Amazon announced today that users of its streaming service Prime Music, which is free with a Prime membership, and its subscription-based Amazon Music Unlimited can now ask Alexa to find tunes appropriate for various activities. As of now, over 500 different activity-based requests are supported including music for meditation, partying and even "getting pumped." The new feature is available immediately to users with Alexa-enabled devices. The new voice controls were geared towards activities that have been requested most often by Alexa users and listeners of Amazon's music streaming services. In the announcement, the company said that 27 percent of all activity requests come from users who want to relax.

Need an assistant to help cook family dinner, or that dessert recipe you've been dying to try? Amazon's Alexa is ready to help. Tech expert Kim Komando shows you how. A link has been sent to your friend's email address. A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. Need an assistant to help cook family dinner, or that dessert recipe you've been dying to try? Amazon's Alexa is ready to help.

Need an assistant to help cook family dinner, or that dessert recipe you've been dying to try? Amazon's Alexa is ready to help. Tech expert Kim Komando shows you how. Is there any company that can keep up with Amazon's different ventures? Cooking is a social activity. Kids help in the kitchen.

We take digital personal assistants for granted these days. But these systems are still limited: they only deal with one task at a time, and more complicated interactions can leave them confused. Iris, a chatbot system developed by a team at Stanford University, is different. It can handle more complex forms of conversation – and could pave the way for personal assistants that understand how we really speak to one another. "I would say this is probably among the most complex behaviour I've seen from a chatbot to date," says Ryan Lowe at research lab OpenAI, who was not involved in the work. When we talk, we use all sorts of linguistic tricks and techniques to make ourselves understood.

Amazon's been expanding its line of smart, Alexa-powered home speakers for awhile now. If you're interested in buying an Amazon Echo, well then today is your lucky day. The smart speaker, which usually is priced at $180, is on sale for just $90 at select retailers today. You can also grab an Amazon Echo Dot for $35, a $15 discount off its regular price of $50, and an Amazon Tap for $80, discounted from the regular price of $130. It's strange that these devices would be on sale at third-party stores and not Amazon itself (not only is the Echo showing as full price, but it's out of stock, with an estimated ship date of August 11.

Facebook has bought artificial intelligence startup Ozlo to help build its Messenger service into a chatty virtual assistant that answers your questions. Ozlo specialises in understanding text-based conversations, and claims its software can understand and answer complex questions that require more than a simple'yes' or'no' answer. For instance, its AI assistant can answer a question about whether or not a restaurant is'group friendly' based on data from multiple reviews. Facebook is buying both Ozlo's technology and workforce, who will likely join Messenger's existing AI team. Facebook has bought artificial intelligence startup Ozlo to help build its Messenger service into a chatty virtual assistant that answers your questions.

Going beyond traditional rules-based voice or chatbot digital banking solutions, a non-bot, natural language banking experience is being offered to USAA members in an Amazon Alexa pilot with Clinc. Last September, a team of computer science professors at the University of Michigan introduced an application developed in their research lab that they believed would change the way consumers would do banking in the future. Combining the science and technology from academia, with the needs for a better voice-first mobile banking capability, Clinc won'Best of Show' honors at Finovate in New York City with their Finie ("the financial genie") application. The intelligent personal assistant uses sophisticated natural language processing engines that have been trained with a deeper knowledge of the financial and banking industry as opposed to using a rules-based approach. Unlike solutions that currently exist from Siri, Alexa and Cortana, Clinc's machine learning capability allows the application to expand knowledge and improve responses with every query.

Guilherme Rambo, who found code suggesting the new photography feature in the leaked HomePod software, also discovered code that references authenticating Apple Pay with facial recognition. Mr Troughton-Smith discovered a'tap to wake' feature, that would allow users to double-tap their screen to wake their device Also earlier this week, Troughton-Smith discovered a'tap to wake' feature, that would allow users to double-tap their screen to wake their device. Mr Rambo tweeted: 'There's also a lot of new references to facial expression detection,' along with the section of the code he was referring to Earlier findings in the code also suggest an infrared camera could be included to allow users to unlock their phone using their face – a feature that was introduced by rival Samsung in its Galaxy S8 device. Apple revealed its HomePod speaker, which rivals Amazon's Echo and Google's Home, earlier this year.

You don't have to dig for old pictures anymore if you're looking at them using Fire TV. Amazon's Prime Photos app now supports Alexa, which means you can bark voice commands at the app instead. To fire up the app on a television, tell your Fire TV Stick "Show my photos." That's only one of the things it can do, though. It can also show files your specify, such as images you added last year ("Show my photos from last year") or ones compiled in an album ("Show my birthday album").

The announcement came after animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) wrote a letter to Tinder founder and chairman Sean Rad to explain why photographs of people posing with the big cats is cruel to the majestic animals. Posted just a day before International Tiger Day on July 29, the Tinder blog referred to PETA's appeal to "rid the platform of tiger photos" and said "we could not agree more." In case you don't understand why posing for photographs with tigers or other big cats -- unless it was taken in the wild and the person being photographed somehow survived -- are cruel, here's another excerpt from the PETA letter: "Baby tigers and other animals used at photo attractions are typically torn away from their distraught mothers when they're just days old and then subjected to extreme stress and physical abuse. There are websites and Instagram accounts, such as tigersoftinder and tinderguyswithtigers, that catalog Tinder profiles that have pictures of people posing with the animals.