Artificial Intelligence (AI) was a movie in 2001 telling a story about a childlike android programmed with the ability to love. Set in a post climate change world of the 22nd Century the movie was ahead of its time. Dial ahead just 16 years, not a whole century, and AI is being talked about a lot, mainly through fear of the unknown and its impact on jobs. In other recent AI news Elon Musk announced Neuralink a venture to merge the human brain with AI, adding this to his SpaceX retrievable rocket technology and the Tesla cars we are now seeing on New Zealand's roads. Leading media including The Wall Street Journal, McKinsey Quarterly, Harvard Business Review and Financial Times all have a plethora of articles about AI.

As voice assistants like Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri get more popular, a new study found what humans think about the technology -- and it sounds like the 2013 movie "Her." The study found people who use voice assistants regularly wish it were human, while others admitted to sexually fantasizing about their virtual assistant. The study, which focuses on voice technology implications for brands, was conducted by J. Walter Thompson Innovation Group London, a platform for research and analytics, and the media agency Mindshare Futures. More than 30,000 respondents in the U.K. took part in a two-week self-ethnography project from January - March 2017, jotting down their behaviors and attitudes related to voice technology. Researchers then analyzed two focus groups of 12 of the thousands of participants.

Between 2000 and 2010, the music industry's total grosses dropped from $14 billion to $6 billion. The change from selling albums, to selling single songs, to hoping fans stream songs on repeat has made it tougher to make a living (for mid-level acts, that is; the rich stars are richer than ever, mostly on the back of tours). Anyway, Silicon Valley thinks it can help by introducing artificial intelligence into the mix. But can AI save the music industry? Forbes has a good overview of several startups hoping to make music profitable again.

USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham says Google Home is improved but is still a work in progress with some gaping holes. LOS ANGELES -- Typing is so yesterday. Why write it when you can say it? This week we turned our attention to a different way of talking -- to our phones and home speakers. And if Google's any guide, that will be the story (digitally synthesized in a computer's best dulcet tones) for the next months and probably, years.

As well as beating us at board games, driving cars, and spotting cancer, artificial intelligence is now generating brand new sounds that have never been heard before, thanks to some advanced maths combined with samples from real instruments. Before long, you might hear some of these fresh sounds pumping out of your radio, as the researchers responsible say they're hoping to give musicians an almost limitless new range of computer-generated instruments to work with. The new system is called NSynth, and it's been developed by an engineering team called Google Magenta, a small part of Google's larger push into artificial intelligence. "Learning directly from data, NSynth provides artists with intuitive control over timbre and dynamics and the ability to explore new sounds that would be difficult or impossible to produce with a hand-tuned synthesizer," explains the team. NSynth takes samples from about a thousand different instruments and blends two together them together, but in a highly sophisticated way.

Between 1967 and 2005, 684 hour-long episodes of live-action Star Trek and 22 half-hour episodes of the animated series aired on TV. Allowing for commercial breaks, that gives us 521 hours of Star Trek, give or take. Add in the 13 movies, from 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture to Star Trek Beyond in 2016, and you wind up with more than 48 full days of Star Trek--not counting books and comics, which, if you want to argue about canonicity and amount of content, my DMs are open. In-world time runs even longer--by a lot. The prequel series Star Trek: Enterprise begins in the year 2151, roughly, and the last movie set in that same timeline, Nemesis, takes place in 2379 or so. But Voyager traveled back to the Big Bang in one episode and Next Generation reached into its own future, to 2395.

UC Berkley researchers, lead by Richard Zhang, have developed an innovative app that uses artificial intelligence to colorize black and white photos near instantly. It begins by automatically colorizing the image, and then offers "suggested colors" to let users manually fix any mistakes, while the computer analyzes the markers in real-time to create the final product. Click here to view the first image in this week's funny Facebook status updates gallery.

When Mom or Dad spends long tours of duty far from home while serving in the military, their kids sometimes need extra understanding, encouragement and emotional support. If a parent dies in combat, these children can struggle mightily to cope with the loss and adjust to a new reality. According to a recent study, one-quarter of such kids contemplate suicide. Creative agency We Believers is stepping up with Ai Buddy, an artificial-intelligence system designed to assist youngsters caught up in such difficult situations. The technology features a kid-friendly interface with a cast of cute cartoon characters, including a teddy bear, a monkey and an oversized, cuddly purple beetle.

An AI algorithm developed by researchers at Salesforce generates snippets of text that describe the essence of long text. These tools can help writers skim through a lot of articles and find relevant topics to write about. "Since new semantic technologies are now mature enough to read human language, journalists and professional writers can finally go back to writing for people," Cuofano says. "The next revolution (which is already coming) is the leap from NLP to a subset of it called NLU (Natural Language Understanding)," Cuofano says.

As a blogger, journalist or reporter, you have to meet several challenges to stay at the top of your trade. You have to stay up to date with the latest developments and at the same time write timely, compelling and unique content. The same goes for scientists, researchers and analysts and other professionals whose job involves a lot of writing. With the deluge of information being published on the web every day, things aren't getting easier. You have to juggle speed, style, quality and content simultaneously if you want to succeed in reaching your audience.