Ask Siri or Amazon Alexa to tell you a joke, and you'll probably get something a 10-year-old would scrunch her nose at. Google wants to change that. The company unveiled Google Home, its Amazon Echo-like home assistant, last week. According to the Wall Street Journal, Google hired writers from places like Pixar and the Onion to help spice up the Home's dialogue and give its AI more personality. Apparently there's more work to be done: As Tech Crunch points out, Google currently has a job listing for someone with "experience writing dialogue for plays/screenplays, fiction/interactive fiction, and/or comedy/entertainment." Personality can be hard to nail down in AI.

Amazon has just launched Amazon Music Unlimited, a cheap subscription service designed to take on rivals including Spotify. The music streaming subscription service was launched on Wednesday. Amazon Music Unlimited, the e-commerce giant's answer to competing services including Spotify, Pandora and Apple Music, is available through the Amazon Music application as well as the Amazon Echo IoT voice assistant speaker system. While Amazon Music does offer Prime members access to music content already, signing up to the new service will open the door to "tens of millions" of songs by a range of artists including Metallica, Sia and Shawn Mendes. Amazon has priced the subscription service with rivals in mind, undercutting aggressively to either eventually lure consumers away from competing services or, more likely, entice new streamers to try out music on-demand.

NEW YORK--"Alexa, take on Spotify and Apple Music." But Amazon on Wednesday launched Amazon Music Unlimited, an on-demand streaming service powered by the Alexa voice familiar to Echo owners, and a service primed to muscle in on an already congested streaming market for music. Amazon Music Unlimited debuts with a catalog of "tens of millions" of songs--Amazon won't reveal a precise number-- as well as curated playlists and personalized stations. That promises to makes it more of a viable competitor against Apple Music, Spotify and any number of other streaming services than the company's existing Amazon Prime Music service, which has a far more limited catalog of some two million songs and will remain available at no extra cost to Amazon Prime members. All too often when you request a song on Echo, Prime Music only plays a sample.

Alexa can already order you an Uber, control your smart home devices, and keep you company. She's about to learn much better DJ skills, save you six bucks a month on streaming music, and possibly even change the way you listen to music in your house. Amazon Music Unlimited, a beefed-up subscription service built to compete with the likes of Spotify and Apple Music, launches today. It's cheaper than those big-name services--for many users, at least--and it features clever voice control with the company's Echo speakers. If you're using Music Unlimited on an Amazon Echo, Tap, or Dot, the service only costs 4 a month. To use it on anything else--mobile devices, your computer, a Fire TV stick, or even Sonos speakers--the pricing falls more in line with Spotify or Apple Music.

Amazon is introducing its answer to Spotify and Apple Music, and it's playing to win. Amazon on Wednesday launched Amazon Music Unlimited, its on-demand streaming service. The new offering is priced aggressively, with Amazon Prime members able to subscribe to the service for 7.99 a month -- below the 9.99 rate popularized by Spotify, Apple Music and just about every other major music streaming option. The on-demand streaming service will work online and through a redesigned Amazon Music app as well as through the Amazon Echo. A separate for-Echo-only streaming plan will cost 3.99 a month.

Entrepreneurs need little convincing that technology is important, rapidly evolving, and likely to have a profound impact on their businesses. But keeping track of developments, and knowing where to focus one's attention, is anything but straightforward. Analysts at PricewaterhouseCoopers (pdf) say the impact of constant technological breakthroughs represent a "megatrend" – a change so big that "every business should develop an emerging technology strategy". They have highlighted eight key areas that all businesses should pay attention to. The artificial intelligence market is growing rapidly and forecast to be worth 36bn by 2025.

When a lot of us think about Data Science and Machine Learning, we might shy away and think - 'that's only for the clever boffins' ... 'I didn't do advanced maths in school, I'll avoid that...', or'I only do basic coding and SQL, it's no use to me...'. Like a lot of areas, the thing is that, if we don't at least take a look at it, we are doing ourselves a disservice. Sure, I will be the first to admit that Data Science and Machine Learning can be hard, but guess what, that's only a small part of the domain. The majority of it is quite accessible to most developers and is not that difficult to either learn, or use. In addition, the Data Science and Machine Learning tools given to use by Microsoft in Azure, make it super easy to get started.

Here's your daily dose of an indie film, web series, TV pilot, what-have-you in progress, as presented by the creators themselves. At the end of the week, you'll have the chance to vote for your favorite. In the meantime: Is this a project you'd want to see? Tell us in the comments. Logline: In the near future, a young animator is offered what should be her dream job. But when she discovers the truth of the modern "creative" process, she must make a hard choice about her passion for film.

Google has hired comedy writers from Pixar and The Onion in a bid to make its smart assistant more likeable. It hopes to use their talent to'infuse personality' into its AI helper, which will be used in the firm's new Pixel phones, Duo app and Home speaker. The ultimate goal is to make users feel more emotionally connected to their personal software agent and the firm believes a livelier disposition could make this happen. In a world of order-taking machines, Google Assistant aims to be a comedian. The search giant has recently hired comedy writers from Pixar and The Onion, a satire newspaper, in order to'infuse personality' into its virtual assistant that will live in Google Home (pictured) Earlier this month, Google unveiled its Pixel smartphones and eagerly awaited Home speaker that will both be designed with the smart assistant.