Drones get some bad press, with many associating them with a dystopian future defined by war and surveillance. But now a company is trying to make drones more popular - and in the process improving aerial photography so you can take selfies from the air. The Fotokite Phi is a drone on a leash that you can lead around just like a pet and is now available for pre-order as part of crowdfunding campaign. On a tight leash: 'The Fotokite's tether (pictured) provides a safer, more direct way to fly. It enables close-proximity operations and the tether provides visual accountability for bystanders and property owners,' the Swiss start-up said The drone is now on sale with prices starting at $249 (£159) and can be pre-ordered on their Indiegogo crowdfunding page.

British academics have helped develop a robot, which is both a home help and a friend to older people who may be ill, trapped and alone. The Care-O-bot 3 is much more like a utilitarian household appliance than the action figures that featured in the futuristic film iRobot, starring Will Smith. And she - or he - is more likely to offer a Karaoke sing along and make a cup of coffee than go on a murderous rampage - or at least that is the idea. A UK team has designed a robot butler called Care-O-Bot 3 (shown). The machine has a flexible arm that can pick up drinks.

For fans of the cult film the Karate Kid, it is a familiar pose. However, in the latest video from the US military team developing a two legged fighting robot, the buildup to'crane kick' is seen in a new way. The researchers taught the robot to stand on one leg - recreating a key scene from the film in the process. According to Boston Dynamics, Atlas is a'high mobility, humanoid robot designed to negotiate outdoor, rough terrain. 'Atlas can walk bipedally leaving the upper limbs free to lift, carry, and manipulate the environment.

Yahoo and Microsoft have both revealed plans to create their own TV shows in the ever-expanding battle for the living room. Yahoo has unveiled plans for four shows, while Microsoft is believed to have 12 in development. They will go up against Amazon, Hulu and Netflix, all of whom are also commissioning their own shows in a bid to change they way we watch TV. Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer has unveiled plans to break into television-style original video with the launch of two original comedy series and an internet channel that will stream live concerts. Amazon last week unveiled a $99 TV box to take on Apple, Google and Roku - and it doubles as a games console.

A graphic designer has created a life-like replica of actress Scarlett Johansson - which winks and giggles when he tells her she's cute. Like many children with imaginations fired by animated films, Ricky Ma grew up watching cartoons featuring the adventures of robots, and dreamed of building his own one day. Unlike most of the others, however, he has realised his childhood dream at the age of 42, by successfully constructing a life-sized robot from scratch on the balcony of his home. The life-size robot was created by Hong Kong designer Ricky Ma, based on a famous Hollywood actress. Named Mark 1, Ma has programmed her to wink and say'thank you' when he tells her she is beautiful The fruit of his labours of a year-and-a-half, and a budget of more than $50,000, is a female robot prototype he calls the Mark 1.

Chillingly life-like robots are causing a storm in Japan – where their creators are about to launch them as actresses, full-size mechanical copies for pop idol fans, and clones of the dearly departed. There is even talk that the naturalistic, even engaging, she-droids may be taken up as men as partners in the not-too-distant future. Android Asuna was a star attraction at Tokyo Designers' Week showcase earlier this month and she is one of a series of geminoids, as their inventor dubs them, that are ripe for commercialisation say their creator robotics professor Hiroshi Ishiguro. Eerie: Android engineers have recently been able to overcome the'Uncanny Valley syndrome', where androids elicit a response of revulsion because they look almost, but not quite, human Gobsmacked men attending the show told MailOnline that she was well made, very convincing and had a nice voice. One man joked that Asuna would make'a good date; a cheap date!' From others, covering their mouths in astonishment at Asuna's realistic skin and facial expressions, the frequent response from the public was'sukoi' which translates as'amazing' in English.

Maestro: A computer has created a remix of of the second movement of Beethoven's 7th Symphony which is to be played in public for the first time tonight It's enough to make Beethoven roll over in his grave. A computer programme that composes music by monitoring a person's emotional response to sounds, is to have one of its musical creations performed by a full chamber orchestra at a prestigious music festival tonight. Using its artificial intelligence, the silicon songsmith has produced a remix of the second movement of Beethoven's 7th Symphony, which will be performed by the The Ten Tors Orchestra at the Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival in Plymouth. Researchers played the German composer's seminal piece to three test subjects as they underwent MRI scans while the programme monitored their brains for emotional indicators. Then using a programmed knowledge of music, it generated a new piece designed to create a similar emotional response.

"You no longer need an Alexa-enabled device to test your skills. Developers worldwide can use Echosim.io to experience Alexa." Alexa originated as the voice behind the increasingly popular Amazon Echo and has developed since into a powerful platform for voice-activated commands. In Echo form, Alexa can access music streaming services, control lighting and heat, order pizza, or answer simple, Googlable questions. The potential is also there for Alexa to do a lot more. With the help of some coding knowledge, customers can create their own custom commands Alexa can respond to – a big strength of the platform that means updates and improvements will be regularly created and added. Developer attraction could also be an edge for Amazon's Echo as rival tech companies like Google come out with their own versions.

The latest venture from Google's innovation team has many in the creative community pondering an old question: What is art? Magenta, the internet giant's latest artificial intelligence project, is a stab at programming an algorithm to create music. Magenta has already produced a single "song" of sorts, a four-note melody composed by Magenta and accompanied by a human-produced drum beat. "Machine learning has already been used extensively to understand content, as in speech recognition or translation," wrote Magenta researcher Douglas Eck in a blog post. "With Magenta, we want to explore the other side – developing algorithms that can learn how to generate art and music, potentially creating compelling and artistic content on their own."

We've built computers that can outplay the finest chess grandmasters in the world, virtual personal assistants that can schedule tasks and control our homes, and algorithms that can predict with increasing accuracy what we'll want to watch, read, or listen to next. But true artificial intelligence – a computer that can solve a wide range of problems through reason, planning, abstraction, and learning – hasn't come about yet. There are machines that are better than humans at specific tasks, but no machine that's as good as or better than a human at thinking. We're getting close to that point, though, Google chairman Eric Schmidt argued in an op-ed for the BBC on Saturday. Mr. Schmidt says artificial intelligence (AI) research has been steadily building since the term was first coined in 1955, and that scientists have made a few big breakthroughs in the past several years.