Asking Apple's voice-activated assistant, Siri, what the company plans to unveil at its Worldwide Developer Conference on Tuesday elicits the response: "If I told you, they'd probably make me sit through product security again." Witty, perhaps, but Siri will have to supply more satisfying answers if it's going to convince customers, developers and investors that Apple is keeping pace with Google Now and Amazon's Alexa in one of the hottest emerging areas of tech: virtual personal assistants. Alongside updates to Apple Music and the company's mobile, watch and television operating systems, Apple will announce that for the first time it will let outside developers integrate Siri with their apps, according to a person familiar with the plans. READ MORE: * iPhone's Siri can'beatbox', in newly discovered trick * Siri learns to speak Kiwinglish * The women (and man) behind the voice of Siri Getting programmers on board is an essential step toward building tools that make Apple's devices more indispensable - such as apps that let you use voice commands on an iPhone or iPad to order a pizza or summon an Uber car, both of which Alexa can already do through the Echo in-home speaker. "Siri needs to grow up and get smarter, and by being in other apps it will get smarter because it will know more of what I do," said Carolina Milanesi, an analyst at Creative Strategies.

Coming off its first quarterly revenue decline in 13 years, Apple Inc. kicks off its annual developers' conference Monday in San Francisco facing questions about whether the company's best days are behind it. The focus of the weeklong Worldwide Developers Conference is expected to be on Siri, Apple's digital assistant. When Apple introduced Siri as an iPhone feature in 2011, it heralded a future of people finding information or completing tasks on their devices by speaking rather than typing or tapping. That vision of Siri hasn't fully materialized, leaving the door open for other technology companies to push into Apple's turf. Google parent Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. have all introduced voice-activated digital assistants that rely on artificial intelligence?technology that allows computers to understand inferences and context so they can make decisions like a human brain instead of following programmed instructions.

There's a short science fiction film that just made its debut online;it's about three people living in a dystopian future on a space station. Thomas Middleditch of Silicon Valley fame stars in it, opposite Elisabeth Gray and Humphrey Ker, who could all possibly be in a love triangle. Stuff Hollywood B-movies are made of. It's called Sunspring--and it was written entirely by artificial intelligence (AI). Having been written by a neural network called long short-term memory dubbed Benjamin, the very fact that it's a film penned by an AI makes it compelling to watch. At the helm of the film is director Oscar Sharp, who collaborated with NYU AI researcher Ross Goodwin.

Coming off its first quarterly revenue decline in 13 years, Apple Inc. kicks off its annual developers' conference Monday in San Francisco facing questions about whether the company's best days are behind it. The focus of the weeklong Worldwide Developers Conference is expected to be on Siri, Apple's digital assistant. When Apple introduced Siri as an iPhone feature in 2011, it heralded a future of people finding information or completing tasks on their devices by speaking rather than typing or tapping. That vision of Siri hasn't fully materialized, leaving the door open for other technology companies to push into Apple's turf. Google parent Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. have all introduced voice-activated digital assistants that rely on artificial intelligence -- technology that allows computers to understand inferences and context so they can make decisions like a human brain instead of following programmed instructions.

"Well, I have to go to the skull," is a line that can only find place in a movie that does not make any sense. In the nine minute movie "Sunspring," however, it is far from the most nonsensical piece of dialogue. The credit (or the blame) for the creation of the disjointed script of the movie goes to Benjamin -- a neural network created by filmmaker Oscar Sharp and Ross Goodwin, who is an artificial intelligence researcher at New York University. Sharp and Goodwin fed the AI, which is a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) recurring neural network, a raft of sci-fi scripts written for movies like Aliens, Watchmen, Star Trek and the X-Files. Initially, Benjamin kept "spitting out conversations between Mulder and Scully [the X-Files protagonists], and you'd notice that Scully spends more time asking what's going on and Mulder spends more time explaining," Sharp told Ars Technica.

Though Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema's '"The Conjuring 2" ghosted all of its competition at the weekend box office, all eyes are on the performance of Universal Pictures and Legendary Pictures' "Warcraft." Though the video game adaptation grossed only a modest sum in the U.S and Canada, given its hefty production budget, the picture's international numbers wildly make up for it. "Warcraft" grossed an estimated 24.4 million in ticket sales in the U.S., coming in just shy of analyst projections of 25 million and taking the second place spot. The film has a 160 million price tag attached to it, proving that film adaptations of massively popular video games (the multiplayer strategy game "World of Warcraft" is produced by Irvine-headquartered publisher Blizzard Entertainment) are still a tough sell in the U.S. Reviews have been decidedly negative for the picture. As of Sunday, only 27% of Rotten Tomatoes critics favored it, though up from the paltry 16% positive rating the film had just days before its release.

The big-budget video-game adaptation "Warcraft" came in second with 24.4 million, according to studio estimates Sunday. That was a more middling debut, but the film, taken from the "World of Warcraft" video game franchise, has been a lucrative hit in overseas markets, particularly China.

Three actors in glittery metallic costumes stand in an office, spouting gibberish at one another: the outcome of an experiment that couldn't be any more predictable. Earlier this week, UK filmmaker Oscar Sharp released Sunspring, an experimental film based on a screenplay developed by an artificial intelligence. The project saw Mr Sharp and technologist Ross Goodwin feeding an artificial long short-term memory neural network (LSTM) an array of science fiction film scripts. Mr Sharp and Mr Goodwin then programmed the LSTM to process the scripts, using cinematic writing conventions to produce a screenplay of its own. Mr Sharp then spent 48 hours developing the script into a film, before releasing it on the Ars Technica Videos YouTube page on June 9.

With so many people taking their cues from the movies on what a future with artificial intelligence will look like, some who fear one day having robotic overlords will be heartened by research that Google is doing. Google DeepMind, a London-based artificial intelligence company that Google acquired in 2014, is working on what will be a kill switch for robots and other A.I. systems. The idea is that one day a smart machine might be able to override its own off button. If that's the case, then humans would need another way to gain the upper hand. "If an agent is operating in real-time under human supervision, now and then it may be necessary for a human operator to press the big red button to prevent the agent from continuing a harmful sequence of actions -- harmful either for the agent or for the environment," researchers wrote in a paper posted on the Machine Intelligence Research Institute website.

You know when you just keep pressing the predictive text button on your mobile phone and the sentence just starts making less and less sense? Well, that type of functionality isn't just for absurdist poetry, you know; the team behind Sunspring used the same technology -- an LSTM Neural network, to be precise -- to write a screenplay. That is pretty funny in and of itself, of course, but then the team had an even better idea… What if they rounded up some actors (including Thomas Middleditch, who plays Pied Piper's Richard Hendricks in Silicon Valley) and turned it into a real movie? The team fed a ton of Sci-Fi movies into an AI… Then fed it some hallucinogenics and asked it to pen a screenplay. And it is absolutely, gloriously, intensely, bizarrely, completely fascinating.