Let's look at some headlines: These articles were published mere hours before I wrote this post. There are countless more like it. There will only be more to come. The problem isn't with Artificial Intelligence, though the idea of extremely sophisticated machines enabled with intelligent software able to mimic or surpass a human's cognitive abilities surely merits further study. The possibilities associated with Artificial Intelligence are wonderful and terrifying (wondrifying). The problem is with sans serif.

"Hey Siri, why should I buy a HomePod?" If you were to ask that question a few months ago, the answer may have been more clear. When Apple unveiled its $349 Siri-equipped HomePod speaker in June, it was poised to fill a big hole in the smart speaker market. While the Amazon Echo and Google Home were pretty good at answering questions, they wouldn't blow anybody away when it came to audio quality. Apple, then, pitched its smart speaker as a piece of high-end audio gear aimed at music aficionados, with Siri on board as a bonus. But the HomePod, which finally starts shipping this week, was delayed for several months.

With less than 72 hours until its release, the first HomePod reviews are in from a hand-picked group of media outlets, and they're very positive--as long as you're buying Apple's $349 smart speaker for sound quality. The Homepod's "smarts," though, leave much to be desired. That's not a total surprise, since Siri is woefully inadequate on other devices and Apple hadn't given us any indication that it has enhanced Siri for HomePod. But in action it's even worse than we expected. Brian X. Chen of The New York Times laments Siri's capabilities on the new speaker and concludes that "Siri doesn't even work as well on HomePod as it does on the iPhone."

At Chordify we love two things: music and technology. Luckily, one does not exclude the other. But, becoming more and more pressing nowadays is the question: will we, humans, become orphaned in the marriage between music and technology? During the Eurosonic Noorderslag conference we presented this question to a panel of experts: Tjeerd Bomhof (lead singer of Voicst and his solo project Dazzled Kid), Colin Benders (from Kyteman), and Matt McVicar (from the British music and artificial intelligence company Jukedeck). The panel is hosted by our own music and technology expert, CEO of Chordify, Bas de Haas.

Now that smartwatches are actually useful enough for the general populace, setting them up isn't as pedestrian a task as pairing with your phone and calling it a day. On the surface, customizing your new device may not seem like a complicated task, but people often overlook some of the tools that can potentially make wearables more helpful. From recommended settings to the apps worth downloading, here's a walkthrough of what you should look out for when setting up your new wearable. This part you probably already know. Turn on your watch, pair it with your phone and follow the onscreen instructions.

"I have been running during the past six years with full force, and as Sony is going into the next stage, I thought it would be best for me and the company that I pass the baton now," Mr. Hirai, 57 years old, said at a news conference. Mr. Yoshida, 58, inherits a company that is making money in all its major areas, from traditional electronics such as televisions to videogame machines, smartphone game software and movies. That is a shift from the beginning of Mr. Hirai's term when the television business, among others, was churning out losses year after year. Even the movie business, which struggled in recent years, is riding a wave thanks to "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle," which was No. 1 at the U.S. box office for several weeks. The stock has risen 63% over the last year.

HomePod may be a latecomer on the smart loudspeaker scene but Apple's entry onto the dance floor is about to liven up the party. At least for well-heeled Apple diehards who share my passion for all kinds of music. If you fit that description and are willing to fork over $349 plus embrace the subscription-only Apple Music streaming service, HomePod is well worth the wait, an outcome I reached after testing the speaker for just shy of a week. Apple makes no bones that HomePod is a music-first speaker, and it sounds terrific, all the more notable given how small it is. Vocals were pure, bass deep. At the same time, the new speaker can be an exercise in frustration at times, especially when you request something of Siri that Apple's digital assistant can't deliver on HomePod.

The HomePod speaker is photographed in a a showroom during an announcement of new products at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference Monday, June 5, 2017, in San Jose, Calif. You can almost detect the reverberations in and around Cupertino, Calif., as Apple prepares to start selling its expensive and delayed HomePod speaker with Siri in stores Friday. Its first smart speaker enters a three-year-old market where first mover Amazon now drowns out its rivals with an estimated 70% share. Amazon's Alexa digital assistant and Google Assistant, the voice of the year-old Google Home, have trained tens of millions of consumers to equate smart speakers with the ability to answer a broad set of requests in an increasingly human-like way. Apple, in contrast, is going all in on music -- defending a price tag that's about $250 more than the basic Amazon Echo by touting its premium audio specs and integration with Apple music ecosystem, rather than the number of ways digital assistant Siri can insert itself into your life. "We never wanted to lose the focus that (HomePod is) first about making a speaker that plays back music in a surprising really great way," Apple's senior vice president for worldwide marketing Phil Schiller said moments after leading a tour of journalists through a working audio testing lab where acoustic and engineering teams first started working on HomePod a half-dozen years ago.

There are accompanying video lectures on YouTube. Title is something like "Pattern Recognition, Information Theory, and Neural Networks". Does everything from prove Shannon's source coding theorem, introduce error correcting codes, show how to solve traveling salesman problem with Boltzmann Machines, ... A true gem of a book relating ideas from info theory to Bayesian stats to ising models to probabilistic modeling with neural networks. Was a formative read for me early on in the ML endeavour.

The Apple HomePod is Apple's smart hi-fi speaker, with a big emphasis on hi-fi quality audio. So how does it look and sound, and exactly how smart is it? We've been using the HomePod for the last week. It manages to be good-looking without dominating, perhaps because it's so compact, which means that you can put it in most rooms and barely notice it's there. It comes in two colours: white and space grey. The mesh finish is a soft-touch cover that's pleasing to the touch and acoustically transparent.