Amazon is launching its Spotify rival, Amazon Music Unlimited, in the UK with a headline price of £9.99 a month and access to a library of "over 40 million" songs. Those figures are comparable to competitors like Spotify and Apple Music, but where Amazon is focusing its competition is on a pair of special offers, as well as the tight integration with its own hardware ecosystem. The service is cheaper for those with an Amazon Prime subscription, the company's all-you-can-eat free delivery package. The monthly cost drops by £2, to £7.99, and an annual payment plan is available for £79 a year, taking the equivalent monthly fee to £6.58. That's how Amazon is hoping to entice users to upgrade from its other free streaming service, Amazon Prime Music.

Other than maybe the NSA, nobody knows more about you than Google. It's got a read on where you are, what you're doing, what you're thinking and watching and searching for and chatting with your friends about. Which means nobody should be better equipped to soundtrack every second of your life than Google Play Music. Starting today, the company's taking full advantage of its smarts to deliver you the sounds you want, when you want them. All you have to do is press play.

Beginning on Monday, streaming music service Google Play Music will relaunch with an unparalleled scare-the-pants-off-you artificial intelligence function that can deliver playlists based on your location, what you are doing -- or what mood you are in. Thanks to its hold on your e-mail, calendars, maps, traffic app and even the motion sensor on your phone, Google can deliver music to get you ready to work out at the gym, ease into a vacation and even pick you up if you've been complaining about being blue. "Google understands the kind of place you're at, so home means something different from the gym, a bar, a park or an airport," Elias Roman, product manager at Google Play Music, told The Post. "We understand activity so with device sensors we understand differences between driving, running and biking and weather that drives what we do and what we want to feel like," said Roman, who sold intelligent streaming service Songza to Google in 2014. The relaunched streaming service, with its spooky smart AI, is aimed at "making people feel how they want to feel." In addition, Google Play Music understands what is called characteristic popularity -- which means it knows what the people in your city are listening to and can serve up similar music.

It's long overdue but Google Play Music is getting a makeover. The search giant confirmed today that it is in the process of updating its Android, iOS and Web offerings with bright new UI that relies on machine learning to deliver what's relevant to you. Its AI-like algorithms will identify where you are and what you're doing, also factoring in things like the weather, to serve up playlists and track recommendations that you didn't know you wanted but capture your mood at the time. "When you opt in, we'll deliver personalized music based on where you are and why you are listening -- relaxing at home, powering through at work, commuting, flying, exploring new cities, heading out on the town, and everything in between," Google says in a blog post. "Your workout music is front and center as you walk into the gym, a sunset soundtrack appears just as the sky goes pink, and tunes for focusing turn up at the library."

Leon Russell called his best-known composition "A Song for You," but a better title might've been "A Song for You -- and You and You and You and You." The heartfelt ballad, instantly recognizable from its opening cascade of delicate piano notes, first appeared on Russell's self-titled debut album in 1970. That's a decade after this singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist -- who died Sunday at age 74 -- moved to Los Angeles from his native Oklahoma and quickly established himself as a go-to session player. Since then, though, "A Song for You" has been recorded and performed hundreds of times by artists as diverse as Donny Hathaway, the Carpenters, Willie Nelson, Amy Winehouse and the rapper Bizzy Bone. In 1994, Ray Charles won a Grammy for his moving rendition of the tune.

Want to see how Hollywood takes on Ghost in the Shell outside of a handful of tiny video clips? You just got your chance. Paramount has released a full-length trailer for its spin on the anime/manga classic, and it's at least interesting -- if not necessarily what purists would want. It's visually stunning, with more than a few moments that will remind you of at least the 1995 animated movie. It's mainly the casting and unanswered questions that might leave you on the fence ahead of the movie's March 31st, 2017 launch date.

Earlier this year, when Amy Adams was in Montreal working on the sci-fi movie, Arrival, out today, she hung out with linguist Jessica Coon. In the film, Adams plays a linguist tasked by the United States government with deciphering a visiting aliens' language. The film's producers tapped Coon, an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics at McGill University, as a scientific advisor because she specializes in studying languages spoken by relatively few people, notably Mayan tongues in Central America. Coon says chatting about her work--analyzing the structure of rare languages, working in the field--with Adams is probably the "most glamorous thing" she will ever do in her academic life. For Coon there's a sense of urgency in her work, since many obscure languages are fast going extinct. She thinks that if linguists don't analyze the rarer languages of the world's 6,000 while they still can, they won't be able to understand the nature of human language; what linguists do understand, she says, is derived from the accessible languages of Western Europe.

The very first thing you'll want to do with your new Amazon Echo is learn a few basic voice commands. Saying "Alexa: stop!" will immediately cancel whatever activity is going on; to make music louder or quieter, say "Alexa: volume up" or "Alexa: volume down". You can jump to a specific volume level by saying a number from one to 10: "Alexa: volume one" will turn the audio down to a whisper, while "Alexa: mute" will silence the Echo altogether. Once you've got the hang of these, you can start experimenting with more adventurous commands, safe in the knowledge that you can always cancel or silence any unwanted activity. Perhaps you don't like the name Alexa – or perhaps you have a family member of that name and don't want to cause confusion.

IBM Research have created an open-source artificial intelligence robot called TJ Bot. Downloading the source via GitHub – coders can 3D print or Laser Cut the template, attach a Raspberry Pi and integrate it with IBM Watson API's. These include Watson Tone Analyzer, Watson Speech to Text API and Watson Conversation. TJ Bot is an example of'embodied cognition' – the idea of embedding artificial intelligence into objects in our everyday lives.

Before Amazon's second-generation Fire TV Stick showed up for review, I thought it could be the cheap streaming device to beat. Amazon has claimed a 30 percent performance boost over the original Fire TV Stick, whose biggest problem was sluggishness. Apps took a long time to load, and were prone to bouts of freezing and stuttering. The device didn't seem built to last in an age of increasingly sophisticated streaming apps such as Sling TV and PlayStation Vue. The 2016 Fire TV Stick--still priced at $40--alleviates those issues, but it doesn't completely solve them.