The weekend is upon us once again (woohoo!), and after another week packed with updates, announcements, rumors and insights, its arrival is certainly welcome. And as ever, 7 Days is here too, to walk you through what's been happening and bring you up to speed. We begin our odyssey this week in the UK, where the European Commission has blocked Three's proposed 10.25 billion acquisition of O2 UK, which would have created the country's largest mobile network operator. The EC determined that the deal would harm innovation, limit competition, and increase prices across the market. Cloud CRM platform Salesforce suffered an outage earlier this week affecting a relatively small proportion of its customers.

Viv is a new digital AI assistance created by makers of Siri. Since co-founder of the artificial intelligent software Dag Kittlaus announced the news, a lot of people are asking what Viv can do and how is it better than Siri. During a conference at TechCrunch, Kittlaus showed the basic voice commands that drive Viv. However, the digital assistance software is currently in development and does not have the voice capability. Viv responded to some complex questions that demonstrated by Kittlause and it is, in fact, better than Siri at understanding difficult sentence structures.

Messaging is the new battleground among powerful tech companies. Facebook, Snapchat and Microsoft are racing to build ever more powerful chat apps, based on artificial intelligence, virtual assistants and bots. Some industry insiders predict that messaging will become the next big computing platform, providing a new way for consumers to do everything from shop online to reading the news. As Google kicks off its annual developer conference near San Francisco next week, a growing number of users, software developers and analysts think Google needs to get on the ball and make some messaging-based announcements. The company's Hangouts chat app was an early success when it was introduced years ago, but appears to have languished recently. Here's why Google can't afford to ignore the messaging threat: Everyone's talking about how chat is the next big thing.

On May 8, a group of Danish researchers publicly released a dataset of nearly 70,000 users of the online dating site OkCupid, including usernames, age, gender, location, what kind of relationship (or sex) they're interested in, personality traits, and answers to thousands of profiling questions used by the site. When asked whether the researchers attempted to anonymize the dataset, Aarhus University graduate student Emil O. W. Kirkegaard, who was lead on the work, replied bluntly: "No. This sentiment is repeated in the accompanying draft paper, "The OKCupid dataset: A very large public dataset of dating site users," posted to the online peer-review forums of Open Differential Psychology, an open-access online journal also run by Kirkegaard: Some may object to the ethics of gathering and releasing this data. However, all the data found in the dataset are or were already publicly available, so releasing this dataset merely presents it in a more useful form. For those concerned about ...

Do we need an Asimov's Law for chatbots? And how do they compare with a talking parrot? What can dairy farmers learn from outfitting cows with pedometers? How can algorithms better explain to humans not just what they're predicting, but why? Some of the biggest names from the Seattle area's growing machine learning and artificial intelligence community tackled these questions and more Wednesday at a Madrona Venture Group summit. The sprawling array of challenges and opportunities in this fast-growing, fascinating, and sometimes frightening field defy easy summary.

The researchers, Emil Kirkegaard, Oliver Nordbjerg, and Julius Daugbjerg Bjerrekær, used software to automatically scrape profiles and then uploaded it in a set onto the Open Science Framework, a forum and repository for scientists to share data. The info is only slightly anonymous: While no real names are used, usernames are connected with location and answers to the litany of personal questions OkCupid uses to find compatibility. Some of these, like political leanings or feelings about homosexuality, are quite private. As Kirkegaard repeatedly stated on Twitter, the data was indeed publicly available, but the scraping violates the dating site's terms and a possible legal matter, an OkCupid spokesperson told Vox. And, as Vox points out, it's also a breach of ethics according to the American Psychological Association, which states that people involved in research studies have the right to consent.

Apple, Amazon, Google, and others are pushing us to use our voices rather than our fingers to interact with their products. But do we really want our assistants to be more human? Voice controlled assistants are all the rage right now, as well as the rise of the bots. It's safe to say that we're accelerating to a world where there are less inefficiencies in our day to day lives. The end game, I believe, to all of this is Iron Man's trusted A.I. friend: Jarvis. That, of course, is not a surprise.

If you tell Siri to set an alarm for 5 am, she'll set an alarm for 5 am. But if you start asking her which prescription pain killer is least likely to upset your stomach, she's not really gonna know what to do--just because that's a pretty complicated sentence. Siri is a long way from what computer scientists call "natural language understanding." She can't truly understand the natural way we humans talk--despite the way Apple portrays her in all those TV ads. In fact, we shouldn't really be talking about her as a "her" at all.

YouTube has figured out a way to get deeper inside your head. The Internet's biggest video site on Tuesday rolled out a smarter machine learning engine on its iOS and Android mobile apps, allowing it to serve up better recommendations for viewers. The gussied-up recommendation system is based on deep neural network technology -- the same type parent Google uses for search results -- which will help YouTube find patterns and learn more about what a viewer wants with each visit. "Delivering a personal recommendation engine that shows YouTube really understand you is our goal," Johanna Wright, vice president of YouTube product management, said in an interview. "We're able to do this because Google has some of the best machine learning in the world."