Facebook's new chatbots still need work and other top stories.

• Facebook's new chatbots still need work

  Facebook debuted chatbots for Messenger this week to much fanfare, promising consumers a new way to interact with their favorite businesses over the company’s popular messaging service. The idea is that Messenger users could simply “chat” with these automated software programs to do things like read the latest news from CNN, get a weather report or even go shopping. In practice, however, the bots — at least at launch — failed to live up to the hype. Trying to use the bots for simple tasks — li..

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• Google Calendar's new feature could help you get a six pack (or not) video - CNET

  

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• Android N Preview 2 Adds Redesigned Folders & Clear All Button - Android Headlines

  

  If you are part of the Android Beta Program and are set to receive updates via OTA to the Android N developer preview, then you will have probably already heard that the second developer preview is now rolling out. If it has yet to land on your device ...

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• 2017 Audi R8 V10 Plus Luxury Supercar Races At 180+ MPH In Daytona Testing: Review Roundup

  

  The new 2017 Audi R8 V10 Plus was tested by journalists on the Daytona testing track, and the results are formidable. The drivers enjoyed speeds of over 180 mph behind the beastly wheel and lived to tell the tale.(Photo : Audi) A number of journalists hopped on the 2017 edition of Audi R8 V10 Plus and took laps at Daytona Testing track so you know what the supercar is capable of. The latest R8 V10 Plus comes with a roaring V-10 that provides 610 horsepower and 413 pound-feet of torque. A 7-spe..

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• Facebook's latest AI experiments: generating captions and recognizing faces in videos

  

  At its F8 developer conference in San Francisco today, Facebook demonstrated its latest artificial intelligence (AI) research efforts. Not surprisingly, they are about video. Video implies a whole bunch of individual images put together. So it logically flows from Facebook’s progress around object recognition and image caption generation using AI. “You can imagine us building image search on steroids,” Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, Facebook’s director of Applied Machine Learning, said onstage toda..

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• Amazon Kindle Oasis hands-on: This is the best-looking and most expensive Kindle yet video - CNET

  

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• Facebook Launches Research Lab, Hires Google Executive to Helm It

  

  Facebook Inc. created a research lab to develop hardware products and hired a top Google executive to lead the effort, underlining the social-networking company’s broadening technology ambitions. The new group, called Building 8, will be led by Regina Dugan, a former Pentagon research chief who joined ​Alphabet Inc.’s Google in 2012. It will create hardware products that “advance our mission of connecting the world,” Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post Wednesday. Facebook w..

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• FBI bought exploit from hackers to access San Bernardino iPhone

  

  The FBI reportedly paid professional hackers a one-time fee for a previously unknown vulnerability that allowed the agency to unlock the iPhone of San Bernardino shooter. The exploit allowed the FBI to build a device capable of brute-forcing the iPhone's PIN without triggering a security measure that would have wiped all of its data, the Washington Post reported Tuesday, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter. The hackers who provided the exploit to the FBI find software vulnera..

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• Google has given its open-source machine learning software a big upgrade

  

  Last November, Google opened up its in-house machine learning software TensorFlow, making the program that powers its translation services and photo analytics (among many other things) open-source and free to download. Now, the company is giving TensorFlow the machine learning equivalent of smart pills, releasing a distributed version of the software that allows it to run across multiple machines — up to hundreds at a time. This sounds like an obvious way to improve TensorFlow, and, well, it is..

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• Facebook's Terragraph project aims to replace fiber with fast, low-cost Wi-Fi

  

  Facebook’s plan to connect the world to the Internet is ambitious. It also has many arms. There’s Aquila, the solar-powered plane that will beam Internet to the ground. Then there’s Project ARIES, a plan to extend connectivity to rural areas cheaper and faster, so people who live close to cities will be able to access the Internet. But Facebook’s newest project is on the ground. It’s called Terragraph, a low-cost, high-speed wireless network that will replace fiber in big cities. Facebook wi..

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