Microsoft's "Anniversary Update," scheduled for release Aug. 2, will let users activate Cortana with a spoken command ("Hey Cortana") even while their screen has gone into sleep mode. Cortana will be able to recall more types of information, such as frequent flier numbers or parking locations. Users can also ask Cortana to remember specific photos, such as a wine bottle to buy again later.

Customer experience personalization is all about data first. Get the data right and you can shape the overall customer experience by applying data science and machine learning. Recommendation engines are very powerful personalization tools because it's a great way to do "discovery" – showing people items they will like, but are unlikely to discover by themselves. They improve a visitor's experience by offering relevant items at the right time and on the right page. In the immortal words of Steve Jobs - "a lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."

As a child, growing up with the 1970's and 80's episodes of the BBC TV series, the only way I could be convinced to watch the Saturday tea-time showings of Dr Who was by robbing the family dog of its worn old blanket and sitting with it over my head, peering at the TV (with its'remote' control attached to the TV unit on a cable) through a chewed hole. It was my way of convincing my 8-year old myself that I was safe and that it wasn't all real. And yet, even stripping away the blanket and upgrading the TV (and remote control) tech quite a bit, and replacing the Daleks with for example, Arnie's Terminator, the Matrix's Machines, Ex Machina's Ava (or even the comedy Fembots in Austin Powers), man's age-old fear of the machine and relentless need to fight, overpower and destroy it hasn't really changed that much … even if some of the methods have. From the industrial revolution onwards, our relationship with machines and technology of any variety has always been'love/hate'. Even the fact that films like Wall-E, Big Hero and the Iron Giant, and characters like The Hitchhiker's' bulbous Marvin and Star Wars' R2-D2, C-3PO and more recently, BB-9, have such a fond film-following stems in part from our need to'humanise' robots and make them less scary.

A serious problem in the Turing test for computer intelligence is exposed in a study published in the Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence. If a machine were to'take the Fifth Amendment' – that is, exercise the right to remain silent throughout the test – it could, potentially, pass the test and thus be regarded as a thinking entity, authors Kevin Warwick and Huma Shah of Coventry University argue. However, if this is the case, any silent entity could pass the test, even if it were clearly incapable of thought. The test, devised in 1950 by pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing, assesses a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour indistinguishable from that of a human. Also known as the'imitation game', it requires a human judge to converse with two hidden entities, a human and a machine, and then determine which is which.

Chance Dorland spoke with Bloomberg TV's Angie Lau, Bloomberg News' David Merritt, Heather Timmons of Quartz, the AP's Paul Cheung & drone photographer Seongjoo Cho after their Asian American Journalists Association "Journalism in the Age of Artificial Intelligence" panel discussion at this weekend's New.Now.Next media conference in Seoul.

We have seen how Tony Stark reacted to the existence of Ulysses, an Inhuman who has visions of imminent danger. Either he can see the future or can work out the future mathematically through probability, no one seems to be exactly sure. But one person who is sure is Tony Stark and he doesn't like it. Which is funny, because back in the nineties this kind of thing was right up his street. The Avengers spinoff team set up by Tony Stark but led by the Scarket Witch?

It's called Here One, and you guessed it, it's another set of wireless earbuds. Here One is all that, plus everything you'd expect from a standard set of wireless headphones, and then even more stuff on top of that. The Here One buds will cost 299 when they ship in November. This company's never been short on ambition or confidence: Doppler calls them "the last thing you'll ever put in your ears." The Here Ones are, at the simplest level, a set of wireless headphones. They can stream music, take calls, interact with Siri and Google Now, and the like.

The Luftwaffe would use the doodlebugs to attack London, where actress Helen Mirren's parents lived during the war. "They were by far the worst because [as Mirren's mother told her] you would hear them coming over and if you heard the drone -- the buzz up there in the sky -- if you heard that noise stop, that's when it was dropping its load," said Mirren during a phone interview with The Huffington Post. "So you would just pray it went over your head." Mirren recalled this memory from her family's history as she was promoting her movie "Eye in the Sky," in which she plays a British colonel tasked with deciding whether to use a drone strike in Nairobi, Kenya. Her character has tracked the location of an extremist meeting, but must choose whether to take out the terrorists at the cost of killing a young girl who is selling bread right outside their headquarters.

On Tuesday, June 28th we'll be exploring "The Art of AI." The evening will examine the opportunities and challenges presented when machine learning and storytelling collide. Together we'll explore the impact of AI on narrative and the role that it can play in building rich immersive storytelling experiences. Guests for the evening include The creators of Sunspring a short scripted by an AI starring Thomas Middleditch from HBO's Silicon Valley. This is a special presentation that mixes story and code in real-time.

There are plenty of toy robots on the market, but they tend to lack a real sense of personality. With scripted responses and set, repeated movements, they can be hard to love. A team of robotics engineers at Anki have attempted to create a truly loveable robot that relies on AI to give it some real personality. Cozmo is a cute little robot capable of recognizing and engaging with humans, thanks to a combination of robotics, artificial intelligence and computer vision. According to Anki, Cozmo possesses the kind of personality we usually associate with robots we see in the movies.