Eero, an increasingly popular network extender for the home, is getting a brain transplant. The hardware, which uses attractive white pods and mesh-network technology to extend and boost internet connections to the furthest corners of your home and property, will remain unchanged. But starting Thursday, Eero is rolling out a software update to all existing devices that will, among other things, let Amazon Echo owners pause network access for everyone or individual family members. To do so, they just have to ask Amazon Alexa. You'll turn the internet back on for everyone or individuals through the Eero app.

We keep hearing that robots are going to take our jobs, but a company called MindMeld is giving us an idea how with its "Deep-Domain Conversational AI Platform." It'll allow bots that can essentially replace customer service agents and even baristas by answering complicated voice or text queries over Google Assistant, Amazon Echo, Facebook Messenger and other popular platforms. Uniqlo, for one, will offer a Facebook bot that can answer questions about its products, services and retail locations with more detail than ever. The "MindMeld Language Parser" helps it understand and answer questions with "human-like accuracy," whether by talk or text, the company says. It adds that while current AI toolkits from Google, Facebook and others are great, they provide "little data suitable for production-quality applications" -- in other words, they can do deep learning, but don't give companies anything to teach them.

Earlier this year, Eero launched a home WiFi solution that it claimed would solve all our wireless woes. The idea behind Eero's system is simple; instead of relying on one router to connect your whole house, it uses multiple hubs. Each Eero hub combines the functions of a wireless router, a range extender and a repeater, and you can easily connect them to one another with a companion app. The whole system is essentially a wireless mesh network for the home. Months later, and Eero is unveiling a massive update that not only brings faster and better performance, but also Amazon Alexa compatibility and a slew of new app features.

To most people, artificial intelligence (AI) is represented in terms of robots with human-like similarities. Today's reality is that of AI powering technologies and driving companies to complete tasks and make things easier. Companies are using AI more than ever, even for tasks that you may not consider. To understand how AI impacts your business, it's important to understand exactly what artificial intelligence is. According to Merriam Webster artificial intelligence is, "an area of computer science that deals with giving machines the ability to seem like they have human intelligence."

The Amazon Echo's smaller, more affordable sibling is a fail-safe gift for anyone who values convenience (and who doesn't?). Driven by Amazon's Alexa digital assistant, this unobtrusive puck puts a wealth of useful information, entertainment, and practical functionality just a voice-command away. Use the Echo Dot to control a home's lighting, play music, estimate commute times, operate a timer, answer trivia questions, read books and news bulletins aloud, provide local movie times and locations, hail an Uber, or order anything from Amazon (natch). Don't be surprised if your gift of a single Dot has the recipient buying more to fill every room.

While Home is positioned as a way to add Assistant to your domicile, it's only fully usable for a single person. You cannot have more than one account tied to Google Home, so all the user-specific data accessible on Home belongs to whoever sets it up. The only option here is to disable "personal results" so other people can't get into things like your calendar. It should be able to figure out who's who, though. Google is able to recognize voices--you train your phone's OK Google trigger so only you can set it off.

Who is on the other side of the webcam -- and what do they want? Internet-connected fridges which order your food, virtual assistants which react to your every voice command, and applications which allow you to remotely control almost every aspect of your home: today's technologies increasingly make The Jetsons look like a prophetic message about the future. That cartoon offers an idealised view at the world of tomorrow and didn't anticipate some of the problems a space-age society might face: George Jetson was never locked out because the home got hacked, and Rosie the Robot was never out of service after being infected by ransomware. Installing the latest technology can provide you with many conveniences, but it also opens up additional entry points for attackers, especially as more and more everyday devices become connected to the internet -- and are more and more capable of storing and recording information on almost every event in your life. "Phones, since they're such a personal extension of your lives, have a lot more security mechanisms than your television, but there's not much difference between your television and your phone," says Dan Wiley, head of incident response at Check Point Software.

Humans are already forming relationships with their artificial intelligence (AI) assistants, so we should make that technology as emotionally aware as possible by teaching it to respond to our feelings. That is the premise of Rana el Kaliouby, cofounder and CEO of Affectiva, an MIT spinout company that sells emotion recognition technology based on her computer science PhD, which she spent building the first ever computer that can recognise emotions. The machine learning-based software uses a camera or webcam to identify parts of human faces (eyebrows, the corners of eyes, etc), classify expressions and map them onto emotions like joy, disgust, surprise, anger, and so on, in real time. "We are getting lots of interest around chatbots, self-driving cars, anything with a conversational interface. If it's interfacing with a human it needs social and emotional skills. This tech is already being integrated into robots," el Kaliouby tells Techworld.

We imagine them to be wickedly intelligent, like Samantha from the movie Her. There is no "I" in their AI. They are so hopeless that some people argue that bots would be better without conversation. But without conversation they are not bots. They are more like the Internet on Nokia feature phones (a.k.a.

When you hear the term "artificial intelligence," you may think of tech giants Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, or Facebook. Industrial powerhouse General Electric is now aiming to be included on that short list. It may not have a chipper digital assistant like Cortana or Alexa. It won't sort through selfies, but it will look through X-rays. It won't recommend movies, but it will suggest how to care for a diesel locomotive.