Media
Europe's biggest tech show finally delivered
As we wind down after trawling IFA's labyrinthine halls, covering everything from phones to washing machines, wearables to haunted pianos, we wanted to point out the most notable things to come out of Europe's biggest tech show -- and it was quite the show this year. If you don't read anything else, read this. And if you do want even more, you can find everything else right here. When Microsoft began talking about its Mixed Reality program earlier this year, the whole thing left me pretty cold. The company claimed that it could slash the cost of a VR headset almost in half, and that the kit would even work with PCs that used only integrated graphics.
Whether it's for restaurants or Trump, bots have gotten pretty good at shilling
For all the huge potential of artificial intelligence, bots still have a long way to go to pass as human. You don't know whether I'm a dog or not, but you can at least be reasonably confident that I'm not a bot. But then I'm writing articles of between 300 and 3,000 words: there's plenty of room to slip up – especially if you've been trained through machine learning, rather than speaking, reading and writing in English for more than 30 years. In the realm of short-form social media and comments sections, where grammar and syntax are both more fluid and less closely scrutinised, it's far easier for bots to blend in, as a study from the University of Chicago found out last week. The bot they'd trained to review restaurants was astroturfing with the best of them. "My family and I are huge fans of this place," the bot gourmet wrote in one sneaky review on Yelp.