Google this week took the wraps off Google Home, its smart speaker and home entertainment hub, but questions remain about the impact the device will have on users' privacy. A direct rival to Amazon Echo, Google Home is the company's entry into the smart home market. Want Google Home to play your favorite song? Just say, "OK, Google" and ask for it to play the music. Want the device, which is equipped with its artificial-intelligence based Assistant, to play that funny cat video from YouTube on your TV? Google Home is always listening for the phrase, "OK, Google" so it can take its instructions.

By acquiring the Viv virtual assistant from the makers of Apple's Siri, Samsung has joined the AI smartphone wars. Now, Google, Apple, and Samsung all have their own AI-driven personal assistant to put at the center of our mobile devices. Apple has been developing Siri as the core of its mobile and desktop operating systems since buying the technology in 2010, and Google's first true smartphone will exclusively have Google Assistant. The message from these companies is clear: just as apps defined smartphones in the 2000s, the next frontier of mobile computing is a virtual entity that helps its owner manage the barrage of information coming their devices. Phones by Apple, Google, and Samsung are similar in design, computing capability, and each have access to roughly the same pool of apps--but each will pursue a slightly different path through their artificially-intelligent assistants. Samsung is one of the world's largest producers of TVs, washing machines, refrigerators, and computers--all of which build an ecosystem that would be well-served by an AI that makes them all a bit smarter, and allows them to work together.

Companies like IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon are actively leveraging A.I. as part of their technology stacks. However, in order to dominate the market, these vendors will need to monetize A.I. at a large scale. Who can win the early race to monetize A.I.? The battle in the artificial intelligence (A.I.) market has been heating up. IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google are all continuously releasing impressive technologies in the space that are capturing the minds of developers and customers. From a market perspective, A.I. is positioned to become a pillar of the next generation of software technologies.

This week – augmenting human senses, stealing AI, Google tries to harness cloud robotics, Samsung gets its own Siri and we get a closer look on a farming robot. Plus – what is life and what is synthetic biology, designer babies and the future of human reproduction and a mask that allows you to smell virtual worlds. Biohacking may open us a way to sense the world in a completely and different way. And there are people who are working on projects aimed at augmenting our senses in a new and creative way. A Device For The Deaf That Lets You "Listen" With Your Skin It's called Versatile Extra-Sensory Transducer, or VEST in short, and it works by picking up sound either from surrounding or from a smartphone, and then translates them into movement of 32 tiny motors that vibrate on your back.

It's been a wild card kind of week, full of Google announcements and Yahoo breaches and AI assistants, and I'm excited to get home and watch the Giants-Cubs game tonight, so let's get this party stared with some Public Access stats for September: There's more trouble in store for Samsung -- a replacement Galaxy Note 7 reportedly began smoking. After it had been shut off. Oh yeah, and this all went down on an airplane. If you asked the average person if they're excited about AI, you might get some shrugged shoulders in response. However, if you asked the same person if they'd like a digital personal assistant, I bet they'd be pretty damn interested.

Snippets of Lady Gaga's new album Joanne have been shared online after fans "tricked" Amazon's virtual assistant into playing preview clips. Previews can commonly be heard on Amazon when an album is available for pre-order, but they had been disabled for Gaga's highly-anticipated comeback. Owners of Amazon's Echo speaker then discovered they could access songs by issuing the instruction: "Play Joanne by Lady Gaga." The 30-second clips have been recorded and shared online by several fans, with one video showing Amazon's speaker lighting up and responding to the voice commands. Among the leaked songs are Hey Girl, in which Gaga duets with Florence Welch of Florence The Machine over a stomping, staccato piano line reminiscent of Elton Johns's Benny and the Jets.

Google is to open a pop up showroom in Manhattan's trendy Soho as it bids to take on apple with its new range of Pixel phones. The firm confirmed the Spring Street location, close to Apple's own Soho store, will open to the public on the 20th October to show off the firm's newly announced range of products, which include phones and its smart speaker Google Home. However, a source said it would not sell items - but simply let the public try them out before ordering online or in traditional stores. At a special event in San Francisco earlier the firm is unveiling a raft of new products - even though most of them have already leaked online. They include two new phones, a Pixel and the 5.5-inch Pixel XL The search giant showed off a plethora of products from phones to TV dongles and even a new home router to boost wifi speeds earlier this week - and said AI was key to all of them.

Today, we are just beginning to scratch the surface of what is possible with artificial intelligence (A.I.) and how individuals will interact with its various forms. Every single aspect of our society -- from cars to houses to products to services -- will be reimagined and redesigned to incorporate A.I. A child born in the year 2030 will not comprehend why his or her parents once had to manually turn on the lights in the living room. In the future, the smart home will seamlessly know the needs, wants, and habits of the individuals who live in the home prior to them taking an action. Before we arrive at this future, it is helpful to take a step back and reimagine how we design cars, houses, products, and services. We are just beginning to see glimpses of this future with the Amazon Echo and Google Home smart voice assistants.

Samsung just bought Viv Labs, the startup behind "Viv," a personal digital assistant that's supposed to one-up Apple's famed Siri in smarts, according to a press release. Notably, Viv Labs was founded by Dag Kittlaus, Adam Cheyer and Chris Brigham -- three of the inventors of Siri itself. Apple bought Siri in 2010 before introducing it alongside the iPhone 4S in 2011. Thickening the plot even further, it was reported back in May 2016 that Google and Facebook had both made offers for Viv Labs over the course of its years-long development cycle. So while we don't know how much Samsung paid, we can assume it was competitive.

In a world occupied by Siri, Cortana and Alexa, Google Assistant is a bit of an anomaly. It's the first widely used voice assistant to eschew a female name, which the company reportedly did to avoid giving it a personality. The company would rather you imagined yourself talking directly to "Google the search engine" than a go-between. Avoiding a gendered name just happened to be a happy coincidence, it seems. Despite Google (perhaps unintentionally) shunning obvious sexism in its AI, it still fell into the gender bias trap by giving Assistant a female voice. And that's a problem, a problem that will require the collective effort of the industry's powerhouses to fix.