Amazon's Echo is a robot that sits in your house and listens. The virtual personal assistant can be summoned into action by saying its name, Alexa, and will then act on commands, like ordering a dollhouse and cookies when asked to do so by a too-clever kindergartener. And because it works by listening, Alexa is an always-on surveillance device, quietly storing snippets of information. Which has placed a particular Echo unit in an uncomfortable role: possible witness to a murder. The night before, Bates invited friends, including Collins, over to watch the football game, and after Bates reported Collins death, police collected some evidence of struggle from the scene.

He's been there for three weeks now -- though he is quick to point out that he was out of the office for one of them so it's really only been two weeks -- but that's not stopping Quartz from launching one of the Bot Studio's first experiments, a Twitter bot to help attendees of the NICAR conference. People going to #NICAR17 can ask a Twitter bot. Keefe says the Bot Studio, which is funded by a $240,000 grant from the Knight Foundation, will focus on two main areas: How bots and artificial intelligence can help journalists do their jobs better and how news consumers can use them to access news and information. Keefe joined Quartz after spending 16 years at WNYC. We spoke about the lessons he learned from public radio, his goals for the Bot Studio, and what it'll take for bots to catch on.

That's a phrase none of us has uttered yet, but the day when voice assistants go beyond helping us simply complete transactions to facilitating deeper human-to-human relationships is rapidly approaching. In fact, Amazon and Google are rumored to be adding voice calling to Echo and Google Home. While today people might ask Alexa for their bank balance, voice is ultimately about human conversation, which might lead you to doing something like connecting with your financial advisor. The news that Amazon and Google are working on adding voice calling to Alexa and Google Home isn't a harking back to simpler times, nor is it a concerted effort to kill the home landline. Rather, it's an acknowledgement that while voice assistants are great at completing transactional tasks, people still want to have human conversations, such as getting someone's opinion or walking through a complex purchase.

We've all read a lot of online dating profiles in our time, but you've probably never read one as heartbreakingly good as this one. Amy Krouse Rosenthal, who is terminally ill with ovarian cancer, penned a stunning essay for this week's Modern Love in the New York Times in which she glowingly recommends her husband, Jason, and urges someone to swipe right on him. It's as beautifully written as it is soul-crushingly sad. Perhaps that's not surprising, since Rosenthal is the bestselling author of many classic children's books -- Little Pea, Spoon, and Duck! From her deathbed, she lovingly details many of Jason's wonderful qualities ("he can flip a pancake"), and in the process paints a picture of their happy courtship and 26 years together.

Without a doubt, 2016 was an amazing year for Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) awareness in the press. But most people probably can't name 3 applications for machine learning, other than self-driving cars and perhaps their voice activated assistant hiding in their phone. There's also a lot of confusion about where the Artificial Intelligence program actually exists. When you ask Siri to play a song or tell you what the weather will be like tomorrow, does "she" live in your phone or in the Apple cloud? And while you ponder those obscure question, many investors and technology recommenders are trying to determine whether,,, or will provide the best underlying hardware chips, for which application and why.

I'm a big Star Wars fan, so when "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story" descended on theaters late last year, I braved the crowds to see it -- twice in the first 18 hours. And just like all the other Star Wars movies, "Rogue One" stoked our geeky imaginations with all the technological possibilities of a galaxy far, far away, like holographic displays and all sorts of strange devices. And did you notice the Imperial server farm? Of course, advanced artificial intelligence (AI) was well-represented too: Like C-3P0, R2-D2 and BB-8 in earlier movies, Rogue One's K-2SO displayed uncanny humanness. The futuristic Star Wars-esque world is still mostly the stuff of Hollywood movies, but technology visionaries are hard at work bringing us ever closer.

Virtual Assistants are the base of new world that is being build with advancement in Artificial Intelligence. A virtual Assistant helps a user with so many things like reading mails, setting remainders, gathering news and performing other tasks. There are so many Virtual Assistants available for PC on internet and some of them are very good. Today we will discuss about. We have Cortana on the top of the list because it comes pre-installed with windows 10.

If Google has its way, it might be bringing its virtual assistant to other smartphone platforms. In an interview at Mobile World Congress, Gummi Hafsteinsson -- product management director at Google -- said it wants to port Google's virtual assistant to competing smartphones according to a report from Geekster. "I do not think we have anything to announce at this point," Hafsteinsson said. "But I think the general philosophy is that we would like to have the Assistant available to as many people as possible." Hafsteinsson's statement followed Google confirming that Google Assistant would be available on Android TV and Android Auto platforms.

As you might have heard, Google Assistant is now being rolled out to Android devices after enjoying a few months of exclusivity (as far as mobile devices are concerned) on the Google Pixel phones. So the question is, will Google consider bringing Google Assistant over onto non-Android devices, such as iOS? In that regard we have some good news and bad news. The bad news is that Google has nothing to announce yet, but the good news is that Google isn't closed to the idea and might have hinted at its arrival on iOS, or at least that's according to a report from Geekster (via AppleInsider). The report quotes Google product management director Gummi Hafsteinsson who spoke at MWC 2017 this week where he said, "I do not think we have anything to announce at this point. But I think the general philosophy is that we would like to have the Assistant available to as many people as possible."

The Google Assistant feature was finally rolled out to Android Nougat and Android Marshmallow devices on Thursday. But to get the feature on your device, you will need the updated version of Google Play Services, which wasn't available on the Google Play app store at the time of writing. If you haven't received the update on your device, or for some reason, can't seem to get the feature on your device, there is another way out. Users who haven't received the feature but still want to access it will need to download the APK version of the update and install. Note: International Business Times cannot be held responsible if anything goes wrong.