Amazon has already filled millions of homes with the Alexa assistant through its suite of smart speakers like the Amazon Echo and Amazon Echo Dot (available from Amazon). Now, after years of waiting, Amazon has finally announced multi-room audio support. In layman's terms, that means users can synchronize their music across their Echo, Dot, and Echo Show. Right now, you'll be able to sync audio from Amazon Music, TuneIn, iHeartRadio, and Pandora. If you're like me and use Spotify, support for that and Sirius XM is supposedly coming soon.

Textbox is the latest box from Machine Box, and has just been released as a BETA preview. It offers Natural language processing, keyword extraction and sentiment analysis of unstructured text. Here's a video of the Text analyzer demo we built to show off the capabilities (you can play with this for yourself, by running Textbox on your laptop; scroll down to learn more). Being able to have machines understand unstructured textual content (like tweets, reviews, comments, questions, emails, etc.) already plays a big part in our life. Apple's Siri, Amazon's Echo, Google Home, and any device that you can speak to uses some form of natural language processing in order to understand what you're saying to it.

Apple is hosting a big iPhone launch event in Cupertino on September 12. David, Arielle, and Michael open up their iPhones and ask Siri to predict what's coming on Tuesday. All the hosts have so far are rumors, leaks, and guesses, but that's more than enough to get them excited. Some notes: David tells us what to expect on Tuesday. Also from David, a sit-down with the Apple engineers trying to make Siri feel more human. Liz talks to an artist who's marrying sounds and visuals in AR kit with groovy results.

If your aging iPhone is too old or damaged to trade in for whatever you think it's worth, here's some good news: As long as it can still connect to a wireless network--and every iPhone from the original 2007 model to today's iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus still can--there are plenty of ways to use it that don't require a cellular data plan. Here are TIME's picks for the smartest ways to get the most out of an old Apple smartphone. You can use your iPhone as a dedicated music player either by streaming songs from a service like Spotify when connected to Wi-Fi, or by downloading tunes straight to the device. This can be handy in any number of scenarios, especially if you want to listen to music without draining your primary phone's battery, say during a lengthy commute. You don't need to buy an Amazon Echo or Google Home to retrieve information without reaching for your phone.

A sick girl stuck with her family in their flooded home due to the devastation of Hurricane Harvey was able to call for help using Siri. Apple's Siri, which has faced increased competition in the digital personal assistant space with the Google Assistant and Amazon's Alexa, helped the girl contact the Coast Guard to pick them up and fly them to safety. Tyler Frank, a 14-year-old-girl suffering from sickle cell anemia, was running a fever and in great pain at the height of Hurricane Harvey's onslaught. In the early morning of Aug. 27, Tyler, her mother, and her three brothers woke up to floodwater rising up inside their home. Joseph, Tyler's oldest brother at 18 years old, carried her on his back up to the roof, as 16-year-old Brayland did the same for 8-year-old Jaquarus.

Popular voice assistants, including Siri and Alexa, are easy to hack because of huge design flaws in modern devices, researchers have found. They were able to take over seven different voice recognition systems on a wide range of gadgets, including iPhones, Windows 10 computers and Samsung Galaxy handsets, using equipment that costs less than $3. The team, from Zhejiang University, found that voice assistants can be triggered by voice commands that are inaudible to humans. Though an attacker would have to be in close proximity with the target device, they could take it over without actually touching it. The researchers used an ultrasonic transducer and an amplifier to convert normal voice commands into ultrasounds that are impossible for humans to hear.

Two of the biggest digital assistants are taking different pathways to find more users. Amazon recently made its intentions clear: It wants to play nice with its rivals. That's on top of the thousands of third-party skills Amazon's AI already has. Google, on the other hand, is focussing on making its tech more self-reliant. Judging by its latest demonstration, its efforts are paying off.

A new report claims that Facebook is testing out a new feature that appears to be very similar with Tinder. The new Facebook feature encourages users to meet up with their friends in real life, but only if both parties agree to do so. The new Facebook feature was first discovered by Motherboard reporter Jacob Dubé. He claims that while he was using Facebook, a notification popped up saying "[Name redacted] and 15 others may want to meet up with you this week." When Dubé opened the notification, it showed him a page with photos of his Facebook friends.

Apple's running battle with Amazon Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana, and Google Home, has a lot going on behind the scenes. Greg Joswiak, vice president of iOS, iPad, and iPhone Marketing, and executive Alex Acero gave Wired a peek behind the curtains, and it's interesting as can be. The trouble with taking the long view is dealing with the perception you're falling behind. That's been Apple's dilemma with AI in general and Siri specifically. While Amazon built a platform designed around training its users, Apple has been building Siri to be a service that can truly understand us, and vice versa.

As Dubai welcomes RoboCop, drones land in the palm of your hand and cars park themselves, are we getting carried away with'maybes'? This week saw a plethora of tangible internet of things (IoT) developments, which is actually a rarity when looking at this space. For example, in Dubai, the city's police force has recruited its latest member: a robot police officer. Weighing in at 100kg and measuring 170cm in height, the robot will patrol the city's streets, offering advice to those who need it. The robot's hardware will enable it to scan a person's face to determine their emotions from up to 1.5 metres away, then changing its mood accordingly to help them. In the event of a crime, its facial recognition software will record a criminal's face and live-stream it back to police headquarters.