While the data was somewhat anonymous, it did include usernames, locations and personal information like sexual orientation, political leanings or turn-ons, and as Motherboard explained last week it wouldn't have been difficult to reverse engineer the data set to identify individuals. At the time, OkCupid claimed the scraping the site for data violated the site's user agreement and it now appears Open Science Framework is complying with OkCupid's DMCA claim. "The repository is currently unavailable due to a DMCA claim sent by OKCupid. Kirkegaard also edits a research journal called Open Differential Psychology, where he submitted a paper based on the data, but that paper is now subject to "internal discussions." After the controversy broke, Aarhus University distanced itself from Kirkegaard, stating that the OkCupid project was not part of his student work at the university.

Amazon is working on a new device imbued with Alexa's powers, according to The Wall Street Journal. It won't be yet another speaker, though: it's a device with a "tablet-like computer screen" that's codenamed Knight. Lab126, the company's secretive hardware facility, is reportedly in the midst of developing the tablet, which sounds like it's meant for the kitchen. WSJ says it'll allow users to load websites or images "even when their hands are covered in flour." Amazon has been working on a high-end kitchen computer for quite some time, but it's unclear if this is the reimagined version of that old project.

Google's answer to the Amazon Echo is named Google Home, according to The New York Times. Google Home, which was developed under the codename "Chirp," is a voice-powered assistant that can answer basic questions as you bustle around the house. The device should hit stores in the fall and Google is set to unveil the device during its big I/O conference tomorrow, NYT reports.

Snips is a new take on the virtual personal assistant. Science fiction has enrapt the world with conversational artificial intelligence. Iron Man's Jarvis is the most notable culprit, but Her's Samantha and even the droids in Star Wars imagine a world where supercomputers integrate seamlessly into our everyday life. But that's not the only way for computers to help. Snips, a French company just launching in the United States, has a different idea about how to serve as a personal assistant. Snips connects to every relevant data stream in your phone--contacts, email, calendar, accelerometer, location data--and logs everything.

In the latest attempt to fulfill sci-fi movie fantasies, tech firms have been lining up to provide you with a virtual assistant. From well-known voice-powered AIs such as Apple's Siri to upstarts like Viv, the goal is to quicken the actions you already take on your phone and other devices, growing ever-more efficient at the job by learning from your behavior. But like any hired help, each of these AI assistants has different skills, blind spots, and quirks. Bio: A voice-driven assistant that talks back to you--invoked by long-pressing the iPhone or iPad home button--and proactively recommends actions to take. Recently took up residence on Apple TV and Apple Watch.

For all the buzz over conversational bots these days, they're still pretty crude, as some users of Facebook Messenger's new chatbots recently discovered. It's not necessarily that they're dumb, but they do need to be trained to respond intelligently in the specific situations in which they're employed. Today MindMeld Inc., one of the pioneers behind conversational artificial intelligence technology, will roll out a version of its bot platform specifically for retailers and e-commerce companies. MindMeld for Commerce is intended to help customers find products, do messaging-based transactions, check on order status and get support without requiring another human to get involved. Tuttle contends that MindMeld's bots can converse, either in text or by voice, better not only than other bots but also virtual assistants such as Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa and Microsoft's Cortana.

As developers, we adapt as technologies move from the realm of Science Fiction into readily available SDKs. In the past 5 years, devices have become more personal and demanding of new forms of interaction. In Windows 10, speech is front-and-center with the Cortana personal assistant, and the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) gives us several ways to plug into that "Hey, Cortana" experience. But there's much more that we can do when working with speech from a UWP app and that's true whether working locally on the device or remotely via the cloud. In this 3-part series, we will dig in to some of those speech capabilities and show that speech can be both a powerful and a relatively easy addition to an app.

Google is about to hold its biggest show of the year. And we've got a pretty good idea of what's going to happen. The company holds its I/O conference every summer to show off the biggest updates to developers and let them get their hands on its newest products. And this year that's going to be the technology that will power your house, take over your wallet and create the reality that you live in – as well as the now relatively small matter of powering your phone. Google I/O runs from 18 May to 20 May.

In 2016, you'll hear a lot about bots. They've been around for nearly the entirety of the Internet. Mostly, bots have been used for malicious reasons. Heck, a quick Wikipedia search reveals more about malicious purposes than anything else. A bot is essentially a piece of code, or software, that runs automated tasks.

Amazon Fire TV is beefing up its Alexa voice features. You could already use the voice remote with Amazon's Fire TV and Fire Stick devices to ask Alexa to search for TV shows and movies. Amazon Fire TV owners will soon be able to ask Alexa to search for -- and get information from -- local movie theaters, restaurants and other businesses, as well as ask the voice-enabled virtual assistant for programming on HBO Go, Hulu, Showtime and other apps. Owners of Fire TV devices (Fire Stick, 49.99; Fire TV, 99.99) will get the new Alexa features automatically via free software upgrades in the coming weeks, Amazon says. "Customers have told us they love having the convenience of Alexa on their Amazon Fire TV," said Tim Twerdahl, General Manager, Amazon Fire TV.