Now, scientists are testing so called human robots with artificial intelligence that speak and express emotions.

Technology firms and advertisers for years have been trying to figure out how to use cloud technology and digital data to curate programming tailored to individual viewers. Zone TV, which has offices in Santa Monica and Toronto, on Monday announced the latest experiment in that pursuit. The company plans to launch a group of 14 subscription video-on-demand television channels, including Foodies, Great Outdoors, Motors, Stylers, Mancave and Playground for children. The twist: rather than employing TV executives to program the channels, Zone TV said it uses artificial intelligence to select and serve videos to individual viewers. Zone TV said it has secured license agreements with various content owners, including NASA, the production firm behind the children's show "Bob the Builder," and traditional magazine publishers including Field & Stream and Outdoor Life to construct a small library of programming.

For decades, we have listened to a one-way radio to get our daily dose of news and music. Spotify came along and redefined the whole experience of consuming music. And now, we, at CityFALCON, are changing your consumption experience for news. Get started by activating our skill for English-US or English-UK on your Echo. You could create new watchlists, add topics to follow (from stocks, commodities, foreign exchange, indices, cryptocurrencies, and more), and identify opportunities through trending topics.

Japan's pop culture is dominated by two inextricably linked industries – video games and animation. The twin forces even form part of the country's Cool Japan ambassadorial project, pushing Japanese creativity to a global market. Yet in the west, although anime fandom has grown significantly, we still tend to see the fields as separate, aficionados of one medium only occasionally crossing over to the other. Anime is a powerful storytelling platform in its own right though, and with increased home video releases and a cavalcade of titles available on streaming platforms such as Netflix and Crunchyroll, it's never been easier for players to explore a medium that has inspired thousands of video games over the last 40 years. Here are 10 titles absolutely rooted in gaming culture.

Not long ago one of my clients told me he badly needed "Artificial Intelligence for Dummies."

The season finale of "Rick and Morty," the Internet Movie Database's fourth most-popular TV show of all-time, runs tonight. What started as a graphic parody of Back to the Future (minus the headache of time travel) is now a critically acclaimed series with a devoted fan base. It follows a prototypical mad scientist, Rick, and his grandson, Morty, on adventures in alternate universes. David Sims, of The AV Club, summed up the show's premise as "essentially--what if Doc Brown was a demented drunk? And what if Marty McFly was a lonely kid who got dragged around with him on terrifying and strange adventures through space and time?"

New Line Cinema's "It," now in its fourth week, returned to the top spot at the box office after temporarily being unseated by 20th Century Fox's spy sequel "Kingsman: The Golden Circle." Despite a 42% drop in earnings this week, the $35-million film, now the biggest September release ever (not adjusting for inflation), brought in $17.3 million for a cumulative total of $291.2 million in the U.S. and Canada and $553.1 million worldwide. The Stephen King adaptation, about a group of kids terrorized by an evil clown, was directed by Andy Muschietti and stars Bill Skarsgard ("Hemlock Grove") as Pennywise the Dancing Clown. "It" boasts a B rating on CinemaScore and an 85% "fresh" rating on review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes. Universal Pictures' crime thriller "American Made," starring Tom Cruise, debuted in second place, earning $17 million this weekend, above analysts' expectations of $12 million to $15 million.

The Internet Archive recently announced a new service they've dubbed'Third Eye'. IA has a vast historical archive of TV news that they'll eventually process, but -- for now -- the more recent broadcasts from four channels are readily available. There's tons of information about the project on its main page where you can interactively work with the API if that's how you roll. Since my newsflash package already had a "news" theme and worked with the joint IA-GDELT project TV data, it seemed to be a good home for a Third Eye interface to live. You can read long-form details of the Third Eye service on their site.

Creativity, Inc. is one of the most insightful and thought-provoking books I have read. Ed Catmull recounts his personal experiences, and talks in depth about the processes he created that made Pixar one of the most successful companies in the business. I strongly encourage you to see the video interview below, where he describes the "Brain Trust." The key takeaway is that great stories are not written in a flash of inspiration, but are a result of an agile, iterative process. I couldn't help but notice the similarities to writing great software code within an agile framework.