China has blocked OpenAI's ChatGPT over fears the American company will use the AI to spread propaganda. Major tech companies nationwide have been ordered not to offer the chatbot to the public, specifically firms in the social media app business. The ban is due to ChatGPT generating replies that the Chinese Communist Party would otherwise censor, according to Nikkie Asia. However, users have found a workaround with a virtual private network (VPN) and dozens of'mini programs' released by third-party developers on Tencent's WeChat social media app that claim to offer services from ChatGPT. The report states that Chinese regulators told tech firms Tencent and Ant Group (a subsidiary of e-commerce giant Alibaba) to restrict access to ChatGPT and report to officials prior to releasing their own chatbots.

I live in the curious intersection of art, design, and code. For the past two years, I've worked with a small group of artists to develop Alexa, Call Mom!, an immersive storytelling installation using Amazon's Alexa platform. Our project is far from the type of third-party apps you typically see for Amazon's voice assistant -- "Alexa, Play Jeopardy!" and "Alexa, Ask Pikachu to Talk" are two popular examples -- as it invites users to engage with Alexa in a way that's just a bit… off. Alexa, Call Mom! leads participants through an immersive séance experience. It is a parodic reimaging of the classic horror séance and an exploration of the tense relationships we share with conversational devices in our home.

How does your business interact with customers? Do you still use a phone-only helpline? Are you flooded with emails? How many employees are dedicated to answering those calls and emails? If you don't employ enough staff for the task, you could wind up with some seriously frustrated customers. That is one of the many reasons why so many businesses are opting to deploy AI chatbots.

Many of today's most popular AI systems are, at their core, classifiers. They classify inputs into different categories: this image is a picture of a dog, not a cat; this audio signal is an instance of the word "Boston", not the word "Seattle"; this sentence is a request to play a video, not a song. But what happens if you need to add a new class to your classifier -- if, say, someone releases a new type of automated household appliance that your smart-home system needs to be able to control? The traditional approach to updating a classifier is to acquire a lot of training data for the new class, add it to all the data used to train the classifier initially, and train a new classifier on the combined data set. With today's commercial AI systems, many of which were trained on millions of examples, this is a laborious process.

Classifiers are a staple of modern-day machine learning. Simply put, they categorize input data -- photos, videos, objects, and recordings -- by type, and do it very efficiently. However, problems arise when a classifier needs a new class -- that is, a new category. Adding even one new class is traditionally arduous and involves lots of data collection and model retraining. But scientists at Amazon's Alexa research division say it doesn't have to be that way.

At Transform, an AI-focused event held by VentureBeat in Mill Valley, California, Google VP Scott Huffman, who is in charge of engineering teams for Google Assistant, shared some insights into what it takes to create lasting experiences with voice assistants. For example, becoming part of a person's daily routine helps drive adoption, and Google Assistant commands like "Create a reminder" or "Play music" are 40 times more likely to be action-oriented than a Google search query. Huffman did a great job of sharing unique insights from a platform perspective, but that's just one side of the story. On the other side are a host of developers, startups, and service providers making their own third-party experiences that work alongside Google Assistant or Alexa. Below is some tried-and-true advice for successful voice computing from three veterans in the industry. Perhaps more than any other portion of the tech industry, bots and artificial intelligence have made great strides in the past few years, while simultaneously suffering from overmarketed and even false claims.

The Gmail email application is seen on a portable device in this photo illustration on December 6, 2017. Google has reportedly allowed third-party developers of Android apps to review millions of Gmail messages, which seems about right. On Monday, a report by The Wall Street Journal drew attention to the fact that access settings for Gmail, Google's popular email platform, allow data companies and app developers that work Google to view millions of users' personal content and details. According to the WSJ, third parties have gotten human and AI access to whole Gmail messages, time stamps, and recipients' addresses, among other things. The report also suggested that Gmail's associated consent form isn't explicit enough about that fact that human eyes will be studying users' content, not just AI.

Niantic Labs, the developer behind "Pokémon Go," has announced that it is planning to open its augmented reality platform to third-party developers. The company also shared it's vision for the future of its AR platform, which includes advancements in machine learning and computer vision. "Today, we are offering a preview of the technology we have been developing: the Niantic Real World Platform," Niantic CEO John Hanke said in a blog post. "This is the first time we've given an update of this nature publicly, and I'm confident it will provide a sense of how committed we are to the future of AR, and to furthering the type of experiences we have pioneered." The CEO also revealed that Niantic has acquired the computer vision and machine learning company Matrix Mill and established a new office in London.

Nintendo has announced that Fortnite is being released for its Switch console to coincide with the opening of the E3 video games show in Los Angeles. However, the release is limited to the title's last-gamer-standing Battle Royale mode and will not include the original Save The World co-op content. Nintendo also revealed Super Smash Bros Ultimate will include every character to have appeared in prior versions. It described it as the "biggest crossover in gaming history". That means the fighting game will include the Japanese firm's own characters - Mario, Zelda and the Splatoon Inklings - as well as those from third-party developers, such as Final Fantasy's Cloud, Metal Gear Solid's Snake and Sonic The Hedgehog.

But I encountered a significant difference using Google Home devices to control my Vivint Smart Home system compared to Amazon's Echo. When I say "OK Google, turn on my kitchen lights," the Google Assistant responds "OK, here's Vivint." He said if Vivint were to choose the other method, which would allow the Google Assistant to control the home more directly, Vivint would need to allow Google to access the state of the home on a full-time basis. I was told it explains how Google's smart home API works for third parties that integrate directly.