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Music written by teams, David Byrne once wrote, is arguably more accessible than that written by a sole composer. Collaborations, he mused, may result in more "universal" sentiments. Now music producers are enlisting AI to crank out hits. Created by Sony's Computer Science Laboratories, Flow Machines analyzes tracks from around the world, then suggests scores that artists--including electropop musician ALB and jazz vocalist Camille Bertault--interpret into songs. For its debut album, Hello World, the AI also surveyed syllables and words from existing music to create original (albeit gibberish) vocals.

This week's hardware IRL is timely, as Google is about to showcase what's coming next at its annual developer conference. It's the perfect occasion to hear Timothy J. Seppala's thoughts on the Google Home Mini, the company's entry-level smart speaker. He ended up buying two, but they haven't quite delivered on everything he was hoping for. My relationship with a pair of Google Home Mini speakers started out great. I bought them during the holidays as cheap Christmas gifts to myself, hoping to eventually place one in every room of my apartment.

Researchers at Sony's computer science laboratory in Paris recently put out a set of pop songs composed by an AI system, which scans songs from a database to compose entirely new pieces in certain musical styles. The final results were, unexpectedly, fairly catchy tunes. Expanding that idea, Sony CSL now wants to use its system of machine-learning algorithms--which is named Flow Machines, and has been in development since 2012--to write and publish entire albums. Using an algorithm to write songs "makes all the elements of experimentation easier, which otherwise would have been too time-consuming or meticulous," says the lab's director and artificial intelligence expert François Pashet. Does a music-making AI violate the intimacy and emotion of the songwriting process?