NEW YORK--"Alexa, take on Spotify and Apple Music." But Amazon on Wednesday launched Amazon Music Unlimited, an on-demand streaming service powered by the Alexa voice familiar to Echo owners, and a service primed to muscle in on an already congested streaming market for music. Amazon Music Unlimited debuts with a catalog of "tens of millions" of songs--Amazon won't reveal a precise number-- as well as curated playlists and personalized stations. That promises to makes it more of a viable competitor against Apple Music, Spotify and any number of other streaming services than the company's existing Amazon Prime Music service, which has a far more limited catalog of some two million songs and will remain available at no extra cost to Amazon Prime members. All too often when you request a song on Echo, Prime Music only plays a sample.

Alexa can already order you an Uber, control your smart home devices, and keep you company. She's about to learn much better DJ skills, save you six bucks a month on streaming music, and possibly even change the way you listen to music in your house. Amazon Music Unlimited, a beefed-up subscription service built to compete with the likes of Spotify and Apple Music, launches today. It's cheaper than those big-name services--for many users, at least--and it features clever voice control with the company's Echo speakers. If you're using Music Unlimited on an Amazon Echo, Tap, or Dot, the service only costs 4 a month. To use it on anything else--mobile devices, your computer, a Fire TV stick, or even Sonos speakers--the pricing falls more in line with Spotify or Apple Music.

Analysis There was a distinct whiff of the retro about Google's launch of its Pixel smartphone. Exclusives with selected large mobile operators; yet another attempt to create a unified Android experience; even the clear focus on Apple as the primary competition – all these should be issues of the past. "Premium is a very important category," Hiroshi Lockheimer, head of Android, said in an interview. "It's where Apple is also very strong. Is there room for another player there? This is the wrong target in a world where the new web experiences are being driven by Facebook rather than Apple. Of course, Apple has huge smartphone power, but that is starting to wane, and the way to weaken it further is not to copy tactics which go right back to the original iPhone, but to shift the terms of debate. Google's heavy focus on its virtual assistant software, the heart and soul of Pixel and other devices, may do that – at least it shows the search giant playing to its strengths and seeking to ...

Amazon is introducing its answer to Spotify and Apple Music, and it's playing to win. Amazon on Wednesday launched Amazon Music Unlimited, its on-demand streaming service. The new offering is priced aggressively, with Amazon Prime members able to subscribe to the service for 7.99 a month -- below the 9.99 rate popularized by Spotify, Apple Music and just about every other major music streaming option. The on-demand streaming service will work online and through a redesigned Amazon Music app as well as through the Amazon Echo. A separate for-Echo-only streaming plan will cost 3.99 a month.

Yet there are several important data points involved, and the Alexa assistant that runs on my Amazon Echo speaker doesn't know what to do. Using the Google Assistant bot on the new Google Allo messaging app, things are a little different. Google has spent the last 18 years parsing the data for search queries. One of the key differences between the Assistant and Alexa is that Google understands context.

The artificial intelligence (AI) component in these programs aims to make create a world in which everyone can have a virtual aide that gets to know them better with each interaction. Google is making a high-profile push into AI, with the internet titan's chief referring to it as a force for change as powerful as powerful as smartphones. Google Assistant software is being built into new Pixel handsets - aiming to outdo Apple's Siri - enabling users to organise and use information on the devices and in the cloud - to check emails, stay up to date on calendar appointments, news or ask for traffic and weather data. Google also offers AI through its Allo messaging application which can be installed on smartphones, and its Google Home hub, a standalone device similar to Amazon's Echo which responds to voice commands to manage tasks and fetch information where people live. The South Korean electronics giant moved to jumpstart its AI efforts by purchasing the US startup Viv Labs, launched by the creators of Apple's Siri.

Google just debuted a digital assistant, which it hopes to place inside smartphones, watches, cars and every other imaginable internet-connected device. It's already hit a snag. The Alphabet Inc. division launched new smartphones last week with the artificially intelligent assistant deeply embedded. It also rolled out a speaker with the feature at its core and announced plans to let other companies tie their apps and services to the assistant. A day later, Samsung Electronics Co., one of the largest manufacturers of smartphones and other consumer devices, said it was acquiring Viv Labs, a startup building its own AI voice-based assistant.

Apple has bought Tuplejump, a machine learning technology company with operations in both India and the United States, TechCrunch reports. Apple continues to buy companies with machine learning expertise. The reason the company had its eyes on Tuplejump was for its "FiloDB" project, according to the report. The lead engineer on FiloDB has been working at Apple since this May, according to his LinkedIn. The purchase price is unknown, although it's almost certainly lower than Apple's last machine learning purchase, Turi, which was bought for around 200 million earlier this year.

Warning: There are spoilers ahead for "Westworld." The second episode of "Westworld" made a significant leap when it came to explaining "glitches" in the robotic hosts' programming. One of the programming employees, Elsie, expressed concern to Bernard about Peter Abernathy (the host who went "crazy" in the premiere). Peter Abernathy began reciting threatening lines from his old narratives. "Let me at least pull the hosts who had contact with him," Elsie asks Bernard.

Samsung Electronics has announced that it has agreed to acquire Viv Labs, "the intelligent interface to everything." Viv has developed an open artificial intelligence (AI) platform that gives third-party developers the power to use and build conversational assistants and integrate a natural language-based interface into applications and services. It claims to be well advanced over other language interfaces like Siri or Google Now where accuracy cannot be relied on. Viv's creator, Dag Kittlaus should know as he co-created Siri too. He said, "Viv would breathe life into the inanimate objects of our life through conversation."