Google's Assistant AI is getting better every year. It can tell you the weather, or perhaps crack a terrible joke if that's more your speed. Give it another year or two, and it'll be able to pre-order your lunch before you even had your morning coffee. But more immediately, it might be able to make calls and book your appointments in a very-natural-sounding human voice, if a recent demo is to be believed. At this year's Google I/O developer's conference in Mountain View, Google demoed a very natural-sounding Google Assistant making an appointment over the phone - a feature it calls Google Duplex.

Many people have grown accustomed to talking to their smart devices, asking them to read a text, play a song or set an alarm. But someone else might be secretly talking to them, too. Over the last two years, researchers in China and the United States have begun demonstrating that they can send hidden commands that are undetectable to the human ear to Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa and Google's Assistant. Inside university labs, the researchers have been able to secretly activate the artificial intelligence systems on smartphones and smart speakers, making them dial phone numbers or open websites. In the wrong hands, the technology could be used to unlock doors, wire money or buy stuff online -- simply with music playing over the radio.

One key limitation in building modern AI systems has been the lack of high quality domain-specific training data, given deep learning's voracious appetite for data. Researchers have responded by getting creative, from less data-intensive training methods to harnessing massive armies of Amazon Mechanical Turkers and teaching algorithms how to watch YouTube videos. Yet, Google's announcement yesterday of its new generation of AI assistant that can engage in eerily lifelike conversations that border on Turing Test material suggests that perhaps in the very near future AI assistants can not only take on growing roles as research assistants and reference librarians, but even go as far as to begin collecting their own training data. While limited in the conversational and task domains it can currently address, Google's new system is particularly notable for the way in which it can fluently interact with real world humans so naturally that they never suspect they are speaking with a human. As with generations of text-only chat bots, Google's system demonstrates that within the confines of a specific task or domain, it is not that difficult to pass the Turing Test.

Researchers have developed a way to hijack popular voice assistants right under the user's nose. All it takes is slipping some secret commands into music playing on the radio, YouTube videos or white noise for someone to control your smart speaker. The commands are undetectable to the human ear so there's little the device owner can do to stop it. Researchers have developed a way to hijack popular voice assistants, including Apple's Siri, Google's Assistant and Amazon's Echo, using secret commands undetectable to the human ear Luckily, the disconcerting vulnerability was only carried out for the study, which was conducted by researchers from University of California, Berkeley. But it still highlights a critical flaw that experts warn could be used for far more nefarious purposes, such as unlocking doors, wiring money or purchasing items online, according to the New York Times.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. Just who is man's best friend? Who are these creatures that we've welcomed into our homes--who light up when we call their names, fetch things for us (like news updates and groceries), and make us feel better when we're sad (by putting on Beyoncé and allowing us to order food without even moving)? Unfortunately, it turns out, not just to you. There's a new reason to worry about the fact that your smart device might be listening all the time: She might be listening to someone else.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. Alexa and Siri never say "like" or "mmm-hmmm" to buy themselves time. Instead, the virtual assistants from Amazon and Apple are brief and to the point when they speak. They're machines, after all, and their stilted cadence and brevity are reassuring. They show that we can still tell the difference between humans and robots.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is trying to distinguish the business technology giant from its technology brethren by focusing on digital privacy. This year, Microsoft's big coder conference was sandwiched between Facebook's annual F8 developer conference last week and Google's upcoming Google I/0 event, starting later this week. Part of Nadella's opening talk centered on user privacy, which Nadella referred to as "a human right," echoing Apple CEO Tim Cook's recent public comments in the aftermath of Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal. Both Microsoft and Apple (aapl) stand to benefit and win public trust if they can portray their companies as bastions of user privacy compared to companies like Facebook (fb) and Google (goog). All of these giant tech companies are amassing large quantities of data that they in turn use to improve their respective artificial intelligence technologies--these AI technologies are then used to create more compelling products, like Amazon's Alexa digital assistant, for example.

Organizations need a way to get work done, not just talk about it. Smartsheet enables you to move from idea to impact -- fast. Your message has been sent. There was an error emailing this page. It's long been the stuff of sci fi, but increasingly, the practical side of artificial intelligence (AI) is very real. On the consumer side, personal assistants such as Siri, Alexa, and Cortana help automate the simplest of tasks.

We're in the final stretch here at Google I/O 2018, and I don't know about everyone else here, but I could really use some proper alone time. Too bad that's impossible to find here. Strangely enough, the closest I've been able to find is the inside of a massive Google Home Max with three other people. To be clear, the Max doesn't play any music itself -- if it did, it would probably sonically disintegrate any poor sucker who wandered inside. Instead, Google kitted out the inside with a painfully normal Google Home Max and an elaborate lighting setup that responds differently to songs you ask Google to play.

Google Assistant can now finally beam Play Movies to a Chromecast when you issue voice commands through the tech giant's Home speaker. It's weird how that hasn't been available until now when Home has been able to recognize spoken commands to stream Netflix shows from the start. Thankfully, the tech giant has fixed the oversight and quietly announced the integration at its annual I/O conference. And from the sound of things, the feature has already started rolling out to users. Trent Archer told Android Police that he's already able to play movies through Google Home -- as you can see in his video above, he tells Assistant through the speaker to play Bourne Ultimatum.