Font preference says a great deal about a person. Before you pursue a relationship with someone, wouldn't you like to see if their ideal profile would feature classy Helvetica, traditional Times New Roman or a brightly-colored mess of Comic Sans that resembles your middle school AIM away message? WE KNOW THAT'S NOT THE CORRECT USE OF "THEIR," OKAY?! IT'S 1AM AND IT WAS A HORRIBLE MISTAKE, PLEASE LET US FIX IT. It would be helpful if dating apps required users to list at least three of their favorite couples. Whether you list your favorite celebrity couples, fictional couples or even your mom and dad -- the couples you admire will give people a great sense of who you are and your overall romantic aspirations. If you see someone shipping Jim and Pam or Ross and Rachel, they're probably great. But if their idea of great romance is Rory and Dean or Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries, you know to definitely think twice before swiping. Knowing your potential match's music preferences is extremely important, but there are other major interests that need to be factored in as well.

Software faults raise questions about the validity of brain studies (arstechnica.com) Is "Python Machine Learning" by Sebastian Raschka a good book?

Echobox, a London-based AI startup targeting the publishing industry, has secured 3.4 million from Mangrove Capital Partners and LocalGlobe. The startup's AI service is used by publishers to enhance their reach and distribution on social media. The startup claims its tech can predict if an article will go viral and when the optimal time to publish content is. Axel Springer and Le Monde are among its clients. "Having worked at a well-known publisher, I was amazed by how they were investing vast resources in trying to perfect the science of content distribution in-house with data scientists and analytics tools to guide decision-making," said Echobox CEO Antoine Amann.

PRO: Chris Bishop, director of Microsoft Research in Cambridge, said earlier this year that he believes the hyperbole around the AI risks could jeopardise any future developments that may in fact assist humanity. "Any scenario in which AI is an existential threat to humanity is not just around the corner," he told the Guardian. Referring to the views of high-profile cynics like professor Stephen Hawking, Bishop said: "I think they must be talking decades away for those comments to make any sense. Right now we are in control of that technology and we can make lots of choices about the paths that we follow." Oren Etzioni, chief executive of the Allen Institute for AI and professor of computer science at the University of Washington, meanwhile says the popular dystopian vision of AI is wrong because it "equates intelligence with autonomy".

Bots have officially taken over, and they're about to make our lives a whole lot easier. In April, Facebook introduced bots for Messenger, but the world's most popular social media platform is not the only company to open a "bot store" with consumer functions, and virtual assistants like Amazon's Alexa are steadily increasing in both popularity and functionality. With Kik, you can chat with Michelangelo and see the climate conditions through Yahoo! With Operator, shopping is as easy as sending a text, and Pana, the online travel agency, turns a simple chat conversation via text into real bookings. In fact, everyone from 1–800-Flowers and the NBA to Taco Bell is jumping on the chatbot bandwagon.

I'm starting to enjoy talking to computers. I don't use speech-to-text all that much because I'm so keyboard-oriented, but I love being able to run a search by voice or ask for last night's baseball scores. Siri works well for this, though I'm now using Android and am thus in the hands of Google Now, which keeps asking me to re-train it by speaking'OK Google' over and over again. Despite this annoyance, a day rarely passes that I don't talk to Google Now. Which raises an interesting question.

The popular discussion around "robots writing the news" tends to presuppose that automation will displace human journalists. While that's certainly possible in some cases, the AP says it hasn't eliminated any reporting jobs as a result of its deals with Automated Insights. Rather, it says the automated earnings stories free journalists to focus on adding detail and context to the more newsworthy reports. And the automated sports recaps have allowed the agency to expand its coverage to events it had previously ignored. For instance, the AP did not previously offer recaps of most minor-league baseball games.

Japan is one of the world's most advanced countries in the field of artificial intelligence and robot industries. At the Group of Seven summit Japan hosted in May, world leaders looked amused and fascinated as they watched a robot performing at the International Media Center. At the same time, because of the technological advances and advent of robots, the leaders are concerned that many people in their countries will lose their jobs and cry out for assistance from governments. This kind of downside to innovation has always been a part of modernization. Innovation brings fundamental change, but the impact of AI will be on a far larger scale than ever before. The most visible sector in which robots are bringing considerable change in Japan is the carmaker industry.

She's smart, resourceful, and roughly the same size as two Campbell's soup cans stacked on top of one another. Her name's Alexa, and unless you've been hiding under a technology- averse rock for the past several months, you've probably heard of her. The Amazon Echo packs a technological maze of wires, motherboards, speakers, and LED's into a 9 x 3 cylindrical frame. It's impressively accurate voice recognition technology is the perfect key to tie your smart home together (for a detailed teardown of an Echo, check out this article from I Fix It) Here at Inspire Energy, we've road tested the Amazon Echo since early April of this year. Here are three important set -ups you'll want to nail on your first day of ownership so that you can get the most out of Alexa right from the get go.

Ask Apple's Siri digital assistant if she's evil, and she'll respond curtly, "Not really." Repeat a famous line from the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey," in which a computer on a spaceship kills nearly all the human crew, and Siri groans. And who can blame her? We humans have a morbid fascination with machines rising up to wipe us out or to enslave us as cocooned, flesh-and-blood battery packs. You can see that vision of the future streaming over Netflix whenever you want.