A year or so ago a new type of drone hit the (preorder) market. It was the self-flying camera drone – a device that promised to combine camera and AI technology to create a drone that you could essentially throw in the air to follow you around and take photos and videos. Some of these drones include Snap, Lily, Staaker and Hover. Most of these companies have raised tens of millions of dollars in either equity or preorders, but have taken a while to actually ship a product. But today Hover is announcing that its first camera drone – named Passport – is going on sale today for 549 – a 50 discount on its eventual retail price of 599.

Looking to drum up consumer excitement, the tech company hosted an event in San Francisco on Tuesday to unveil a series of products, including two new phones, a virtual reality headset and the Chromecast Ultra. The flagship announcement was the introduction of Pixel, the first Google phone to carry exclusively Google branding. The company called it the "first phone made by Google inside and out." The device is poised to take on the iPhone with a built-in artificially intelligent assistant, 4K video and other bells and whistles. Here's a closer look at everything you need to know: Google (GOOG) announced a new Pixel line of phones -- the 5-inch Pixel ( 649) and 5.5-inch Pixel XL ( 769).

Fisher plays a recently divorced mother of two teens and out-of-work art critic determined to cook a traditional festive dinner with all the trimmings in her sunny Southern California home for her smartphone-addicted friends and extended family. But taming the turkey proves to be the least of her challenges when her neighborhood's cell reception suddenly goes dead, which proceeds to bring out the worst in some already less than exemplary behavior from her preoccupied houseguests. Unfortunately many viewers will have experienced their own connectivity issues long before those characters do. Although there's a genuinely cozy rapport between Fisher and Stevens, the other cast members, including Daphne Zuniga, Nick Court, Natasha Gregson Wagner and Michael Muhney, have a tougher time trying to make all the overwritten, self-consciously quirky dialogue believably their own. Filmmaker Russell Brown clearly had something pertinent he wished to say about our plugged-in, tuned-out obsession with the Internet and was obviously going for a Luis Buñuel-Robert Altman style of social commentary here.

At Data By The Bay in May, we saw a great talk by Netflix's Justin Basilico: Recommendations for Building Machine Learning Software. Justin describes some principles for effectively developing machine learning algorithms and integrating them into software products. We found ourselves nodding violently in agreement, and we wanted to recapitulate a few of his points that resonated most strongly with us, based on our experience working with data science teams in other organizations. Justin emphasizes that "developing models is iterative" and experimentation is important. He also suggests "avoiding dual implementations" so it's easy to use a model in production once it's been built, without a re-implementation step.

News[News] White House publishes Report on the Future of Artificial Intelligence (whitehouse.gov) I have a policy paper I need to do for my political science class, and I chose AI and Government as my topic. Now I know where to begin! This just came out yesterday, so there should be more comment published in mainstream media soon.

The opening screen of Variable State's new video "feature" "Virginia" welcomes players to a small town named Kingdom. It's laid before us as if it were a board game, with little trails leading to a cave or a gas station, a schoolyard or an observatory, all of it presented with the simple cheery look of a brightly filled-in coloring book. Come in, stay awhile and bask in the beauty of small-town life, it seems to say. Press play, however, and things get twisted, and not with the typical things-are-not-what-they-seem subversion. Indeed, the first sign that something is out of the norm comes from the word "feature."

Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Recode by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, executive editor at The Verge and editor at large of Recode. I've been familiar with Siri longer than most people. Way back in 2009 -- two years before Apple incorporated the intelligent digital assistant into the iPhone -- I stood onstage with the inventors of the service while they debuted it at a tech conference I co-produced. At the time, it was just a third-party app on the iPhone App Store. Not long thereafter, Apple bought the company, and the assistant reemerged in 2011 with a splashy introduction as a core feature of the iPhone 4s.

Robot" star Christian Slater has dished out behind-the-scenes details about the show, including his fear that he was not going to appear in the series after Season 1, according to IndieWire. "It was something I was a little concerned about, because I was enjoying playing the part so much," Slater, who plays Mr. Robot in the series, told IndieWire's Michael Schneider in an interview for the Screen Actors Guild?American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. Slater, 47, said that towards the end of "Mr. Robot" Season 1, when it was revealed that Mr. Robot was Eliot's (Rami Malek) deceased father, he feared he would not be called back to work, believing his stint was done. "And it definitely would've been a bummer if that had been it … so when we did the graveyard scene in Episode 9, I didn't know what was going to happen in Episode 10.

Randomly generating quantized beats and melodies is likely to sound the same - if not better - than this, especially with some basic heuristics as far as music theory is concerned. Maybe I've missed something that makes this neat research, but I feel like there has to be some merit to the result, which in this case sadly sucks.

"I wish I could touch you," Theodore says, laying in bed. Until she speaks up, tentatively. "How would you touch me?" It's a famously poignant scene from the movie Her, as the character Theodore is about to make vocal love to an artificial intelligence living in his ear. But according to half a dozen experts I interviewed, ranging from industrial designer Gadi Amit to the usability guru Don Norman, in-ear assistants aren't science fiction. In fact, a notable pile of discreet, wireless earbuds enabling just this idea are coming to market now. Sony recently released its first in-ear assistant, the Xperia Ear. Intel showed off a similar proof-of-concept last year.