With a 7-inch widescreen display, you'd think the Google Home Hub wouldn't fit on your nightstand. And it'll leave plenty of room for a Pixel Stand, too. I don't usually start off hands-on stories with price, but it's worth mentioning right at the top: The Google Home Hub, with its 7-inch touchscreen display, is just $149. Granted, these aren't apples-to-apples comparisons--the screen size is three inches bigger on the Show, for example--but when people are shopping for a smart speaker with a screen, a few inches here and there won't matter. And the price tag will make the Google Home Hub hard to pass up.

Google not only offered the Home Hub to connected households at its Pixel 3 event but also had a new version of the Home app for your phone. The revamped Android and iOS software promises both a much more organized approach to smart home control and more flexibility for where you take control. Similar to the Home Hub's new Home View dashboard, you now have a clear view of your various Home-friendly devices in one place rather than having to jump from app to app. It also organizes devices by room, so you won't have to remember which speaker is in the living room. You can check on your home from wherever you are and make adjustments on compatible devices.

AI can significantly enhance the learning experience thanks to learning-specific algorithms, compared to those that we're already aware of, particularly those that power AI-enabled consumer products, such as smart home assistants (Google Home, Amazon Alexa) or social media platforms that use AI to turn text into emojis on your smartphone. In the context of learning, deploying AI requires algorithms powered by a fine-tuned combination of machine learning, deep learning and natural language processing. The benefits of AI will be felt in any number of ways in enterprise learning, but we've identified five that you should start to understand as soon as you can. Additionally, AI would help learners uncover resources by suggesting various learning assets, eliminating the time and effort it would take to do this task manually. AI-enabled systems "hear" and understand language as complete sentences and their connotations while a learner talks to the learning platform.

In a remarkable new app, Google has addressed one of the most pervasive grievances of our impersonal times: voicemail jail, or its technical name IVR (Interactive Voice Response). Although IVR's multiple menu options, long waits, and tinny music are a bother, they pale by comparison with the annoyance of the technology's characterless robotic voices. This is where a new feature of Google Assistant, called Google Duplex, a technology for automating for "real world" telephone tasks, has come to the rescue. And it does so by going against the grain by including the bane of all speakers, the dreaded "um" and "ah" words, also called filler words. Listen to the audio clip in this Google AI Blog post marked "Duplex calling a restaurant," where an automated male voice calls to make a reservation with a live receptionist. You'll hear him say "um" four times in 50 seconds.

At Tuesday's Google event, the company unveiled the extensively leaked Pixel 3 and 3 XL smartphones, in addition to both a new ChromeOS tablet, the Pixel Slate, and a new smart home assistant in the form of Google Home Hub. While Google's made smartphones and tablets in the past, the Home Hub is the first Google Assistant-powered device from the company that incorporates its "smart display" functionality, providing users with a touchscreen that lets users interact with their home in addition to using voice control. It's also one of the few smart home hubs with a display that's missing an integrated camera. Depending on who you ask, it's either a flaw or a feature. At first glance, the $149 Home Hub looks oddly traditional.

Jefferson Graham offers tips on how to listen to the Talking Tech podcast via apps, speakers, TVs and the car. The Talking Tech podcast is available for you every day with a quick hit on the latest tech news, gadget reviews, opinion on tech trends and interviews with insiders. On this page, you'll find quick links to all of our shows. In October so far, we've covered everything from the latest on Google's new video speaker to Talking Tech's recent visit to Tokyo and all the cool tech gear we saw in Japan. Between the commuters is the giant Yodobashi-Akiba camera store.

To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app. When I say "smart," I mean the speakers possess artificial intelligence, can conduct basic conversations, and are hooked up to the internet, which allows them to look stuff up and do things for you. And when I say "all," I know some readers will think, Speak for yourself! Friends my age--we're the last of the Baby Boomers--tell me they have no desire to talk to a computer or have a computer talk to them. Cynics of every age suspect their virtual assistants of eavesdropping, and not without reason.

Google is giving phone users the option to spam their spammers. The new Pixel 3 smartphone, which the company unveiled on Tuesday, features a virtual assistant that can help screen out robocalls by responding to the automated calls with its own automated messages. With the tap of a button, users will be able to send suspicious incoming calls to the assistant, which will tell the caller, "Hi, the person you're calling is using a screening service from Google, and will get a copy of this conversation. Go ahead and say your name, and why you're calling." Based on this response, the user can either accept the call, send a preset text, or report it as spam.

Google keeps secrets when it wants to (e.g., the Google security flaw it discovered earlier this year), so all the "leaks" leading up to today's announcement of its new Google Home Hub smart display were likely engineered to dissuade people from pre-ordering Amazon's second-generation Echo Show, which goes on sale next week. We like the new Echo Show--a lot. We haven't laid hands on the Google Home Hub yet, but the following five features are the ones we find the most interesting. JBL is the biggest loser here, considering that it sells its 8-inch smart display, the JBL Link View, for $250. Lenovo's 8-inch Smart Display, meanwhile, is priced at $200, and its 10-inch model sells for $250.

Although the financial sector, the automotive industry and the marketing and retail branch are taking the lead in implementing the latest artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies, today there is hardly any field that is not being touched by the progress that has been made since the term AI was first coined by John McCarthy in 1956. The biopharma and healthcare sectors are no exception and although acceptance and implementation of AI-driven technologies in these fields have been sluggish, more and more companies come to the realization that it is critical to embrace AI and related technologies to stay ahead of the competition or at least stay current. Progress in natural language processing (NLP) has led to sophisticated algorithms able to recognize spoken and written language which allows machines not only to recognize words and sentences, but as well to understand context and make connections between text in a variety of different formats from spoken words and written documents to scientific publications and electronic medical records (EMRs). Alexa, Cortana, Siri, and Google Assistant all are examples of powerful, AI-driven search engines made possible,in a large part,because of improvements in NLP. Without NLP the biopharma industry would not have seen today's advances in AI-assisted drug discovery, design of and decision making in clinical trialsand complex data mining and analysis of big data sets.