Sierra, the latest version of macOS (formerly OS X), will be available to download on September 20th. The update adds Siri to the Mac, the ability to copy and paste among Apple devices, and it enables picture-in-picture, which allows users to pop out a video from iTunes or Safari and keep it playing in a separate floating window. Plus, Apple Music has a new, streamlined UI and the Photos app gets an upgrade with a "Memories" view that collects shots taken in specific places or of certain people. The new operating system updates the messaging app as well, adding enlarged emojis, inline previews of videos and links, and the ability to respond to a message with a heart, thumbs up or other icon. We gave Sierra a spin in June and found most of its features to be intuitive and handy.

House Republicans are fighting to retain control of the chamber this fall, and they face looming priorities like stemming the Zika crisis and averting a government shutdown on a Sept. 30 funding deadline. But on Wednesday, they spent some a few lighter moments reviewing how the partisan divide can often be found on popular dating sites like OkCupid. At their first private session after returning from the long summer recess, House Republicans closed with a cheeky presentation on the interests most cited by liberals and conservatives in their dating profiles. "Yoga" ranked high among liberals; "Marines" by conservatives, according to a GOP source granted anonymity to discuss the private meeting. The presentation was based on a study released in July by OkCupid. GOP Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield is known for lightening up the often rocky GOP huddles, sometimes by showing movie clips.

It's all over but the waiting for Apple fans, who should get to see two new models of the iPhone unveiled Wednesday in San Francisco. The launch event may provide some clues about Apple's future, as the company deals with a slowing smartphone market. Apple's iPhone sales have dropped over the past year for the first time in the device's history. As a result, the company has poured more effort into services such as Apple Music, its voice assistant, Siri, and smart-home management -- all as a way to make users even more reliant on iPhones, regardless of whether they are the latest model. Consumers may already have seen a glimpse of Apple's future this summer when the company showed off how its mobile operating system, iOS 10, which will allow outside developers to use Siri more deeply for their own apps and create new functions for Apple's Messages service.

The worlds of AI, Deep Learning and Machine Intelligence are rapidly evolving and it's hard to keep up! To help you get up-to-date we've rounded up the latest must-see AI news, interviews and videos. RE•WORK blogs Should We Be Rethinking Unsupervised Learning? Meet the Woman Behind the Personality of Microsoft's AI Assistant'Cortana' Deborah Harrison believes people should come to expect civility, humor, transparency and kindness from interactions with AI, just as they expect the ability to update a calendar. Democratising Deep Learning: Q&A With Prof. Neil Lawrence It has taken 20 years to go from defeating Kasparov at Chess to Lee Sedol at Go, but what have the real advances been across this time?

We have, up to this point, had decades of benefits accrued through computing -- but what innovations will push the envelope for our seniors? Artificial intelligence (AI) is the information of science. AI is misunderstood and glamorized by some, making it out to be something other than what it really is. It gives us the ability to use computers to perform tasks that usually require human intelligence. What was dubbed "artificial" is coming to be more appropriately thought to be cognitive intelligence, giving us tremendous benefits in all fields including aging, health, and safety.

At this stage in the application platform growth and maturity of the AI Personal Assistant, there are many commands and options that common users cannot formulate due to a lack of knowledge and experience . A key usability feature for many integrated development environments (IDE) are their capability to use "Intelligent Code Completion" to guide their programmers to produce correct, functional syntax. This feature also enables the programmer to be unburdened by the need to look up syntax for each command reference, saving significant time. As the usage of the AI Personal Assistant grows, and their capabilities along with it, the amount of "command and parameters" knowledge required to use the AI Personal Assistant will also increase. For each command parameter [level\tree], a drop down list may appear giving users a set of options to select for the next parameter.

No longer simply the subject of science-fiction movies, artificial intelligence is making its way into the insurance enterprise. According to Accenture, four in five insurers are planning to or have deployed some sort of artificial intelligence technology in their enterprises. Allstate Business Insurance deployed ABie -- the Allstate Business Insurance Expert -- virtual assistant to help walk agents through the quoting process for complex products. The context-aware technology understands agents inputs and is able to direct them through the process without using the call center. AIG has partnered with Human Condition Safety to deploy devices that "couples wearable technology with artificial intelligence (AI) and building information modeling."

This story was delivered to BI Intelligence IoT Briefing subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here. LG's SmartThinQ, a competitor to Amazon's popular Echo device, will have third-party functionality from Amazon's Alexa voice assistant, according to TechCrunch. The new device is expected to be unveiled at the IFA conference in Berlin in October. SmartThinQ will not have all of Alexa's capabilities from launch, featuring only the more basic capabilities, such as playing music or checking the weather initially.

Will smart automation, intelligent software bots and brainy robots take away our jobs anytime soon? Pose this question to any Indian working in a company where unions are strong, or to any Indian who has a government job, or to the majority of Indians who work in the unorganized sector--those who drive taxis, trucks pull handcarts, hawk goods on footpaths or are employed as maids--and you will, in all probability, be looked at askance or even dismissed as an uninformed prophet of doom. The reaction may not be surprising in emerging countries like India, given that a majority of such employees would never have heard about the Industrial Revolution, or terms like disguised unemployment, cloud computing, machine learning, deep learning, automation or artificial intelligence (AI)-driven software bots. They would perhaps have also never heard of drones taking photographs and doing surveillance; of robots delivering pizzas and packages; of assistive robots taking care of the elderly; of robots making hamburgers and others like the Roomba robots that mop floors; of software bots writing articles and movie scripts; of three-dimensional or 3D printing revolutionizing the manufacturing sector; of driverless cars and trucks--all of which would make it very hard for them to imagine the future impact of these technologies that have not yet directly touched their lives or their jobs. They would have surely seen humanoid robots in sci-fi films like actor Rajnikant's Enthiran in Tamil or Robot in English, or a movie like Terminator or Transformers.