Reviewing a product designed to learn over time is like reviewing a newborn baby. So much functionality is dependent on artificial intelligence and machine learning, the only certainty is that it'll get smarter over time. Who knows what it'll end up being: A jack-of-all-trades? Or maybe just a creeper that records everything you say? At birth, it didn't have the ability to order you Domino's, play Spotify playlists, or get things from Amazon Prime.

USA TODAY'S Ed Baig compares Google Home to the Amazon Echo. Ask Google Assistant inside Google Home what it thinks of Amazon Echo's Alexa and you get a gracious reply: "I like Alexa's blue lights. Her voice is nice too." Civility aside, the standalone $129 Home speaker that becomes available Friday is Google's answer to the $179.99 Echo speaker, and a potentially strong answer at that, though Google is still in catchup mode and too often answered my voice queries with a "sorry I don't know how to help with that yet."

The Google Assistant was the big news from the company's I/O conference earlier this year, but it took months for Google's true Siri competitor to really arrive. First it was baked into the largely unnecessary Allo chat app, and then it showed up as a flagship feature on the new Pixel phones. Now Google Home is shipping, putting the Assistant a voice command away even when your phone is in your pocket. Its inspiration is obvious: The $129 Home directly takes on the Amazon Echo. Indeed, many of the features here are the same.

Like many tech enthusiasts, I've been using a $180 Amazon Echo intelligent speaker at my home for a year or more. And, while I love using it for some things -- playing music and podcasts, setting timers, and re-ordering items from Amazon -- I've come to realize that, like Apple's Siri and all other virtual assistants, its Alexa voice-driven artificial intelligence system disappoints a lot. So I was excited to test Google Home, the $129 Echo competitor that puts the search giant's much-touted new Google Assistant intelligence technology inside a small, but powerful Echo-like speaker and microphone unit. Surely, I thought, after collecting all that info about the world (and about me) for years and years, Google would crush Amazon in the home-intelligence race. But after nearly a week of using two Google Home units in two different rooms, my conclusions are decidedly mixed.

Google Home is an interesting product to review. In a way, it's just an internet-connected microphone and speaker array that draws all of its smarts from the cloud. As far as the AI experience goes, Home delivers -- but that's no surprise, given that Google already has long had a lead over competitors like Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa and Microsoft's Cortana. Because its intelligence is in the cloud, it will also only get smarter over time (which makes these devices rather future-proof if you're thinking about them as an investment). We've already written quite a bit about the Google Assistant, which is at the core of the Home experience.

The man versus machine dichotomy has been a staple of pop culture for decades. From 2001: A Space Odyssey to Blade Runner to Terminator to The Matrix and beyond, film makers have envisioned what the world would look like if artificial intelligence took over. However, a new mindset is taking shape -- the era of AI-human hybrid intelligence. This combination of a human brain and a computer intelligence is known as a centaur. The centaur model sparked the growth of freestyle chess, a context in which Garry Kasparov concluded that "weak human machine better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkable, superior to a strong human machine inferior process."

Have you seen sci-fi movies like A.I. Artificial Intelligence, a 2001 US science fiction drama directed by Steven Spielberg that portrays a childlike android programmed to love, or Bicentennial Man, which starred the late Robin Williams and was based on a 1976 novel by Isaac Asimov? Have you seen the movie Surrogates which starred Bruce Willis and portrayed a futuristic world where people live within the safety of their homes while their robotic surrogates carry on their daily chores? If yes, you are also likely to believe that machines endowed with artificial intelligence (AI) can emulate, or even surpass, human intelligence. However, nothing can be further from the truth, say researchers. "The frightening, futurist portrayals of artificial intelligence that dominate films and novels, and shape the popular imagination, are fictional… Unlike in the movies, there is no race of superhuman robots on the horizon or probably even possible," insists a Stanford University-hosted report.

Brandon is an author and deep learning developer. He has worked as Principal Data Scientist at Microsoft, as well as for DuPont Pioneer and Sandia National Laboratories. Brandon earned a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bayesian inference is a way to get sharper predictions from your data. It's particularly useful when you don't have as much data as you would like and want to juice every last bit of predictive strength from it. Although it is sometimes described with reverence, Bayesian inference isn't magic or mystical. And even though the math under the hood can get dense, the concepts behind it are completely accessible. In brief, Bayesian inference lets you draw stronger conclusions from your data by folding in what you already know about the answer. Bayesian inference is based on the ideas of Thomas Bayes, a nonconformist Presbyterian minister in London about 300 years ago. He wrote two books, one on theology, and one on probability.

China's fastest supercomputers have some clear goals, namely development of its artificial intelligence, robotics industries and military capability, says the U.S. But some of the early iterations of this effort seem a little weird. China recently deployed what it calls a "security robot" in a Shenzhen airport. It's named AnBot and patrols around the clock. Here's what AnBot looks like, according to a Chinese government newspaper, The People's Daily online.