Looking to drum up consumer excitement, the tech company hosted an event in San Francisco on Tuesday to unveil a series of products, including two new phones, a virtual reality headset and the Chromecast Ultra. The flagship announcement was the introduction of Pixel, the first Google phone to carry exclusively Google branding. The company called it the "first phone made by Google inside and out." The device is poised to take on the iPhone with a built-in artificially intelligent assistant, 4K video and other bells and whistles. Here's a closer look at everything you need to know: Google (GOOG) announced a new Pixel line of phones -- the 5-inch Pixel ( 649) and 5.5-inch Pixel XL ( 769).

The oncoming storm of Artificial Intelligence as popularized by sci-fi films and to some extent over-inflated expectations of machines that can learn to mimic humans has created an early worry of its impact on jobs, society and us in general. The announcement of a UK commission to look at ethical, legal and societal impact needs to be unpacked in terms of what the state of current A.I. is today and what is causing this early alarm bell to be taken seriously. Why are we raging against the machine? This is perhaps in two areas, the level of sensors and data collection is now rapidly increasing from mobile phones, security cameras to devices in the home like Amazon Echo and Google Home starting to record huge amounts of data about our behavior and choices. On one level this is a concern for privacy and identity that machine algorithms are in use already that analyze this sea of data and can start to manipulate and influence our outcomes and expectations. This is part of the source of the commission focus.

When you're swiping through Tinder it's pretty easy to dismiss someone based on their first photo. Maybe it's poorly compressed, from the delivery room or the church steps on a person's wedding day. Those might be red flags that push people to instantaneously dismiss a potential match before looking deeper at a person's profile. To help your right-swiping sojourn, though, Tinder is using data to make sure someone's best picture is the first you'll see. The new feature is called "Smart Photos."

With more than 50 million profiles worldwide, it can be hard for Tinder users to make themselves stand out. Now the dating app is lending a helping hand by automatically reordering users' photos to display their best profile pictures first. The new'Smart Photos' feature uses an algorithm based on each response as other people swipe on the profile. This alternates the first photo seen by other users. Now the dating app is lending a helping hand by automatically reordering users' photos to display their best profile pictures first In testing, users saw a 12 per cent boost in matches, claims Tinder.

Todoist is one of the more full-featured to-do services out there, and it's available on nearly every platform out there. Whether you use Mac or Windows, iOS or Android, Todoist has you covered. It works much like you'd expect: you can ask Alexa to add items to the various lists that you have in your Todoist account, and you can also ask it to tell you everything that's on your to-do list for that day. And Alexa works with Todoist's natural language processing, so you can ask it to add things to your list "tomorrow" or "next Wednesday" and it'll know just what you're asking it for. It's not clear if you'll be able to tell Alexa to add items to specific projects or to-do lists in your account -- they probably get added to whatever your default list is for you to sort out on your phone or computer.

Until now, Tinder users have had to rely on good old-fashioned narcissism to try and determine which photo they look best in, but now it can be ascertained empirically, boosting their chances of finding matches. "Starting today, we're implementing a brand new algorithm that maximizes your match potential," a spokesperson for the dating app announced. "It's simple: Smart Photos alternates the photo first seen by others when you're shown on Tinder, notes each response as others swipe on you, and reorders your photos to show your best ones first. In testing, users saw up to a 12% increase in matches. "Tinder's Smart Photos continuously test your profile photos for their success, so that you're always leading with the photos most likely to be swiped right." "Think of us as your own personal data research team.

Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Recode by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, executive editor at The Verge and editor at large of Recode. I've been familiar with Siri longer than most people. Way back in 2009 -- two years before Apple incorporated the intelligent digital assistant into the iPhone -- I stood onstage with the inventors of the service while they debuted it at a tech conference I co-produced. At the time, it was just a third-party app on the iPhone App Store. Not long thereafter, Apple bought the company, and the assistant reemerged in 2011 with a splashy introduction as a core feature of the iPhone 4s.

In this post-Tinder world, your profile picture is everything. The world swipes right (acceptance!) or swipes left (rejection!) based solely on what your photo looks like. Not what you look like. What your photo looks like. So, when hunting for dates and other forms of conjugation, you better get that photo right.

"I wish I could touch you," Theodore says, laying in bed. Until she speaks up, tentatively. "How would you touch me?" It's a famously poignant scene from the movie Her, as the character Theodore is about to make vocal love to an artificial intelligence living in his ear. But according to half a dozen experts I interviewed, ranging from industrial designer Gadi Amit to the usability guru Don Norman, in-ear assistants aren't science fiction. In fact, a notable pile of discreet, wireless earbuds enabling just this idea are coming to market now. Sony recently released its first in-ear assistant, the Xperia Ear. Intel showed off a similar proof-of-concept last year.

Bill Gates recently declared artificial intelligence "the holy grail of computer science." The industry has made massive strides in recent years and there are even more exciting things ahead. The AI market will grow from 420 million in 2014 to over 5 billion by the year 2020. By 2018, an estimated 6 billion things from appliances to cars to wearable tech will depend on AI technology. There are currently more than 1,000 AI start-up companies and a total of 5.4 billion has been invested into them.