Dating app Tinder has called on its users to stop posting pictures of themselves alongside heavily-drugged tigers. The company has said it is time for the selfies to go, claiming they take advantage of'beautiful creatures that have been torn from their natural environment'. It follows calls from animal rights activists to act on the images, which they say appear frequently on Tinder. The pictures'take advantage of beautiful animals that have been torn from their natural environment' Such is their popularity among those looking for love that a number of Instagram accounts have been set up dedicated to sharing screenshots of users who pose with big cats. The company says it will donate $10,000 to a conservation charity if the pictures disappear.

Every good paranoiac sees an always-listening device like an Amazon Echo as a potential spy sitting in plain sight. Now one security researcher has shown exactly how fine the line is between countertop computer and surveillance tool. With just a few minutes of hands-on time, a hacker could turn an Echo into a personal eavesdropping microphone without leaving any physical trace. On Tuesday, British security researcher Mark Barnes detailed a technique anyone can use to install malware on an Amazon Echo, along with his proof-of-concept code that would silently stream audio from the hacked device to his own faraway server. The technique requires gaining physical access to the target Echo, and it works only on devices sold before 2017.

Google welcomed Honeywell into the Home family as a partner back in January, but now it's finally including both of the company's connected thermostat families, the Lyric and Total Connected Comfort. Users can control them using either Home's voice controls or through Google Assistant on an Android device. That adds to the thermostats' existing integrations with connected platforms, including Amazon Alexa, Apple HomeKit, Samsung SmartThings and user-customized IFTTT functionality.

What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)? Are you intrigued by the sheer ease with which Facebook tags your friends and family when you post a photo? Or how Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa & Microsoft's Cortana help you find information, give you direction and add events to your calendar? How does Outlook know that some emails should go into your Clutter folder when you never marked them as spam? All these are powered by Artificial Intelligence technologies.

Facebook is reportedly working on a video chat device for your living room. The laptop-sized touchscreen and smart camera technology is said to make it so people connecting digitally through the device feel like they're actually in the same room. This is the first major product from the company's experimental Building 8 lab, which launched last year to develop hardware products, and is also rumoured to be working on a phone and a smart speaker. This is the first major product from the company's experimental Building 8 lab, which launched last year to develop hardware products to further push users into the Facebook system comprised of the the newsfeed, messenger and more Sources say Facebook's Building 8 hardware lab is working on a video chat device for your living room. It will have a laptop-sized screen, wide-angle camera, microphone, and speaker boasted by AI.

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. Artificial intelligence, or A.I., goes beyond the current digital assistants like Cortana, Siri and Echo.

Amazon's Alexa voice assistant is ready to control your Fire TV . Using an Alexa device such as the Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, or Echo Show, you can watch videos, search for videos by genre, and control playback without picking up the remote. Hands-free voice control is available now on all Fire TV boxes and Fire TV Sticks in the United States, and should be available on all Fire TV Edition televisions in the United States by the end of this week. For now, launching directly into a video works with Amazon Prime on all Fire TV devices, and with over-the-air channels on Fire TV Edition televisions. Although you can launch other apps by voice, you'll still need a remote to navigate past their main menus.

Machines are learning to process simple commands by exploring 3-D virtual worlds. Devices like Amazon's Alexa and Google Home have brought voice-controlled technology into the mainstream, but these still only deal with simple commands. Making machines smart enough to handle a real conversation remains a very tough challenge. And it may be difficult to achieve without some grounding in the way the physical world works. Attempts to solve this problem by hard-coding relationships between words and objects and actions requires endless rules, making a machine unable to adapt to new situations.

The briefly available HomePod firmware last weekend did not only contain information on the smart speaker's specs and features, but also details about Apple's upcoming iPhone 8. While everything that's known so far about the next-generation iPhone is from various leaks and rumors, what the firmware has is the real deal. Thus, the discovery made by developers recently through their close examination of HomePod's firmware could pertain to the official specs of the next Apple flagship phone. On Monday, developer Steven Troughton-Smith took to Twitter to disclose that upon checking the firmware codes, he learned that the next flagship iPhone would pack in a 2436 x 1125 screen resolution. This resolution is quite bigger than the one that came with the 5.5-inch iPhone 7 Plus last year. Troughton-Smith also pointed out that though the iPhone 8 would come with a taller screen, it's not designed to fit the same kinds of content onscreen as the iPhone 7 Plus.

Facebook has acquired AI assistant startup Ozlo to help build "compelling experiences within Messenger that are powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning," a Facebook spokesperson has confirmed to VentureBeat. A brief note on the acquisition and plans to join the Messenger team was also shared on the Ozlo website. As part of the acquisition, Facebook will receive Ozlo's tech and a majority of its team of about 30 employees, and Ozlo will shut down its apps and API services, according to Recode. The Ozlo app for iOS and the web launched in October 2016 and was powered by an AI assistant of the same name. Ozlo initially focused on helping users sift through restaurant listings in a conversational format.