How to Do It is Slate's sex advice column. Send it to Stoya and Rich here. My wife and I (both women) are now in an open marriage … at least in theory. The problem isn't our comfort levels--we love each other deeply, are both comfortable with the idea that we can venture out but that we'll always come back to each other, and generally have pretty good communication. The problem is how to find someone else who's interested.

From mobile work to security and maintenance, perhaps no company has done more for the advancement of technology in today's society than SkyNet, a promising start up out of Austin, Texas that has made great strides during the COVID-19 pandemic. Last year, their T-400 model of home assistant swept the country, combining at home personal assistants with a walking talking android that actually helped with chores and tasks around the house. We had the opportunity to sit down with Barry Snow, the CEO of the skyrocketing company, about SkyNet's future and some of the backlash to what some have called "unnecessarily violent home assistants." Can I have one of those waters? So, your company was already gaining steam a few years ago, but it really seems that during the pandemic you pulled ahead of a lot of your peers with your home androids.

As some of you might know, I'm a runner. On occasion I review sports watches, and outside of work I'm a certified marathon coach. So when Engadget wanted to round up the best wireless workout headphones, I raised my hand. In addition to fit and battery life, I considered factors such as style; ease of use; the charging case; the strength of the Bluetooth connection; support for assistants such as Siri and Alexa; water resistance ratings; and audio features such as noise cancelation and ambient sound modes. You'll notice I don't have much if anything to say about audio quality. Engadget's resident expert Billy Steele has written about this plenty in his standalone reviews, which I've linked throughout, but for my purposes the differences were too subtle to make or break a purchasing decision. In the end, I never quite mastered some of the over-complicated controls, but at no point did an earbud fall out while I was exercising. I also never came close to running out of juice.

In 2016 at TechCrunch Disrupt New York, several of the original developers behind what became Siri unveiled Viv, an AI platform that promised to connect various third-party applications to perform just about any task. The pitch was tantalizing -- but never fully realized. Samsung later acquired Viv, folding a pared-down version of the tech into its Bixby voice assistant. Six years later, a new team claims to have cracked the code to a universal AI assistant -- or at least to have gotten a little bit closer. At a product lab called Adept that emerged from stealth today with $65 million in funding, they are -- in the founders' words -- "build[ing] general intelligence that enables humans and computers to work together creatively to solve problems."

People with disabilities often cannot count on modern digital devices, software, and services to be accessible. Will streaming video platforms include closed captions for viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing? How will virtual assistants work for users with speech disabilities? Can websites be read aloud by text-to-speech engines for readers who are blind or visually impaired? How will smartphones be accessed by people with physical and mobility disabilities?

AI-enabled cameras capture schoolchildren in China's Xinjiang region. Cameras identify and track ... [ ] Uighurs and other ethnic minorities face in the heavily-policed region. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a key technologies of the future – and not just because of civilian applications like ecommerce, self-driving cars, and online search and personal assistants. AI will transform militaries through innovations in intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, logistics, command and control capabilities, weapons systems, and so on. Last year a landmark U.S. National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) report found, "The ability of a machine to perceive, evaluate, and act more quickly and accurately than a human represents a competitive advantage in any field--civilian or military."

When it comes to setting timers or getting traffic updates, nothing beats the convenience of a smart speaker. If you haven't got one already, right now is a good day to buy. Amazon is selling the fourth-generation Echo Dot for $28. In our review of the Echo Dot, we gave it four out of five stars. We liked its improved audio and revamped design.

Machine Learning is a major technology that is dominating the market. This technology can be used in tablets and computers that can learn all types of data, including programming languages. It uses a futuristic approach to address all major requirements, such as speech recognition and virtual assistants. These major projects can help you get started if you are interested in a career as a Machine Learning professional. During the pandemic, people have begun to watch movies online and on television.

To scale natural language understanding to every spoken language on Earth, Amazon.Inc has announced the release of its open-source'MASSIVE' speech dataset. The main goal of curating such a dataset was to assist researchers in developing virtual assistants that could easily be generalized to some of the world's most hidden languages. In addition to the database, Amazon has also published open-source modeling code to help developers create more capable virtual assistants. Several new technological breakthroughs in speech recognition and natural language understanding (NLU) have opened the way for voice-activated digital assistants such as Siri, Bixby, and Google Assistant. The primary shortcoming of these voice-controlled personal assistants is that they are only available in a few familiar languages.

The Echo Show 15 is Amazon's biggest Alexa smart display and is designed to be a command centre or digital noticeboard for all the family. It is considerable larger than the rest of Amazon's Echo Show devices, which were recently given a motorised screen and small desk-ready displays. That illusion is furthered by its wall-mountable form – it is designed to be hung in a central place like the digital equivalent of the pinboards common to kitchens of homes of the 1980s, and can be mounted in landscape or portrait orientation. It can be bought with a stand for £30 more if you would rather not screw 2.2kg of technology into your wall. The 1080p touchscreen is bright and crisp when viewed at arm's reach.