Google Home wants to have a center space in your home, always ready to help with a simple voice command. But what exactly will you be able to do, particularly when it comes to the apps and services you use every day? Google has an official list of the apps that work with Home and perform tasks based on what you tell them to do. Google Home is part of a new batch of new hardware that's all tied together with Google services and the Google Assistant. So while the underlying technology is interesting, it's how much you can do that will determine how compelling this will be for everyday use. Here's the current list of supported apps, which Google of course hopes to grow as more third-party developers and services jump on board.

Funny artificial intelligence is nothing new. We might be used to Siri's bad jokes on our iPhones or messing with Amazon's Alexa. And recently an AI robot Sophia tried out a pickup line on Charlie Rose on 60 Minutes last week. Now Google has joined the trend of human-like artificial intelligence to make AI a little more fun. Its new assistant was developed in part by comedy writers from Pixar and The Onion, the satirical newspaper that is sometimes just too honest for these crazy times we live in, according to The Wall Street Journal. The Onion's satirical headlines can be pure gold.

Google just debuted a digital assistant, which it hopes to place inside smartphones, watches, cars and every other imaginable internet-connected device. It's already hit a snag. The Alphabet division launched new smartphones last week with the artificially intelligent assistant deeply embedded. It also rolled out a speaker with the feature at its core and announced plans to let other companies tie their apps and services to the assistant. A day later, Samsung, which just announced it was ending production of its problematic Galaxy Note 7 smartphones, said it was acquiring Viv Labs, a startup building its own AI voice-based assistant.

What do Siri and machine translation have in common? They both produce strange, sometimes ridiculous language that leave us shaking our heads with confusion. Here at IVANNOVATION we frequently use Siri as well as Google's dictation function to get our work done. Siri instantly adds items to our to do lists, adds events to our calendars, and tells us answers to important questions like, "Siri, how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?" (Ask Siri yourself.) Likewise, Google dictation helps us avoid the ruthless onslaught of carpal tunnel syndrome by typing up our articles and emails for us.

Between Tinder, Bumble, OKCupid and the plethora of dating apps available, finding someone to hook up with has never been easier. But the endless supply of options has also made it much harder to connect with someone on a deeper, longer-lasting level. To tackle that problem, Hinge is rebuilding itself to focus on connecting people looking for relationships. It's also incorporating a new 7 monthly membership fee, in part to make sure that subscribers are actually invested in looking for relationships. The app has been revamped to more heavily feature on people you've matched or interacted with, instead of constantly presenting more options in a deck of cards.

Major technology firms are racing to infuse smartphones and other internet-linked devices with software smarts that help them think like people. The effort is seen as an evolution in computing that allows users to interact with machines in natural conversation style, telling devices to tend to tasks such as ordering goods, checking traffic, making restaurant reservations or searching for information. The artificial intelligence (AI) component in these programs aims to make create a world in which everyone can have a virtual aide that gets to know them better with each interaction. Google is making a high-profile push into AI, with the internet titan's chief referring to it as a force for change as powerful as powerful as smartphones. Google Assistant software is being built into new Pixel handsets -- aiming to outdo Apple's Siri -- enabling users to organize and use information on the devices and in the cloud -- to check emails, stay up to date on calendar appointments, news or ask for traffic and weather data.

Artificial intelligence continues to have its moment in the spotlight, with a surge of interest in startups and efforts from huge tech companies to push the boundaries of how we might best use machine learning, computer vision and other areas of AI in the future. The latest development on that front comes from China's Huawei, which today announced that it would form a research partnership with UC Berkeley focused on AI, and fund it to the initial tune of 1 million. The alliance, between Huawei's Noah's Ark Laboratory and Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR), is being billed as a "strategic partnership into basic research", and it will cover areas like deep learning, reinforcement learning, machine learning, natural language processing and computer vision. "The two parties believe that this strategic partnership will fuel the advancement of AI technology and create completely new experiences for people, thus contributing greatly to society at large," Huawei notes. Some of these areas of AI you will have heard a lot about already.

Google is hiring writers from the farcical newspaper the Onion and the computer animation film studio Pixar to humanize its Assistant AI voice service, a Wall Street Journal report said. Google's new Pixel phone, which will hit stores Oct. 21, will be the first device to feature its Assistant voice service. After Amazon launched its AI voice service, Alexa, it found that people spoke to it as if it were a person. AI in its current form isn't really artificial intelligence since the device doesn't understand the conversation. Google is hiring writers from the Onion and Pixar to "infuse personality" to its voice service, Gummi Hafsteinsson, product-management director of Google Home, told WSJ Sunday.

From gender-neutral bots to period-friendly healthcare trackers, cars with more storage and clothes with bigger pockets - the world could be a very different place if there were more women working in tech. We asked a group of women who are working in the fields of science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem) how the world might be compared to now, if more women were present in these male-dominated industries. Now in its sixth year, the annual celebration of women working in Stem is named after the woman regarded as the world's first computer programmer - Ada Lovelace - because of her work with inventor Charles Babbage on his idea for an "analytical engine" in the 1800s. "If there were more women working in bots & Artificial Intelligence (AI), women wouldn't be an afterthought when building new technology. "Early voice recognition software didn't always recognise female voices, because none of the developers had been female and no-one thought to test out the technology on women (Car safety failed to take into account female anatomy - female-sized crash test dummies were only enforced in the US in 2011).

Original or replacement, power down your Samsung Galaxy Note 7 phone. Samsung plans to make its range of smartphones smarter with its acquisition of Viv, an AI virtual assistant platform started by the man who created Siri. LOS ANGELES -- Just how bad is the situation with Samsung and its Galaxy Note 7 woes? Samsung has halted production and sales of its water-resistant, high-end smartphone as the company and U.S. regulators investigate reports of overheating replacement Note 7s. These are the devices that Note 7 buyers swapped for the first run of the large, high-powered phones after a massive consumer recall, also linked to overheating batteries. Some 2.5 million worldwide of the Note 7, Samsung's "phablet," with a 5.7 inch LCD, as of early September when Samsung said it would exchange the 850 phones.