Google Home is an always-on speaker coming later this year. LOS ANGELES - We know that Big Brother has been watching our every move for years--but are you ready to have your home conversations monitored as well? Following on the footsteps of Amazon's smash Echo connected speaker, which reads the weather and news, plays music, and turns lights on and off, based on your voice instructions, Google is set to launch its rival product, Google Home, later this year. And this week reports surfaced saying Apple could be joining the fray with its own speaker featuring the Siri personal digital assistant from the iPhone. Which begs the question--how do you feel about buying a connected speaker for the kitchen that could listen to every word you're saying?

Since 2007, I've read countless versions of the "Apple is doomed" argument, most of them related to the iPhone. Apple was doomed because it dared compete in the smartphone business, then it was doomed when Android came along, and then it was doomed every time a product failed to arouse the imagination of some analyst or journalist. In all this time, however, Apple has been anything but doomed. And it's likely that will not happen in the foreseeable future. Today's version of "Apple is doomed" comes from well-known outspoken software developer Marco Arment, who has often shared his views on Apple's business.

Plus, how one journalist is handling the challenges of reporting on the drone war in northwest Pakistan. The world's largest social media network is also one of the biggest news platforms - so allegations of a bias towards liberal news issues has triggered a lot of scrutiny, both from outside and from within. This week we unpick how Facebook delivers the news to you and why it matters. Many journalists and writers have been tracking the Facebook story and its implications. For this report, we have spoken to: Zeynep Tufekci, assistant professor at the School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina; Callum Borchers, media and politics reporter at The Washington Post; Will Oremus, technology reporter at Slate.com; and Kelly McBridge, media ethicist, The Poynter Institute.

The innovations protected by the new patent tie together graphs and graphical annotations with the corresponding narrative in natural language reports that the Arria NLG software generates. For example, placing one's cursor on a graphical element can cause the corresponding report section to be highlighted for ease of reference. The patented features will be deployed to strengthen the integration of language and graphical elements in the Company's products. As with the Company's other recent patents, the covered features are desirable in any NLG system, not only Arria NLG's advanced Reiter & Dale model language generation system. The new patent is part of a broad diversification plan that Arria NLG has instituted to enhance versatility and improve ease of use, as well as to increase the analytic power and actionable conclusions of its NLG products.

If you're one of the 38 million American travelers this Memorial Day weekend, or enjoying one of the 800 hot dogs consumed per second during this holiday, then take a step back, relax and enjoy the week's top technology news! The question of human sustainability and sufficient resources on our planet has served as the basis for many science fiction movies. But unlike Hollywood's'Interstellar' film, our answer might be right here on Earth. AI is showing potential to completely revolutionize farming, and with it keep humanity's food supply coming. What if we could go past what we know as binary computing?

Five days from now Google will publish open-source tools that will focus its machine-learning engine on music and art. But one London startup, named Jukedeck, has been working on getting machines to automatically generate original music for years. You can even generate your own ditty, composed by artificial intelligence, right now on Jukedeck's website. Jukedeck lets anyone use its machine-learning engine to generate tunes hosted on its website. The engine then produces an original piece of music.

Can computers be truly creative? More specifically, can people bestow upon machines what we know as creativity and have the machines thinking creatively? Google knows that an answer does not come easily and some people may argue that the answer is hairy. Do all people agree on what makes creativity creativity? Depending on what kind of definition you go by, if you build software that can take a note sequence and turn it into a melody by finding patterns where do you place it on the scale of creativity?

The danger-sensing abilities of the newly developed robot system far exceed those of the Robot in the classic TV series Lost in Space. The danger-sensing abilities of the newly developed robot system far exceed those of the Robot in the classic TV series Lost in Space. Researchers are developing a system to teach robots how to feel pain. That might seem counterintuitive, as IEEE Spectrum points out. After all, "One of the most useful things about robots is that they don't feel pain."

Who needs Art critics when a computer can do the job? Visitors to the Tate will be invited to access an Artificial Intelligence (AI) programme which uses algorithms to explain the relevance of works in the collection. "We can't wait to begin working with Tate, Microsoft and a talented team of AI specialists to create this living, seeing, algorithm." Tate Britain has awarded the 15,000 IK prize and a 90,000 production budget to the Italian team behind Recognition, a research project which will merge AI and art, to "uncover the hidden links between current events and art from the Tate collection." Supported by Microsoft, the Fabrica team, based in Treviso, will use powerful algorithms and "machine learning" to search through Tate's vast digital collection and archive and news images of current events, unearthing "hidden relationships between how the world has been represented in image form, in the past and present."

Twice a week, we'll be highlighting the latest bot and artificial intelligence news here on the Bot or Not Medium blog. This week, we have bots running countries, companies and social engagements. Will bots eventually rule the world, like in the movies? See below for a summary, and stay tuned for more bots news next week! Real-time bots have grown exponentially smarter in the last decade.