Google Assistant, and by extension, the Google Home smart speaker, can now control a raft of smart home appliances, including products from big names such as iRobot, LG, GE Appliances, and D-Link. Most of these bigger names are not part of the Home Control section of Google Assistant. Instead, they utilize their own apps that integrate with Google Assistant (and in most cases, with Amazon's Alexa as well). The iRobot Home app, for example, lets you control Wi-Fi-connected Roomba vacuums via Google Assistant. Voice commands then let you tell Roomba to start, stop, or resume cleaning, or you can find out where the Roomba is in the house or what its status is.

There wasn't any one big product announcement at Google I/O keynote on Wednesday, the annual event when thousands of programmers meet to learn about Google's software platforms. Instead, it was a steady trickle of incremental improvements across Google's product portfolio. And almost all of the improvements were driven by breakthroughs in artificial intelligence -- the software's growing ability to understand complex nuances of the world around it. Companies have been hyping artificial intelligence for so long -- and often delivering such mediocre results -- that it's easy to tune it out. AI is also easy to underestimate because it's often used to add value to existing products rather than creating new ones.

In the 2001 blockbuster, 'What Women Want', Mel Gibson's macho character is in an accident that allows him to hear what women are thinking. And when it comes to online dating, researchers suggest that men would be wise to follow suit and get into the mind-set of women – albeit without going through an accident. A new study has found that men are more likely to be successful in online dating if they create profiles that are more like the women they hope to attract. The researchers looked at three months' worth of anonymous data from a popular dating site, including the profiles and clickstreams of 410,000 active users from 10 metropolitan areas. Together, these users wrote 25 million messages, generated 286 million clicks on the site and rated other users' profiles 864 million times.

A new survey done by image authenticity app TRUEPIC revealed Thursday said 93 percent of Americans believe that online photos have been edited. Over the past two decades, content has become more visually available and more people follow visual content such as images and videos. At the same time, it is also a fact many, if not most, of the photos posted online have been subjected to some level of editing. On social media and dating sites, this might have been done for making a person appear more visually attractive and vibrant and engaging to the other people. But it seems to be having the opposite effect.

Google has announced some new features for Android TV during the 2017 I/O conference which is set to arrive alongside Android O. The company also revealed that it will be bringing 360-degree YouTube videos on TVs. Google first announced at CES 2017 that it will be bringing the Google Assistant to the Android TV platform. The company's plans regarding that haven't changed, but now we know that Google Assistant for Android TV will arrive "later this year." Google Assistant on Android TVs will function similarly to how it works on other Android devices.

Cortana's finally made the leap to the PC in Windows 10, assuming control of the operating system's search functions and dishing out just as much sass as the Windows Phone version. But by default, she doesn't listen for your commands. If you'd like to be able to just bark commands at your PC, open Cortana by clicking the search field in the taskbar and select the Notebook icon in the left-side options pane. Select Settings from the list, then simply enable the Let Cortana respond when you say "Hey Cortana" option. You'll need an active microphone for this to work, of course.

Google Assistant on the iPhone was the most understated announcement at the Google IO keynote, but it's a game changer for the future of your smartphone. It's Google's voice assistant that's crossing the Android-iOS divide, and it's doing more than just trying to convert Siri users to the Google campus. The new Apple-flavored Google Assistant isn't perfect, but there are five important things you should know about before downloading the new app. The first thing I thought of when Google Assistant for iPhone launched was not that they're poaching Siri users, but making Android machine learning smarter. Siri is (and probably always will be) limited to iPhones, iPads and Apple Watches.

Google kicked off its three-day developer conference with a two-hour keynote. There were a lot of news and updates, notably to things like the Google Assistant, Google Home, and Google Photos, but if you don't have 120 minutes to spend watching the entire thing, we've recapped the keynote for you in a snackable 10-minute supercut. Then, if you want to dive into more details on each of these news items, see our storystream for everything you may have missed.

There were whoops and cheers from developers as Google announced the incremental ways it is strengthening its grip on many aspects of people's lives at its annual developer conference, Google I/O. There were no jaw-dropping major product launches nor executives proclaiming their utopian vision of the future (ahem, Mark Zuckerberg). Instead there was a showcase of features, powered by artificial intelligence, designed to make people more connected – and more reliant on Google. "We are focused on our core mission of organising the world's information for everyone and approach this by applying deep computer science and technical insights to solve problems at scale," said CEO Sundar Pichai. By combining the personal data harvested from its users with industry leading (and human Go player beating) artificial intelligence, Google is squeezing itself into spaces in our everyday interactions it hasn't been before, filling in the gaps and oozing into new territory like a sticky glue that is becoming harder and harder to escape.

Google's annual conference touched on all the zeitgeisty terms you'd have expected: More voice assistant features, artificial intelligence, visual search powered by deep learning and a whole lot more. Here's what you missed Google I/O 2017 recap The opening day of Google's developer event focused on putting more AI everywhere -- in your camera with Google Lens, in your phone/car/TV/speaker with Google Assistant -- and connecting virtual reality to mixed reality with Daydream. It probably sounds like a lot, because it is, but we boiled down the speech to a 15-minute video with all the highlights, so click here and get acquainted with the Google-y new world we're living in. Its latest search engine knows what's in your photos. Google Lens is a broad term that encompasses all kinds of vision-based computing skills.