If you've been itching to talk to your Google Home about current events, travel, and pizza, you're in luck. The voice-activated speaker just added nearly three dozen new services that will expand its knowledge of what happening in your house and the world. Earlier this week, Google Home gained the ability to play Netflix shows through a Chromecast and display pictures stored in the Google Photos app, but these new actions are conversational, meaning you can talk to the specific service to get information. Similar to Amazon's Alexa Skills, if you're looking for a recipe for tonight's dinner, the Food Network can walk you through it. Or if you want to know what's happening in the world, hit up CNBC, The Huffington Post, or The Wall Street Journal.

If Siri or Alexa had a human-like form, they might resemble Gatebox Labs' hologram-in-a-jar digital assistant. Reminiscent of a sci-fi movie device, the Gatebox is either the future of digital assistants or the end of humanity. SEE ALSO: This device can project'Star Wars'-like holograms in the air Like the Echo and Google Home, users can talk to the Gatebox and its digital assistant, Azuma Hikari, will talk back. It has the same basic smart home applications as the Echo and Home, with the ability to control other smart home appliances. Additionally, the Gatebox has several sensors for detecting motion and temperature. The biggest difference here, besides being able to see Azuma Hikari emote with body language, is advanced friendship capabilities that make her even more humanoid.

Autonomous 18-wheelers are now driving the highways. Coffee table gadgets are recognizing spoken English nearly as well as humans. Smartphones apps instantly translate conversations between people speaking as many as nine different languages. But for Dean Pomerleau, none of this is all that surprising. Pomerleau built a self-driving car way back in 1989, when the first George Bush was president, and it navigated private roads using a neural network, the same AI technology that underpins modern gadgetry like the Amazon Echo and Microsoft Translator.

In the sci-fi film Ex Machina, reclusive inventor Nathan Bateman foresees a bleak future, telling the movie's protagonist Caleb that, "One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Africa." When we don't understand something, we tend to fear it; which is one reason popular movies like Ex Machina and HBO's nail-biting new series Westworld like to imagine futures in which artificial intelligence plots to destroy humanity. Fortunately, AI is far more likely to recommend those titles to your Netflix queue than to result in a dystopian society out of a George Orwell novel. While technologies including Amazon's Alexa have been busy making people's lives outside of the workplace easier, bots were the big office story in 2016, helping companies handle routine tasks such as managing support tickets and streamlining workflows. In the coming years, machine learning will take on more of the non-routine work as well, ushering in the new era of artificial intelligence--one that looks to be far brighter than the future Hollywood typically envisions.

Arrival Amy Adams stars in this elegant, involving science-fiction drama that is simultaneously old and new, revisiting many alien-invasion conventions but with unexpected intelligence, visual style and heart. The Eagle Huntress A portrait of a 13-year-old Kazakh girl from Mongolia who defies eons of tradition by learning to hunt with fierce golden eagles is a documentary so satisfying it makes you feel good about feeling good. The Edge of Seventeen Hailee Steinfeld gives a superb performance as a high-school misfit in Kelly Fremon Craig's disarmingly smart teen dramedy, the rare coming-of-age picture that feels less like a retread than a renewal. Elle Paul Verhoeven's brilliantly booby-trapped thriller starring Isabelle Huppert is a gripping whodunit, a tour de force of psychological suspense and a wickedly droll comedy of manners. The Handmaiden The most absorbing feature in years from the South Korean director Park Chan-wook ("Oldboy") is a teasingly witty and elegant puzzle-box of a thriller about two women (played by Kim Tae-ri and Kim Min-hee) pursuing their destinies in 1930s Japanese-occupied Korea.

Google's search algorithm appears to be systematically promoting information that is either false or slanted with an extreme rightwing bias on subjects as varied as climate change and homosexuality. Following a recent investigation by the Observer, which uncovered that Google's search engine prominently suggests neo-Nazi websites and antisemitic writing, the Guardian has uncovered a dozen additional examples of biased search results. Google's search algorithm and its autocomplete function prioritize websites that, for example, declare that climate change is a hoax, being gay is a sin, and the Sandy Hook mass shooting never happened. The increased scrutiny on the algorithms of Google – which removed antisemitic and sexist autocomplete phrases after the recent Observer investigation – comes at a time of tense debate surrounding the role of fake news in building support for conservative political leaders, particularly US President-elect Donald Trump. Facebook has faced significant backlash for its role in enabling widespread dissemination of misinformation, and data scientists and communication experts have argued that rightwing groups have found creative ways to manipulate social media trends and search algorithms.

Could robots be marking your homework? What do you call a sick bird? This is computer-generated wordplay and an example of how the boundaries of artificial intelligence are shifting.If a computer can crack jokes, what other human activities could they start to replicate? What jobs could it take?Artificial intelligence has become an increasingly big issue for education – not least because many tech companies and publishers are circling around the huge commercial opportunities.But could students really get their answers from a robot rather than a teacher? Dr Tarek Besold, speaking at the annual OEB educational technology conference in Berlin, said a joke-writing computer showed how robots could be creative as well as carrying out repetitive, factory-floor tasks.

"Game of Thrones" author George R.R. Martin is proud of HBO for having two shows going up against each other at the Golden Globes, one of which is based on the fantasy series he created. "Being an HBO guy, I'm thrilled that to see that both'Game of Thrones' and'Westworld' have been nominated for the big prize," he wrote on his blog. However, Martin acknowledged that the first season of "Westworld" was a true masterpiece, so he tipped his hat to the sci-fi show. "Though Westworld is going to be some tough competition. James Marsden Celebrates'Westworld' Golden Globe Nod By Treating Girlfriend'Westworld' Cast Talk'Mayhem And Chaos' Awaiting Fans'Westworld' Creator Weighs In On Guests' Experiences'Westworld' Cast Talk'Mayhem And Chaos' Awaiting Fans But should neither shows win the Best Show category, Martin wouldn't feel bad, just as long as "Stranger Things" takes it home. "As an science fiction and fantasy geek, I am also delighted to see that "Stranger Things' made the list," he said.

You might find yourself wishing for a silent night after you hear the first Christmas carol written by artificial intelligence. The new tune makes its holiday season debut courtesy of a team of computer scientists in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. The researchers fed 100 hours of pop songs to a type of artificial intelligence (AI) known as a recurrent neural network, which learns and performs by building connections between input data, much like the human brain does. In this case, the uploaded songs taught the neural network about the general structure of pop music. The researchers then tested its ability to generate a song about an image -- a decorated Christmas tree surrounded by wrapped presents -- using a process called "neural story singing," which they described in a study currently under review for a conference presentation. To write the song, the researchers first had the computer produce a story about the festive image.

More than 30 startups and companies like Domino's Pizza, Food Network, and Product Hunt launched new actions for Google Home today. Actions, like Amazon Alexa skills, give a user control and command of Google Assistant. This marks the largest rollout of actions since Google Home went on sale in October and since the Google Assistant platform to make commands for Google Home launched last week. There are currently 35 third-party conversation actions you can use on Google Home, 32 of which were released today. "Conversation Actions from early access partners will begin rolling out over the coming weeks -- starting today. We're excited to see what developers build!,"