Teslas with partially automated driving systems are a step closer to being recalled after the U.S. elevated its investigation into a series of collisions with parked emergency vehicles or trucks with warning signs. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Thursday that it is upgrading the Tesla probe to an engineering analysis, another sign of increased scrutiny of the electric vehicle maker and automated systems that perform at least some driving tasks. Documents posted Thursday by the agency raise some serious issues about Tesla's Autopilot system. The agency found that it's being used in areas where its capabilities are limited, and that many drivers aren't taking action to avoid crashes despite warnings from the vehicle. The probe now covers 830,000 vehicles, almost everything that the Austin, Texas, carmaker has sold in the U.S. since the start of the 2014 model year.

Hey Siri, turn off the kitchen light. The first "smart" home gadgets that can be controlled by Apple's voice-activated digital assistant are going on sale this week, just days after rival tech giant Google announced it's building its own software for Internet-connected home appliances and other gadgets. The new products could be an important step forward for the emerging industry of "smart" or "connected" homes, where appliances, thermostats and even door locks contain computer chips that communicate wirelessly. While a number of companies are working on similar products, analysts say Apple could persuade more consumers to try them by making it easy to control different products from a familiar device, such as the iPhone. Apple announced its "HomeKit" software project a year ago, but isn't making the new products.

Google's experimental "skunkworks" lab, Google X, has come up with a lot of weird, potentially useful ideas, including Internet-enabled weather balloons and special contact lenses to monitor the composition of users' tears. But a patent filed by Google X and published this week might be the lab's oddest project yet: a line of Internet-connected stuffed animals that can control appliances throughout your house and maintain eye contact with kids. Similar to Amazon's Echo home speaker/information hub, the Google toys would be activated by a spoken word or phrase which, the patent says, would cause the toy to "aim its gaze at the source of the social cue." The toys would be built with motors so they could physically open their eyes and turn their heads toward the person delivering the command. They would also have embedded speakers to let them verbally respond to the user, and the ability to mimic emotions the patent speculates that "to express surprise, [a toy] may make a sudden movement, sit or stand up straight, and/or dilate its pupils."

Microsoft is reportedly developing a version of its year-old digital assistant, named Cortana, for iOS and Android. The move seems to indicate Microsoft is trying new ways to get its products onto the two dominant mobile operating systems across the US. For mobile users, the question will be: how does Cortana stack up next to Siri? The Cortana project came out of a branch of Microsoft developing artificial intelligence, dubbed "Einstein." Cortana, which is named after a central character in the massively popular Microsoft-owned video game series Halo, has been installed on Microsoft phones for the past year.