This Adorable Home Robot Totally Won't Murder Your Entire Family

Our homes have voice-controlled assistants like the Amazon Echo, self-navigating devices like the Roomba, and networked monitoring devices like the Nest Cam. Why not combine all of this tech into an adorable home robot companion? Mayfield Robotics has announced Kuri, the home robot that will navigate around your house, respond with voice and body language, answer your questions, manage your home via IFTTT support, and monitor your children or pets with a built-in 1080p camera. Kuri isn’t the first home robot design, but at just $699, it’s the first to be priced within the reach of many consumers. What could possibly go wrong?

Apple Opens Up to AI Community with Research White Paper

Apple’s artificial intelligence efforts are starting to come to light thanks to a just published white paper. The document describes a way to use artificial images to train computers to recognize real world objects, and is also a bit of a good faith gesture towards the open research philosophy in the AI community.

The First AI-Written Christmas Song Is More Soul-Crushing than Fruitcake

Gather ye around the yule log, so festive, warm, and bright! Listen to this song of Christmas cheer written and composed by an AI. And hold on to your loved ones as said tune sucks the soul from your very bones and leaves you quivering in the naked fear not that the morrow will not come, but that it will come and you will be forced to endure another day contemplating the futility and hopelessness of life!  “I’ve always been there for the rest of our lives. A hundred and a half hours ago. I’m glad to meet you. I can hear the music coming from the hall.” Now that, dear friends, is the Christmas stuff of nightmares, as HowStuffWorks put it. And yes, I am dying, both from laughter and abject fear. This “song,” such as it is, was the result of a neural network project from The University of Toronto. They fed in 100 hours of holiday music, a bunch of holiday photographs with captions, and said, “Now you do it.” The song below was the result. Put another way, score ones for the humans.

Apple's TV App Reveals its Plight with Television Industry

From time to time, we’ve seem articles that explain Apple’s plight with its TV business. But John has found a splendidly complete diagnosis at The Verge  for this week’s focus. It examines the deepest motivations of Apple, it’s clash with the entertainment industry, its successes and failures, and how that has, in turn, affected Apple TV software design and customer perceptions.

Tim Cook: Giving Up Privacy with Siri and AI is a False Choice

The best analyst questions during Apple’s Q4 2016 Financial Results came from Simona Jankowski with Goldman Sachs. She asked Tim Cook about his perspective on home vs. mobile artificial intelligence agents and then the issue of privacy. Tim Cook took a solid stand on both questions that reveal the future direction of Apple.

Apple Has Plans for Better AI, Cashless Society

Apple CEO Tim Cook wants to weave artificial intelligence deeply into our lives, and he’s ready for a cashless society. The iPhone and Mac maker’s planned research center in Japan will play a role in those plans, and the country could be at the forefront of plans to push Apple Pay as the standard for a no-cash world.