What is John Giannandrea, Google's former head of search and AI, going to do at Apple? The short answer is "a lot." The more pressing answer is "fix Siri." Luckily, Giannandrea seems to be the right person for the job. The 53-year-old Scottish engineer was poached by Apple in April, but his new title and position were only announced yesterday. He is now "chief of machine learning and AI strategy," which means he will be overseeing a team that combines two of the iPhone maker's most important AI products: Core ML and Siri.

Apple confirmed this morning that the combined Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning team, which houses Siri, will be led by the recent hire, who came to Apple this year after an eight-year stint at Google, where he led the Machine Intelligence, Research and Search teams. Before that he founded Metaweb Technologies and Tellme. While still at Google, Giannandrea spent 20 minutes on camera with TechCrunch's Frederic Lardinois to discuss the AI hype/worry cycle and the importance, limitations, and acceleration of machine learning. My take: I took a look at Giannandrea three months ago, when he first joined Apple. I don't know anything more today than I knew then except that his job hasn't got any easier.

The humble vacuum cleaner has come a long way over the past few years. Gone are the days when you had to carve out 30 minutes or more per week to keep those carpets clean. These days, your vacuum can clean the house for you -- meaning you can leave, and come home to a totally clean home. There are a number of smart robotic vacuums out there, and while they all do basically the same thing, there are a few key differences that might make one product better than another for your uses. Apart from the obvious -- like the fact that you want a robotic vacuum to be relatively good at cleaning, you'll also want to consider how the vacuum is controlled.

Amazon Prime Day is almost upon us and, inevitably, there are plenty of deals available on Amazon's excellent range of smart home devices with Alexa built in, especially the Echo Show which has dropped in price by $100 from $229 to $129. You can read all about the best Amazon Prime Day deals in Gordon Kelly's excellent guides here and here - and there are more to come. But what if it's Google's virtual assistant who floats your boat? Well, there are plenty of discounts on Google smart home gadgets - here are some of the best. The deals highlighted within this post were independently selected by the contributor and do not contain affiliate links.

An upcoming book is getting some media attention for including an unflattering characterization of Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Some original Google employees remember Brin as a "playboy" during the company's early days, as well as a manager who thought nothing of having intimate relationships with female employees, according to Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (as Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher. In addition to the salacious info, excerpts of the book published by Vanity Fair this week include a sobering reminder about what Brin and the company's other founder Larry Page, always considered their primary goal. In Fisher's book, Kevin Kelly, Wired's founding editor, told him: "When I met Page, I said, 'Larry, I don't get it. I don't see where you're going with this. And Larry said, 'We are not really interested in search. We are making an (artificial intelligence).' So from the very beginning, the mission for Google was not to use AI to make their search better, but to use search to make an AI." Author Steven Levy wrote something similar in his 2011 book about Google, "In the Plex."

Google was busy this week with upgrades and new features for its apps and devices, and a major security update for the Chrome browser. Here are some of the changes Google rolled out recently. The Assistant in Google Home will now tell you about events from URL and iCal calendars that have been imported into the Google Calendar app. After you've imported a calendar, tap the menu icon (upper left-hand corner) of the Home app, tap Settings and scroll down to Calendar at the bottom of the page. The calendars you imported should show up in your calendar list.

Football season is finally back, and that 75" HD flat screen you've had your eye on for ages is on sale. You've entered your payment details and are all ready to hit "Complete checkout"… but then you notice the delivery options. With order processing time, will your new TV arrive before the kickoff game? You spot a chat icon in the corner of the screen and click to ask about your potential delivery window. In just a few minutes, you find out the TV will definitely arrive in time, with no extra rush shipping fees. You place the order and start daydreaming of taking in all that pulse-pounding gridiron action in stunning HD.

Andrew Rebhan, MBA is a health IT research consultant with Advisory Board of Washington, DC. Natural language processing (NLP) techniques allow digital systems to streamline user interactions allowing machines to read text, understand meaning, and generate narratives from existing information. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have accelerated progress in a broad range of NLP applications for healthcare, including digital assistants for clinical staff, concierge services for patients, and digital scribes to streamline documentation processes. For example, last Fall Nuance Communications released its Dragon Medical Virtual Assistant to help health care providers interact with clinical workflows using NLP and other conversational AI functionality. Nuance announced at HIMSS18 that it will integrate its virtual assistant technology into Epic's EHR.

Google is having a hardware sale.Credit: Google Amazon typically offers Prime Day discounts on their Fire tablets, Kindle E-readers and Echo digital assistants. This year is no exception with the Echo Show already discounted $100 through Prime Day which starts on July 16th and ends on the 17th. It's offering deep discounts on some of its own hardware, and you don't have to pay the fee to be a Prime member or wait until Prime Day to take advantage. If you want a hands-free digital assistant so you can buy stuff from Amazon, the company's line of Echo devices is for you. If you want to have something that resembles a normal conversation with a digital assistant that leads the field when it comes to answering questions and providing information, Google's line of Home devices is what you want.

We never have been so closer to the future than we are now. There are news spreading across the media about the robots takeover of our jobs, driverless cars hitting the road with outstanding proficiency in driving standards, while at the same time, virtual assistants make us feel a bit less lonely telling us jokes and spending time with us. In fact, Siri, Alexa or Cortana have something machines didn't have before: a simulated human conscious capable of keep conversations with humans without being uncovered. AI is now at its most advanced development stage ever, but… do we need to worry about how smart are getting the robots? Will we ever need to?