Google has revealed its Amazon Echo-rivalling smart speaker, Google Home, will come to the UK later this year. The technology giant launched the voice-activated device in the US last October but is yet to extend its release outside of the country. However, the company has now confirmed Home will go on sale in the UK during the'second quarter' of this year, meaning it will be released before the end of June. Google Home (pictured) will go on sale in the UK by the end of June of this year. 'We're in the Home stretch; Google Home is coming to the UK soon, stay tuned for more,' the tech firm said in a tweet.

In George Orwell's classic dystopian novel, "1984," every house is equipped with a Telescreen, a monitoring device enabling government surveillance. Amazon is trying to prevent its Echo/Alexa from turning into just that. Amazon is hoping to keep its Alexa devices from being a tool of government listening, which could inhibit people from buying them. Accordingly, the Seattle-based company has filed a motion to prevent recorded audio from an Echo being used as evidence in a criminal trial. Last year, police in Arkansas sought to obtain recordings captured by Echo as evidence in a 2015 murder case.

If voice assistants really are the next big user interface, then Amazon is off to fantastic start -- by the numbers, at least. As this chart from Statista shows, Amazon's Alexa assistant now has more than 10,000 "skills" (i.e., third-party voice-enabled applications). That's double the amount that was available just last quarter. To be clear: That developers are interested in Alexa is good news for Amazon, and Alexa itself seems to be well ahead in the home compared to rivals like Google Assistant, the AI found in the Google Home speaker that competes directly with the Alexa-centric Amazon Echo. Calling up an Uber or ordering a pizza just by yelling across the room is convenient enough, but for every useful skill, there are 500 CorkOrnaments.com

Motorola might have lured people to its MWC press conference with the promise of new phones, but the real talking point came toward the end of the event. After hyping a pair of mid-range devices and some fun Moto Mod concepts, the company confirmed that it's working with Amazon to bring Alexa to Moto phones. While the first steps of Motorola's Alexa partnership are now well known, it's the stuff that Motorola later told Engadget about its plans that seems most exciting. Let's start from the beginning. Our first taste of this Amazon/Motorola mash-up will come in the form of an Alexa-powered Moto Mod.

Picture a future where a robot suggests where to go for dinner, which meetings to take or which hotel you should stay at during an important client event. That's just an example of the impact artificial intelligence (AI) can have on the ways we work and interact with one another. When Apple first introduced Siri in 2011, it had just scratched the surface in terms of what was possible with AI, voice recognition and digital assistance. But as technology leaps forward, experts predict AI is now poised to transform business and our personal lives in more ways than we can imagine. Why this sudden barrage of predictions about AI and its potential to change the world? Taken together, these three developments created the ideal conditions for AI to evolve.

This is my first guide posted on GitHub, bear with me. You can submit a pull request with anything else you think should be added here. It will come as no surprise to those of you reading this (thanks!), that the interest and applications of'Voice-Assistants' is growing rapidly. Amazon Alexa recently hit 10,000 skills and there is talk around what will drive adoption for the next 10,000. I wont be diving into specifics and discussing issues like retention.

The Amazon Echo can seem like your best friend--until it betrays you. That's because this device is different from anything else in your house. Alexa, the voice assistant that powers Echo and more, is always listening, sending what you say after using a "wake" word to Amazon's servers. Of course, Echo isn't the only voice-assistant speaker on the market, but it sits in millions of homes, and Alexa is headed to devices from companies like Ford, Dish, Samsung, and Whirlpool. Veteran civil trial attorney Gerald Sauer is a founding partner at Sauer & Wagner LLP of Los Angeles.

Machine learning has long powered many products we interact with daily - from "intelligent" assistants like Apple's Siri and Google Now, to recommendation engines like Amazon's that suggest new products to buy, to the ad ranking systems used by Google and Facebook. More recently, machine learning has entered the public consciousness because of advances in "deep learning" - these include AlphaGo's defeat of Go grandmaster Lee Sedol and impressive new products around image recognition and machine translation. In this series, we give an introduction to some powerful but generally applicable techniques in machine learning. These include deep learning but also more traditional methods that are often all the modern business needs. After reading the articles in the series, you should have the knowledge necessary to embark on concrete machine learning experiments in a variety of areas on your own.

Elliptic Labs says it can use the speakers and mics on smart home assistants to detect a person's presence.

One of the great horrors of Windows 10 is that Microsoft forces you to use Bing and Microsoft Edge with Cortana. When you search with Cortana, any web searches are automatically sent to Bing and displayed in the Edge browser, no matter what your default browser is. Before April 2016 you could use any browser you wanted, although Cortana still insisted on Bing for search. But then Microsoft put a stop to browser choice, and Cortana-loving Edge haters have been recoiling ever since, until now. Norway-based developer Daniel Aleksandersen recently created a program called EdgeDeflector that puts a stop to Cortana's shenanigans.