CNN to get breaking news and personalized stories. People will now be able to chat with the companies and publishers like they would do with their friends. CNN is using chatterbots for Facebook Messenger to interact with users in a natural and human-like way.

Since its founding nearly 15 years ago, Sonos has amassed a devoted following among audio enthusiasts for its high-end, WiFi-connected speakers. But now its business is endangered by a new breed of speakers powered by artificial intelligence assistants from the likes of Google and Amazon. They're starting to eat into the company's bottom line. In the midst of that change, Sonos cofounder John MacFarlane is stepping down as CEO after leading the company since 2002. Sonos president Patrick Spence will be taking over as CEO.

Whether they're in marketing or some other discipline, it's odds-on that when artificial intelligence in the workplace is mentioned to somebody, one of the first thoughts to leap into his or her head is, "Will it take away my job?" And people have been asking it for a really long time. The tension between machine learning and human intellect has been routinely reflected in popular media: In our past two entries in this series, we did call-outs to an Avengers movie, Star Trek and Mad Men for their takes on AI as a nefarious change agent who'll suck the humanism out of our lives. But as far back as the 1950s, the notion that computers might supplant us in the workplace was very much on people's minds. So much so it was a comic premise of a 1957 Tracy-Hepburn comedy, Desk Set.

After 14 years at the helm, Sonos CEO and co-founder John MacFarlane has stepped down. He has also resigned from the company's board or directors, but will remain with Sonos to work on other projects and serve as a mentor to employees. MacFarlane's transition is the latest in a handful of personnel moves that began last year. Sonos announced layoffs last March shortly before product head Marc Whitten left the company. Former president and chief commercial officer Patrick Spence will take over as CEO.

The federal government spent millions of taxpayer dollars studying if women can pick Barbie out of a lineup, creating robot flowers, and building a computer that binge watches "Desperate Housewives," according to a new report on wasteful spending. Sen. Jeff Flake, R.-Ariz., on Tuesday released Wastebook: PORKémon Go, the latest chronicle of waste in a series started by former Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn, a Republican. The report covers 50 items and more than $5 billion in spending on outrageous government programs and frivolous projects. "Within mere days, the national debt will top $20 trillion, the largest amount ever owed by any nation in history, and the federal government's authority to borrow expires in March," Flake wrote in the introduction to the report. "But rather than making a long overdue resolution to be fiscally responsible, the promises from Washington are to spend even more."

From a nation defined by cricket, steam engines and horses to a celebrity-obsessed, football-mad country, Britain has undergone huge cultural changes between 1800 and 1950. The history of the country is well-documented in books, but a new analysis has used a different source, newspapers, to pinpoint exactly when these shifts in culture took place. A group of computer scientists have developed artificial intelligence software to analyse articles from 120 British newspapers between 1800 and 1950, and revealed key turning points in our culture. In 2011, a huge analysis of five million books taken from over 200 years provided the first clues to what insights can be gained from analysing words on such a huge scale. But the project was criticised for only counting words, and ignored the context they were based in.

UK ISPs will begin sending out emails to subscribers later this month, warning them of movie, TV and music piracy identified on their connection and pointing them to legal content sources. Providers confirmed to ISPreview the voluntary programme will kick off later this month, with Virgin Media offering more details on how it'll work. If the ISP can link the IP address with a subscriber account, it'll send an email expected to contain an itemisation of the media in question, as well as links to bona fide content sources and other educational, anti-piracy resources. Torrents are the main target here, since it's easy to identify IP addresses due to the peer-to-peer nature of the network (as long as there's no VPN at play). Tracking people that turn to other sources of illegal media, such as direct download sites, is more complex.

Director Denis Villeneuve's "Arrival" may be an alien movie, but you won't hear the sounds of warp speed, Martian death rays or beeping robots in it, say supervising sound editor Sylvain Bellemare and re-recording mixer Bernard Gariépy Strobl. "Denis really insisted on having a sound that was not electronic," Bellemare says of the film starring Amy Adams as a linguist trying to communicate with an alien species. "He wanted to do another type of science fiction. So he wanted to use an approach of [making] the sound really organic." Bellemare and Gariépy Strobl knew what they were in for, having worked together on several previous films, including Villeneuve's 2008 short "Next Floor."

Reality was more ambitious than rumor when AirTV made its big debut at CES 2017. Instead of a networked antenna tuner that feeds broadcast channels into the Sling TV app on other devices, AirTV wants to be the complete package. It's a $100 Android-based box with an optional antenna hookup, letting you stream Sling TV channels and free over-the-air broadcasts into a unified interface, which also includes recommendations from Netflix. The remote control strives for similar harmony, with TV power and volume controls, dedicated guide and previous channel buttons, voice search from Google, and shortcuts to Netflix and Google Play Movies & TV. As importantly, AirTV isn't just a product, but a new subsidiary of Dish Network, which also operates the Sling TV service.

In recent years, computers have gotten remarkably good at recognizing speech and images: Think of the dictation software on most cellphones, or the algorithms that automatically identify people in photos posted to Facebook. But recognition of natural sounds -- such as crowds cheering or waves crashing -- has lagged behind. That's because most automated recognition systems, whether they process audio or visual information, are the result of machine learning, in which computers search for patterns in huge compendia of training data. Usually, the training data has to be first annotated by hand, which is prohibitively expensive for all but the highest-demand applications. Sound recognition may be catching up, however, thanks to researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).