About a year ago, Adobe announced its Sensei AI platform. Unlike other companies, Adobe says that it has no interest in building a general artificial intelligence platform -- instead, it wants to build a platform squarely focused on helping its customers be more creative. This week, at its Max conference, Adobe provided both more insight into what this means and showed off a number of prototypes for how it plans to integrate Sensei into its flagship tools. "We are not building a general purpose AI platform like some others in the industry are -- and it's great that they are building it," Adobe CTO Abhay Parasnis noted in a press conference after today's keynote. "We have a very deep understanding of how creative professionals work in imagining, in photography, in video, in design and illustration. So we have taken decades worth of learning of those very specific domains -- and that's where a large part of this comes in. When one of the very best artists in Photoshop spends hours in creation, what are the other things they do and maybe more importantly, what are the things they don't do? We are trying to harness that and marry that with the latest advances in deep learning so that the algorithms can actually become partners for that creative professional."

When Charles Reilly and Donald Ingber set out to make their short film--In the Beginning, an homage of sorts to Star Wars that (spoilers) tells the tale of a single sperm's triumph in a literal life or death race to fertilize an egg--they had just one goal. Ingber, the founding director of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, and Reilly, a biochemistry researcher also at the Wyss Institute, wanted the animated film to be scientifically accurate. To achieve this, the two reached for techniques more common to the silver screen than the lab. They sought digital imaging software ordinarily used by video game designers and film animators. Not only did they achieve cinematic glory, but by reaching far outside the scientific silo they were able to happen upon a new discovery: an understanding of the molecular-level mechanics that let a sperm whip its tail back and forth to fuel its need for speed.

Baidu chief executive Robin Li on Tuesday said the Chinese internet giant will have a self-driving bus on the road soon as it races for a lead in autonomous vehicles. Baidu is collaborating with an array of companies on autonomous cars, and is working with a large bus maker in China to have a self-driving bus running a route by next year, Li said in an on-stage interview late Tuesday at The Wall Street Journal D.Live conference in Laguna Beach, California. Most major automakers and technology titans including Google-parent Alphabet have been stepping up efforts on autonomous driving in recent years, convinced that these systems could eliminate most road accidents. Baidu's search engine dominates the Chinese internet, and online ads are a key revenue stream. But since a crackdown by authorities on Baidu's online advertising business after a much-publicized scandal over promoting a fake medical treatment, 'China's Google' is seeking to focus on artificial intelligence and is investing heavily in the sector.

Voice assistants seem to represent the best of what films offered us in the future: the ability to control your home, your music and everything else about your life simply by talking to a digital butler. But science fiction never had them sounding quite so bad. Despite all the hype around voice assistants, they have mostly been confined to things that make them sound terrible when they speak. Siri mostly comes out of your phone speakers, for instance, and the best the Google Assistant can do is the little rounded Google Home. The Sonos One represents the first time that you can talk to a voice assistant and actually have its voice – and anything else it does – sound good.

While it may seem like Amazon and commercial banks are worlds apart, Amazon's "Day 1" business model offers key success drivers for banks to consider. The Day 1 model, spelled out in CEO Jeff Bezos' 2016 shareholder letter, in essence means the company continually operates as a start-up. Also, Amazon--like other digital giants and fintechs--is raising customer expectations. And in small business credit, Amazon is competing directly with banks. Banks, instead, often operate like Day 2 companies and make good decisions slowly based on a maximum amount of data. While banks cannot completely emulate the Day 1 model due to their critical role in maintaining financial stability and security, and meeting attendant compliance constraints, they can adapt and adopt certain aspects of it.

Sonos has multi-room audio down to a science, but it desperately needed a speaker capable of voice recognition if it was to fend off the veritable flood of smart speakers coming to market. The Sonos One is that speaker. It sounds better than the last entry-level Sonos speaker, it's compatible with Amazon's Alexa digital assistant, and it will be compatible with Google Assistant soon. If you already have Sonos speakers in other rooms, you can control all of them with voice commands with the addition of a single Sonos One to your network. And once you have that, you can control any Sonos speaker from any Amazon Echo.

In my house, we use it to play radio stations, to get the weather, and to answer questions like "When was the Edo period?" One thing I don't often use the Echo for is music. That's because it sounds terrible. As good as Amazon's Alexa voice service is, the Echo's black tin can croaks out audio just a notch better than the 20-year-old Coby FM radio I keep in the garage. Amazon has taken steps to improve the Echo's sound quality with a reboot last month, and companies like Lenovo have coaxed Alexa into nicer-sounding enclosures.

When Sonos released the Play:5 speaker in late 2015, the Amazon Echo was still an unproven tech curiosity. But since then, Alexa and the Echo have grown rapidly in both popularity and functionality, inspiring competition from the likes of Google and Apple. Talking to a speaker is totally normal now -- but Sonos users haven't been able to that. They've instead had to choose between the convenience of products like the Echo and Google Home and the superior audio quality that Sonos speakers offer. Sonos has known for some time that this is a problem.

Google Photos can now recognize photos of your furry friends. The feature, rolling out in most countries today, automatically groups photos of the same pet together and allows users to search for photos of their pets by their name. Users can search to quickly find photos of their pets, or even photos of themselves with their pets. To make a movie of your pet using Google Photos, tap on the new photo group of your pet. Select your favorite photos, then tap ' ' and create a movie.

After Celebgate and the Fappening, a new iOS app called Nude is trying to protect iOS users' racy photos from another iCloud leak. The app scans a user's camera roll and pinpoints which photos, videos or documents include explicit content. After the AI scan, the images are locked into the app and erased to avoid hackers from getting their hands on the images. Jessica Chiu, Y.C. Chen and Edgar Khanzandian created the Nude app, which was released Oct. 4. "The app itself is very simple and intuitive to use," Chiu told International Business Times. "Once our proprietary AI technology scans through your camera roll and detects sensitive material, they are then imported into the app, deleted from your camera roll, and erased from iCloud."