Google has unveiled a range of new products focused on artificial intelligence, which the technology giant hopes will make its services easier to use. At the firm's annual I/O developer conference, Google's latest innovations included revamps for its Android operating system, as well as Gmail and virtual helper Google Assistant. The next version of Google's annually updated mobile operating system, Android P, is now "smarter" according to the firm, thanks to new machine learning tools at its heart. This artificial intelligence has been applied to several new features, including Adaptive Battery which prioritises power to the apps used most, while Adaptive Brightness automatically tweaks screen brightness. There are also App Actions, which learn user habits and then predict which app a user is likely to turn to next - for example raising a prompt to resume a Spotify playlist when a pair of headphones are plugged in.

I asked Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant if they're spying on me. Some answers are helpful, one isn't. Here's what each voice assistant said when I asked. I asked Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant if they're spying on me. Some answers are helpful, one isn't.

Microsoft, best known for its software, still manages to churn out a beautiful piece of hardware every once in a while. On the portable side, products like its Microsoft Surface Laptop show that the company still has a keen sense of design and a knack for developing products for the modern era. The larger Surface Studio does the same for the desktop. Now, the company's just-announced Surface Hub 2 promises to be a sleek, extra-large addition to the office boardroom when it begins shipping next year. The Hub 2, a more affordable follow-up to the original 2016 Surface Hub, is a 50.5-inch touchscreen display ringed by only the most slender of black bezels.

Google Assistant is finding her (or his) voice. At Google's developer conference this year the company introduced six new voices and they're now available. The new voices, three female and three male, are said to be more realistic because they include pauses and intonation, and they better approximate the way real people speak. To be sure, they still don't sound totally realistic but they do remove a bit of the monotone from the basic Assistant voice. Switching between them is simple and should only take a few seconds.

Past last week Google unveil their Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistant namely Project Duplex. Hosted the Google I/O 2018 by Google CEO Sundar Pichai, a mix reaction of audience are seen in the event when Pichai start to call and book a hair cut appointment to a salon. When the AI Assistant make a call to the salon and set an appointment there. The hair salon receptionist have no idea that she was talking to a robot. When you carefully listen to the conversation you can hear a person like sound that the Assistant do like using "umhh" with a slightly pause before a sentence and the fast recognition of understanding of the receptionist answers.

Google has unveiled artificial intelligence software that books appointments over the phone on behalf of users by conducting voice-based conversations on their behalf. Chief executive Sundar Pichai said that Google Duplex would launch as an "experiment" over the coming weeks. The facility was unveiled at the firm's annual IO developers conference. Experts have said that if it works it could give the firm a major advantage over rival virtual assistants. Pre-recorded demonstrations played back to the audience featured the software first booking a haircut and then making a restaurant reservation by speaking to two human employees.

Apple's hiring of Google's former head of search technology and artificial intelligence is the latest sign that AI is becoming a major battleground for tech companies. Artificial intelligence and machine learning have become "a top 10 spending priority" for corporate chief information officers, Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty said in a note to clients Friday. Apple's recent hiring of AI expert John Giannandrea "reinforces this view," she said. "With the hiring of Mr. Giannandrea, who will report directly to Apple CEO Tim Cook, Apple is telling the world they are aiming to become a more serious player in the AI/machine learning industry," she said. Deployment and evaluations of AI and machine learning systems have steadily increased over the last year, Huberty said.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. In the Lucinda Williams song "Changed the Locks"--first released in 1988, then again in 1996 by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers as "Change the Locks"--the singer describes a number of things you have to change to insulate yourself from an ex: There's nary a mention of one of the most obvious things you have to change after a messy breakup today: a password. Malicious exes now have access to a world of tech-facilitated stalking methods, and it's important to lock them out of your accounts. Your Netflix, alas, is the least of the worries here. While "passwords" may have once meant simply banking PINs and social media passwords--which can do an awful lot of danger on their own--we now also have to remember to update access information for all sorts of apps and devices.

The key message from a new policy report from the University of Manchester is that future-state artificial intelligence needs to be socially responsible. This is because the current path of development of new artificial intelligence technology has been shown, through experimentation, to contain bias. For example, Joy Buolamwini has challenged inherent ethnic and female bias in many facial recognition systems. This issue of bias becomes serious when used in the business setting and by governments, such as when assessing welfare claims. Here many developed systems can be discriminatory.

"The thing that caught me is she was into the Cure, one of my top three bands, she has blue hair, she was posing in a DeLorean in her Facebook picture," recalls Mr. Jennings. She was a scientist, Rachel Truscon, living more than a thousand miles away. They now live together in Michigan. "We laugh about how crazy it is that we met," he says, especially given that his own experiment with online-dating sites lasted just an hour, because "it felt so unnatural." The couple now jokes about starting a Spotify-based dating site.