Amazon.com Inc.'s own video store will no longer have the starring role on the company's Fire TV streaming devices. Software updates coming this year will give movies and TV shows from Netflix, HBO and other competitors equal prominence on the devices' home screens. The approach is similar to one Apple Inc. took when it refreshed its Apple TV device last year. Amazon's Fire TV has offered solid performance at reasonable prices, but its home screen has been cluttered with Amazon products -- whether to rent, to buy or offered at no extra charge through Amazon's 99-a-year Prime program. That's made it tough to find video from competing providers without turning to a voice-search feature that, until recently, excluded Netflix.

"The Silicon Review 50 Smartest Companies of the Year 2016 program identifies the companies transforming the way we work via cutting-edge technology. These companies are leading the seismic shifts that today's company leaders need to be thinking about before it's too late. We selected WorkCompass because of its unique application of artificial intelligence to improve performance appraisal, its revenue growth, customer reviews and domain influence," said Manish Pandey, Editor-in-Chief of The Silicon Review Magazine. "We are honored to be recognized by The Silicon Review Magazine as the one of the 50 Smartest Companies of the Year 2016," said Denis Coleman, Founder and CEO at WorkCompass. "In 2012, I left my job to found WorkCompass. I wanted to transform performance appraisal into an ongoing process about coaching and mentoring staff to achieve their full potential. I'm incredibly proud of what we have achieved so far at WorkCompass".

The UK government's plans to check whether people are old enough to watch pornography might include creating a database of everyone's viewing habits. The Government has recently been looking to introduce new checks to ensure that adult content can only be viewed by those over 18. To do that, it will introduce age verification schemes, and sites that don't implement them will be rendered inaccessible from within the UK. But the mechanism involved in doing so could create an entire database of the UK's porn viewing habits, according to the Open Rights Group. Doing so will create a vulnerable set of information that could expose anyone, according to the group. The robot developed by Seed Solutions sings and dances to the music during the Japan Robot Week 2016 at Tokyo Big Sight.

Figuring out how much a business trip will cost can be a hassle. Employees are often put in the position of figuring out how to get somewhere, and once they get there, they don't have an incentive to keep their spending to a minimum. A new startup called TravelBank is aiming to help by providing a predictive budget for a trip, based on when someone is traveling and where they're going. After that, it helps them document their spending and file an expense report that shows how much money they've spent against their budget. More than just helping employees capture expenses, TravelBank is focused on helping to change their behavior so they spend less money. Companies that adopt TravelBank for expense reporting can elect to give employees who spend less than the predicted budget half of what they saved.

Amazon's filing of a patent on voice-control "pocket drone" technology demonstrates that the company is seeking to develop the work it has done in voice recognition applications and virtual assistant further by bringing it into the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) market. Voice commands for drones have been in development for years. Even in 2010, hobbyists were able to adapt drones to take simple directional commands to navigate pre-mapped areas. Now, basic systems are sold for under 100 online and in stores. And it is possible to modify Amazon Echo through a ground station to deliver commands to commercially sold quadcopters, as demonstrated by a proof-of-concept initiative on hackster.io in February using the Alexa virtual assistant.

This post is authored by Sachin Chouksey, Principal Software Engineering Manager, and Darwin Schweitzer, Senior Program Manager, at Microsoft. Building analytics solutions can consume a lot of time. Customers who wish to build intelligent solutions on Microsoft's advanced analytics platform today, for instance, need to navigate through a multitude of options, thanks to the broad array of services available as part of the Cortana Intelligence Suite. This buffet of options could present a learning curve for newer customers who may not be sure where to start, or what the optimal architecture might be, or how to glue different services together. To address the above challenge, we offer Cortana Intelligence Solutions, a set of pre-built solutions that are based on commonly encountered design patterns and which customers can quickly deploy and test.

Researchers at Microsoft have published details of new speech recognition technology that they say transcribes conversational speech as well as a human does. "We've reached human parity," says Microsoft's chief speech scientist Xuedong Huang in a statement. "This is an historic achievement." The system's word error rate is reported to be 5.9 percent, which Microsoft says is "about equal" to professional transcriptionists asked to work on speech taken from the same Switchboard corpus of conversations. It uses neural language models that group similar words together, allowing for efficient generalization. Microsoft plans to use the technology in Cortana, its personal voice assistant for Windows and the Xbox One, as well as speech-to-text transcription software.

Investigators hunting for debris from missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 are about to be joined by a mechanical teammate. In the Australian Transport Safety Bureau's weekly operational update on the MH370 search released Wednesday, officials revealed they were installing a robot on one of the two vessels scanning the ocean floor for wreckage. The Associated Press called it a "drone." The Dong Hai Jiu 101 was in Fremantle this week being set up with the Remora III, a remotely operated vehicle with video cameras and high-tech sensors. Its mission is to "reacquire and investigate, through video imaging, a range of sonar contacts which have been identified during previous deep tow operations," according to the bureau.

RTB House, a technology company specializing in retargeting scenarios, has come up with a brand new model that relies on deep learning (currently the most promising subfield of AI-oriented research) to craft digital features that recognize the attitude, intention and intent of internet users. It allows for accurate estimation of the conversion probability, which in turn makes personalized retargeting more efficient than before. The model can even be applied to users who haven't clicked ads, a long-sought after feature of digital marketers. Users take hundreds of small steps when visiting advertiser's website. The model developed by RTB House uses deep learning to identify every one of these footprints, in order to find patterns in decision-making.

If you could implant a device in your brain to enhance your intelligence, would you do it? A new company has just invested 100 million into developing such a device, and is being advised by some of the biggest names in science. The company, Kernel, was launched earlier this year by entrepreneur Bryan Johnson. He says he has spent many years wondering how best to contribute to humanity. I think it's the most precious and powerful resource in existence," says Johnson. His goal is for human intelligence to expand and develop in the same way that artificial intelligence has in recent years. The first experiments planned will be on memory. Johnson is working with Theodore Berger, at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who is looking at the hippocampus – a brain region key for memory. Berger is currently studying people with epilepsy, who already have electrical implants in their brains to treat their seizures. Rather than using these implants to stimulate the brain, Berger's team have been using them to record brain activity instead, to tell us more about how our memory works. Once we learn how a healthy brain functions, we should eventually be able to mimic it, says Johnson. By electrically stimulating the same pattern of activity, the team think they should be able to restore memory in people with memory disorders. Berger has already had some success with animals, and has started experiments in people. Kernel will be starting new human studies in the coming months, says Johnson. "The idea is that if you have loss of memory function, then you could build a prosthetic for the hippocampus that would help restore the circuitry, and restore memory," says Johnson. People with memory disorders, for example due to a traumatic experience or ageing, are intended to be the first people to test such a prosthesis. "The first super-humans are those who have deficits to start with," says Johnson. But Johnson then plans to develop this prosthesis to enhance memory, and potentially other functions, in healthy people. He envisions a future in which it is normal for people to walk around with chips in their brains, providing them with a cognitive boost as they go about their everyday business. The 100 million – from Johnson's own pocket – will be spent on developing such a device. Ideally, it will be as tiny and easy to implant as possible, while being able to record or stimulate multiple neurons. The team are also working on ways to develop personalised algorithms – a set of rules that dictate normal brain function for an individual. Johnson hopes that memory enhancement will just be the start. "If we can mimic the natural function of the brain, and we can truly work with neural code, then I posit the question – what can't we do?" says Johnson. "Could we learn a thousand times faster?