Conversations with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant are supposed to be personal. In a promo video for the Google Home connected speaker, for instance, a husband and wife ask the omnipresent AI about their respective agendas for the day, and get individualized answers in return. But that’s not how Home and Amazon’s Echo speaker work in the real world today. When someone speaks, neither company’s virtual assistant can detect who’s talking. Echo requires an extra step of switching profiles to get personalized information, and offers no verification aside from an optional PIN for making Amazon purchases. Google Home doesn’t support multiple …

Kuri, the smart home robot from Bosch internal startup Mayfield Robotics, won a lot of hearts when it debuted at CES in January. Now, the little domestic bot has gained some new abilities, which should help it win minds, too, when it launches officially to pre-order customers later this year. One of Kuri’s new powers is facial detection, which allows it to tailor its reactions and responses to respond to faces it sees. That means it can smile back at people who smile at it, and watch your face with its eyes while waiting for your next instruction. It’s a big …

Lowe’s Cos. is embarking on the next chapter of its virtual reality journey. Starting Tuesday, March 7, the home improvement chain’s store in Framingham, Massachusetts, debuted its “Holoroom How To,” Lowe’s first-ever virtual reality DIY skills-training clinic. As consumers enter the interactive virtual reality (VR)-based environment, they wear an HTC Vive headset to receive “hands-on” tutorials on basic DIY skills, including supplies and steps, needed to complete a project. The first module teaches how to tile a shower.

An Arkansas man who is accused of murder after a former officer was found dead in his hot tub is offering his Amazon Echo recordings as evidence after the company fought to protect his privacy. Amazon handed over the Echo recordings Friday when James Andrew Bates said he would volunteer the data for his defense. Bates's case is being handled by Kathleen Zellner who represented Steven Avery. She tweeted on Tuesday her client is handing over the recordings because he is innocent. 

It has been described as a cross between 'an angry toaster and an old school Apple iMac on wheels'. But this bizarre-looking driverless pod concept is what Volkswagen believes will be the future of self-driving cars. Dubbed Sedric, the design was unveiled by VW ahead of the Geneva Motor Show this week. The firm said it also plans to launch more than 30  purely battery-powered vehicles by 2025.  The German carmaker is trying to position itself at the forefront of new technologies in the wake of its diesel emissions scandal. The Wolfsburg-based company said 'battery technology, autonomous driving and …

Last November if you were driving a BMW x5 or a Volvo XC60 on the highway ringing Moscow, you might have noticed a digital billboard on the side of the road flash an ad just as you approached, one for a new SUV from Jaguar. If it was evening, you saw an ad with a dark background, helping the car stand out. In bad weather, you saw it maneuvering in the snow.

Fitbit’s big smartwatch announcement is, it seems, still a ways off. But the company’s got a pair of announcements this week, including an update to its popular Alta tracker and changes to the way it gathers sleep tracking. The Alta HR is an update to last year’s Alta, a well designed piece of hardware that has since grown into the second-best fitness tracker (behind the company’s higher-end Charge 2), according to numbers from NPD. The biggest addition is, as you’ve no doubt gathered from the name, heart rate monitoring, which the company has manage to add while maintaining the wearable’s slim form factor.

Clothing retailer H&M looked to digital outlets and immersive content to expand the reach of the runway show for its S/S 2017 collection at Paris Fashion Week. The live stream was held in conjunction with H&M Studio’s "see now, buy now" S/S 2017 collection inspired by “the strength and passion of ballet,” and featured both womenswear and for the first time, menswear. Following the show, the over 800 guests in attendance — along with a global audience watching live on H&M’s mobile-optimized Web site and via VR on H&M's YouTube channel — were all treated to a performance by the …

Japanese mega-corp Softbank expects its processor-designer subsidiary ARM to fire out a trillion chips for the Internet of Things over the next two decades, its CEO told Mobile World Congress. Masayoshi Son also laid emphasis on the growth of smart devices and thus the need for chips in those devices, telling the Barcelona shindig that “this is why I spent $32bn to acquire ARM”, according to Reuters. At the time of Softbank’s 2016 purchase of ARM, Son said: “ARM is going to be everywhere in Internet of Things.”

Virginia has made robotics history. The commonwealth is the first state to pass legislation allowing delivery robots to operate on sidewalks and crosswalks across the state. The new law goes into effect on July 1 and was signed into law by the governor last Friday. The two Virginia lawmakers who sponsored the bill, Ron Villanueva and Bill DeSteph, teamed up with Starship Technologies, an Estonian-based ground delivery robotics company, to draft the legislation. Robots operating under the new law won’t be able to exceed 10 miles per hour or weigh over 50 pounds, but they will be allowed to …