Last year, I reviewed Ecovacs' Deebot (6/10, WIRED Review). It was an expensive and massive mopping robot vacuum that came with a ton of extra functions that, to be quite honest, didn't make much practical sense. My 8-year-old, for example, is used to her mother occasionally doing strange things around the house. She accepted when her mother was talking to her through that robot vacuum's walkie-talkie, but she didn't exactly like it. That's why, this year, it made more sense for me to try the Deebot T9, which at $800 is the midrange model in Deebot's 2023 line.

Artificial intelligence is creeping into our smartphones in small, subtle ways. Google's Pixel 3, announced Tuesday, can answer robocalls on your behalf thanks to Google's Duplex technology and Google Assistant. Meanwhile, Android P, the latest operating system for Google's phones, can learn from how you interact with phone alerts to suggest stopping notifications for particular apps, reducing the amount of unnecessary intrusions your phone makes into your daily life. But there's another new phone in the pipeline that takes these kinds of developments further. By pairing them with more robust voice control, it may help fill in the picture of how we'll talk to the next generation of smartphones--and what they'll learn about us in order to talk back.

Instead, they can just raise their wrist and talk into the watch in order to speak with Apple's digital assistant. Shortcuts for Siri are also coming to Apple Watch, which allows users to set custom Siri commands that will appear on their watch. They can also customize the way buttons appear in the Apple Watch's Control Center. Apple said more third-party apps are coming to the Apple Watch. Now, third party apps can play background audio, which means users can sync their audio books, playlists and guided meditations to their Apple Watch, and they'll play continuously in the background.

Do you ever feel guilty about leaving your dog at home alone when you need to buy groceries? If you do, a new robot may be able to change that: The Anthouse Pet Companion Robot can play fetch, feed and even let you talk to your pet from your desk. The $349 robot, which comes in white or yellow, can be set to automatic mode or be controlled via a companion app to interact with a pet in real-time. The bot, which has so far raised $10,112 on Kickstarter, can monitor your dog's activity via a live stream connected to your phone, allowing you to take pictures and share videos on social media. The multi-purpose bot has a range of features, including an automatic food dispenser, automated obstacle avoidance, video monitoring, a mini tennis ball launcher and automated charging.

Director Denis Villeneuve's "Arrival" may be an alien movie, but you won't hear the sounds of warp speed, Martian death rays or beeping robots in it, say supervising sound editor Sylvain Bellemare and re-recording mixer Bernard Gariépy Strobl. "Denis really insisted on having a sound that was not electronic," Bellemare says of the film starring Amy Adams as a linguist trying to communicate with an alien species. "He wanted to do another type of science fiction. So he wanted to use an approach of [making] the sound really organic." Bellemare and Gariépy Strobl knew what they were in for, having worked together on several previous films, including Villeneuve's 2008 short "Next Floor."