The well-groomed young man dressed in a crisp, blue shirt speaking with a soft American accent seems an unlikely supporter of the junta leader of the west African state of Burkina Faso. "We must support … President Ibrahim Traoré … Homeland or death we shall overcome!" he says in a video that began circulating in early 2023 on Telegram. It was just a few months after the dictator had come to power via a military coup. Other videos fronted by different people, with a similar professional-looking appearance and repeating the exact same script in front of the Burkina Faso flag, cropped up around the same time. On a verified account on X a few days later the same young man, in the same blue shirt, claimed to be Archie, the chief executive of a new cryptocurrency platform. They were generated with artificial intelligence (AI) developed by a startup based in east London.

Ever since Scarlett Johansson voiced an AI assistant in the sci-fi blockbuster'Her', many tech fans have dreamed of making that technology a reality. But it now seems that OpenAI may have pursued that dream too literally as they face accusations of deliberately copying Johansson's voice for ChatGPT's latest update. According to Ms Johansson's statement, the likeness is'so eerily similar to mine that close friends and news outlets could not tell the difference'. Following the allegations, OpenAI's'flirty' voice assistant has now been paused, yet tech fans have been weighing in on whether there really is a resemblance. So, do you think ChatGPT's AI voice sounds like Scarlett Johansson?

Every evening last summer, after I'd shut down my work laptop, my 3-year-old daughter and I would approach our Google Home smart speaker and yell, "Hey Google, can you play'Aankh Marey' from the movie Simmba?" We'd hold our breaths and wait for a response. The digital assistant would then repeat the name of the Bolly wood song we'd requested in its default standard American accent. We'd rejoice and dance when the assistant played the right number, which happened about half the time. My daughter was going to a Bollywood dance class and we'd finally found a use for the device that my husband had won at a tech conference. Often, however, it would mishear our requests and play something else.

Are you wondering whether you could impersonate Jame Bond or any other famous British character? Well, now you can test your fake British accent with this AI developed by Cambridge Consultants. This fun and simple Artificial Intelligence project uses a neural network to train itself so it could determine how British or American you sound. Although there is no way, at the moment, to tell how accurate this AI really is, it's amusing to help in its' training. All you have to do to test your fake accent is head on to their website and read out loud a small phrase for the AI to analyze.

They were once seen as a bizarre fetish, but it seems that sex dolls are now so widely in demand that they could be going into mass production. Samantha, an eerily realistic sex bot, is currently on sale in London, but could soon be available for the masses. The robot's designer claims that he is looking to mass produce the head for Samantha in Wales in a bid to keep up with growing demands. They were once seen as a bizarre fetish, but it seems that sex dolls are now so widely in demand that they could be going into mass production. 'Silicon Samantha' is covered in sensors that respond to human touch and can switch between'family' and'sexy' mode.

Artificially intelligent automatons could soon be having'children' with their owners, claims the inventor of one of the world's first sex robots. Sergi Santos predicts a future where humans and machines will marry, using technology to create offspring. The Spanish engineer has already begun working on a way to achieve this aim, by blending his mind with that of his creation, 'Silicon Samantha'. Artificially intelligent automatons could soon be having children with their owners, claims the inventor of one of the world's first sex robots. 'Silicon Samantha' is covered in sensors that respond to human touch and can switch between'family' and'sexy' mode.