It's a new year, and I bet you picked up a few shiny tech gadgets to play with over the holidays. But while your Google Home pods, face ID-enabled iPhones, wearable fitness trackers, 3D printers, and the like might be fun and games now, there's serious power behind those tools – power that enhances the performance of your content marketing efforts, makes them easier to produce, and makes them more enticing to your audiences. If you read our recent 2018 Content Marketing Predictions e-book, you may have noticed how many experts anticipate tech-enhanced experiences to dominate the content landscape. For example, HubSpot's Scott Brinker predicts chatbots and voice interfaces will experience explosive growth. Autodesk's Dusty DiMercurio sees an impending rise in augmented reality content at live events; and Chief Content Officer's Clare McDermott is all but ready to bow down to the AI overlords and embrace a more automated future. These expectations of greater tech dependence are likely well founded.

Brits can now ask their iThings to give them a brief update on what's happening in the world with the command: "Hey Siri, give me the news." Siri doesn't actually read the news, though, and instead will automatically play the latest podcast from a trusted source of your choice. I was treated to a 2-minute bulletin from BBC News when I said the magic words to Siri this morning, which also offered Sky News and LBC up as alternative sources. As Apple prepares Siri for life inside its HomePod smart speaker, it first added the news briefing feature to the beta version of iOS 11.2.5 -- limiting it to the States at that point, too, where The Washington Post, Fox News, NPR or CNN provide the updates. In a matter of weeks, however, it's now graduated out of beta to become a standard Siri feature in iOS 11, whilst rolling out to new territories.

When Artifical Intelligence (AI) is brought up, it's hard to shake the rising fear of robots outsmarting humans and making us the subservient species.

The OPPO A83 comes with an 8 MP front camera and a 13 MP rear camera, and uses A.I. Beauty Recognition Technology that employs a cloud database from premium suppliers that have sufficient power to support diversified facial recognition in smart terminals.

Canadian academia, industry and government are heavily investing in Artificial Intelligence, setting the stage for it to become a research and development powerhouse. Silicon Valley needs little introduction: it is a global leader in technology start-ups and venture capital with significant AI strengths.

Switzerland's largest bank is expanding a site in Ticino to specialize in artificial intelligence. The move will create 80 new jobs in southern Switzerland. The University of Lugano IDSIA institute has advanced to a recognized research center for machine learning and artificial intelligence.

The publisher of Kojien, the nation's most authoritative dictionary, has drawn complaints from advocates for sexual minorities for incorrectly defining the term, "LGBT," in its latest edition released Friday. "Lesbian," "gay" and "bisexual" are terms used to describe sexual orientations, while "transgender" is used to "describe people whose gender identity does not match the sex or gender they were identified as having at birth." But the seventh edition of Kojien failed to separate the meaning of "lesbian," "gay" and "bisexual," from "transgender," defining the meaning of "LGBT" collectively as "people whose sexual orientations are different from the majority." Following its release, many LGBT advocates took to Twitter and Facebook to point out the mistake, urging the publisher to make a correction. Iwanami Shoten, the publisher, admitted the inaccuracy, saying the explanation of the term was "insufficient."

I'm trying to study a solution for a problem I was asked to solve. It's kinda based on the Travelling Salesman problem, basically there's a geographic zone that a vehicle needs to cover (the vehicle should travel through the streets of his assigned zone), optimizing the route in relation to a fuel consumption function. My formulation of the problem consists of a graph V,E where V intersection of streets in the zone of interest, E street which connects two nodes. Edges have weights based on the street actual length. The vehicle starts from the deposit (initial node) and returns to the deposit after visiting all nodes.

At the moment, legal AI is at the "frothy" part of the hype cycle. It's a bit like the scene What did the Romans ever do for us? in the film the Life of Brian, but in reverse. The scene's premise is that the Romans did little, but of course they did a lot. Legal AI promises a lot but at the moment has delivered little. Somewhat frustratingly, while a decade from now it will be obvious in hindsight that the world beater was going to be "X", right now we don't know what that "X" will be.

David Hanson envisions a future in which AI-powered robots evolve to become "super-intelligent genius machines" that might help solve some of mankind's most challenging problems. If only it were as simple as that. The Texas-born former sculptor at Walt Disney Imagineering and his Hong Kong-based startup Hanson Robotics are combining artificial intelligence with southern China's expertise in toy design, electronics and manufacturing to craft humanoid "social robots" with faces designed to be lifelike and appealing enough to win trust from humans who interact with them. Hanson, 49, is perhaps best known as the creator of Sophia, a talk show-going robot partly modeled on Audrey Hepburn that he calls his "masterpiece." Akin to an animated mannequin, she seems as much a product of his background in theatrics as an example of advanced technology.