The absence of Amazon's Alexa and Prime Music services in Canada has been a strange oversight, given that the nation's share a border and (one of two) common languages. That has now been corrected, as Amazon has finally launched the Echo family, Prime Music and Alexa Voice services and skills in the land of hockey and poutine. "We're excited to bring [Alexa] to Canada with an experienced designed from the ground up for our Canadian customers," said Amazon Senior VP Tom Taylor in a statement. Amazon has introduced a new English voice for Alexa with a Canadian accent, though even we Canadians aren't exactly sure what that is. However, Alexa doesn't seem to be available yet in French, which is bit surprising considering that it's one of Canada's two official languages (Engadget has reached out for more information).

Al Alcorn knew he was being wooed. Nolan Bushnell, the tall, brash, young engineer from Alcorn's work-study days at Ampex, had shown up at Alcorn's Sunnyvale office. Bushnell was driving a new blue station wagon. "It's a company car," he said with feigned nonchalance. He offered to drive Alcorn, recently hired as an associate engineer at Ampex, to see the "game on a TV screen" that Bushnell and Ted Dabney had developed at their new startup company. The two men drove to an office in Mountain View, near the highway. The space was large, about 10,000 square feet, and looked like a cross between an electronics lab and an assembly warehouse. Oscilloscopes and lab benches filled one area. Half-built cabinets and screen with wires protruding from them sat in another. Bushnell walked with Alcorn to a sinuous, six-foot-tall fiberglass cabinet with a screen at eye level. Bushnell was proud of what he called its "spacey-looking" shape.

It's no understatement to say that the science fiction stories that we've told ourselves in well-thumbed paperbacks, cult movies and beloved TV series have changed the world. For years they've led the way for real scientific advances, providing the creative vision that has inspired engineers and scientists. But in an age where reality is starting to catch up with fiction… well, what happens next? "We're really starting to catch up with those ideas now in the real world," says futurologist and artificial intelligence (AI) expert Dr Ian Pearson. And it's true, science is making fiction a reality.

Personalized experiences are a hot topic these days. Certain types of businesses have become very skilled at delivering personalized service. Think about a hotel you've stayed at before that welcomes you back and remembers that you liked a certain type of pillow, a specific newspaper and a corner room. The experience is becoming more and more common, and this type of service is crossing over into many other industries, especially retail. When a customer walks into a retail store, the salesperson has two choices: simply ring up a purchase, or truly help the customer get what he or she really needs.

Just in time for the impending release of its higerh-fidelity Google Home Max smart speaker, Google has given its Home app a makeover, bringing advanced audio settings, smarter search, and better navigation. Anyone who owns an Assistant or Chromecast device knows how easy it is to set it up using the Home app, but now Google is giving us a reason to open more often. The entire app has been redesigned, with a clean aesthetic and more intuitive navigation. For example, when you want to find a movie or song, the search bar is at the bottom of the screen, just like it is on the new Pixel phones. The new Google Home app has audio controls, in-app movie trailer casting, and smarter search.

Many readers will recognize that line from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film in which the onboard computer, HAL 9000, perceives an astronaut to be a threat to its "existence" and refuses to open the airlock to allow the crew member back into the ship. Other films like Ex-Machina, i-Robot, Terminator sow similar fears of Artificial Intelligence systems with cognitive capabilities taking control from humans, rendering us defenseless. Of course, there are also films that focus on the positive aspects of AI, such as Bicentennial Man. My view is that AI systems are increasingly necessary to augment what we do in our everyday lives -- whether that means... Partly because there is so much misinformation and hype -- and some people just like to sell fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD). And it's true that there will always be people who seek to exploit technology to do bad things -- the dark side vs. the light side (Star Wars fans).

How artificial intelligence can be used creatively is an often asked, and perpetually unsolved, question. Of course, the term "AI" itself can be somewhat misleading; serving, as it does, as a catch-all phrase for anything involving machine learning and/or algorithms. What is possible, however, is to explore in general terms what levels of creativity we can currently see from the people and technology working in this space. Beginning with the most publicised stories, we have IBM's lighthouse project Watson, which created a movie trailer for the film "Morgan", (a film about an artificially intelligent robot child – spoiler alert: it doesn't go well), and Sony using a system of machine learning algorithms called "Flow Machines" to compose a pop song, ("Daddy's Car"). Further back, we also had Oscar Sharp and Ross Goodwin put a recurrent neural network to work writing a screenplay for a film called "Sunspring", which they subsequently shot in a single day, (it is a must-watch).

Once you have some basic algorithms/examples to work with, you can use them to explain the main issues of over/underfitting. Based on the level of the people, this can be used for discussing learning theory: what ERM is and why SRM might be better. From there you could easily cover the VC-Dimension and dive into SVMs.

If I were to tell you this in the year of 2000, that there is a mug that can control the temperature of your Coffee and you can set the temperature using your mobile phone. Or, there is a ring that can store all your personalized details like credit card info, bus pass and it only responds if it recognizes your finger print while you put it on, you would probably assume that I am a Sci-Fi movie director and I am pitching you my ideas to woo the public with these unrealistic technology gadgets. But in the last decade, there is a technology that has disrupted the world with its ability to connect physical devices with Internet and has given them the power to become a smart device to better serve the cosmopolitans. Yes, I am talking about IoT and the products stated above, are few of the amazing IoT products that are developed and commercialized. In fact, the smart mug is already in mass production and will be shortly available for all the caffeine addicts in one of the biggest brand of the world, Starbucks!

We are living in an era driven by algorithms and more specifically deep learning algorithms which are beginning to pervading and potentially intruding every single facet of our personal and professional lives. When algorithms begin playing a commanding role in our everyday personal choices including clothes, shoes, movies, music, content, jobs, whatever and start dictating what is best for us and what is not, we have to concede that we are already in the midst of algorithms driven enlightenment, based on whichever camp we want to be in. Consider their application in myriad esoteric use cases - sorting and grading cucumbers; creating movie trailers; writing news articles; measuring productivity of cows; predicting students likely to drop out; optimizing soil nutrient levels and many more such use cases. To a battle for supremacy on the'senses' dimension against the human race including vision, speech and text, these algorithms are proving their mettle in every walk of human life. So it is really high time that we bow to the powers of these very powerful algorithms and be led by them in this algorithms-driven insights economy.