For many years, effective voice-based search technologies have eluded businesses that have tried to bring next-generation input methods to customers. Confined to basic navigation and so-called'magic words', command-based speech systems have been ineffective and hard for consumers to use. The widespread adoption of smartphones and tablets, and their minimised keyboards, has led to a renewed interest in this genre of technology however, with Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa and Google Now's'OK Google' progressing beyond basic menu navigation functions and striking a chord with consumers and businesses alike. In fact, any device with a microphone has potential for speech based commands, and can become an intelligent discovery system that uses a sophisticated entertainment brain to understand customer desires. This technology is important and under-explored by the TV industry, which often appears to have been left behind in terms of intuitive discovery functionality.

Additionally they used 3-D printing to replicate the body of Alexis Ohanian, infusing it with their proprietary Artificial Intelligence engine. "There's a lack of qualified IT professionals here in Armenia", said Dr. J.P. Hagopian, the CEO of 1AI Solutions. "We need to hire people, but we simply can't find enough good candidates. At some point our HR manager said that we should clone one of the high-performing Silicon Valley guys. She was kidding, but the idea stuck."

Stephon Alexander is a theoretical physicist and jazz musician.

On a post-apocalyptic 2077 Earth, Tech 49 named'Jack' (played by Tom Cruise) works with drones to protect the fusion generators fueling colonists relocating to Saturn's moon. Hostile aliens capture, reprogram and arm one of the drones with a nuclear weapon. "You can't blame yourself… Drones are unreliable… Sometimes things go wrong." Sixty-two years earlier (in 2015), Google's new CEO Sundar Pichai (below) inherited the home planet of the Alphabet universe from Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Per Pichai, the post-mobile Google is "normalizing" home and car computer interactivity.

Amazon's Echo speakers have a ton of smart capabilities, but until recently, playing music from any service other than Prime Music required telling the device which service to use each time. Now, users may have noticed an option to set Pandora or Spotify as its default music player. If you have one of the Alexa-connected devices, then you can go into its control app on the web or a mobile device and look under settings to switch the default away from Amazon. Once it's set, just talk normally to the speaker, "Amazon/Alexa play (artists/song/etc.)" and it will play from the proper service.

The winners of this year's aerial photography competition run by online site Dronestagram have been announced. The winning pictures taken using drone cameras were selected from thousands of entries by the judges, including National Geographic Deputy Director Patrick Witty and Emanuela Ascoli, photo editor of National Geographic, France. Here we present the winning images from three categories.

Washington University in Saint Louis researchers demonstrated their upgraded camera by pointing laser light onto a printout of a toy car to create a movie of the light reaching different portions of the car at different times. A new approach to high-speed photography could help capture the clearest-ever footage of light pulses, explosions or neurons firing in the brain, according to a team of ultrafast camera developers. The technique involves shooting 100 billion frames per second in a single exposure without an external light source. That means, for example, there would be no need to set off multiple explosions just to gather enough data to create a video reconstructing exactly how chemicals react to create the blast. A team of Washington University in Saint Louis researchers introduced their "single-shot compressed ultrafast photography" camera two years ago.

Apple has released the first public test version of iOS 10 and Sierra, its new MacOS software. The iOS update brings a new look complete with a radical overhaul of the messages app offering new animations and emoji, while Sierra brings Siri to the Mac for the first time. The products, available as free updates, were announced at Apple's WWDC event in September. The iOS update brings a new look complete with a radical overhaul of the messages app offering new animations and emoji, while Sierra brings Siri to the Mac for the first time. To sign up for Apple's beta program, simply visit the beta site.

Cover stories offer a look at the process behind the art on the cover: who made it, how it got made, and why. Editing photographs for Science is always exciting, but I had never encountered anything like the challenge of photographing the tiny transparent "ray" on the cover of this week's issue. I was fascinated to learn about this scientific achievement but worried about the cover. Photograph a tiny transparent device that moves in response to light? This was going to require creativity, problem-solving, patience, and luck.

Every year, Apple fans around the world line up to buy the newest iPhone the minute it goes on sale. But Apple's software updates for the iPhone, which the company usually reveals during its annual developer's conference, are met with far less fanfare. This is largely because Apple's new software releases, as important as they may be for keeping your iPhone fast and secure, have recently been minor upgrades. Apple's iOS 8 introduced iCloud Drive for accessing files across multiple devices and a new Health app to house fitness data from several fitness apps; iOS 9 brought Apple's streaming music service and a slightly improved version of Siri. While helpful, these additions didn't alter the overall iPhone experience in a significant way.