that the us missile strikes on a syrian airbase has played into the hands of extremists. he reaffirmed russia's stance that accusations that the syrian regime had launched a chemical weapons attack on tuesday did not align with reality. police in the norwegian capital oslo have carried out a controlled explosion afterfinding a bomb—like device in the city centre. the area's been sealed off while investigations continue. a suspect has been detained. police in norway began carrying guns in response to the lorry attack in sweden. king carl gustaf has praised the strength and resilience of swedish society following friday's attack in stockholm which killed four people. police say they're increasingly certain the uzbek man they've arrested is the one who drove a stolen lorry into a crowd and rammed it into a department store. now it's time for click. this week: de—stressing with a future ball. knocking up google.

and shouting at amazon. tell me, who is the murderer! click theme song. robot voice: welcome home, spen. how was your day? awful. i'm stressed out. that's a shame. i will run you a bath and play some relaxing music from your anger— management playlist. music plays. rory, do i have any messages? you have 17,000 tweets, 16 e—mails, and 105 fake news updates. anything of them urgent? your boss sent an e—mail

asking if he can stop by for dinner tonight. do we have anything to eat? there is a quinoa, sapphire, and ginger scallop bake in the fridge which feeds four. i'm setting the oven to come on now and ordered a bottle of his favourite wine to be delivered at 7:00. and order some chocolate double—fudge cake. ok, i've ordered it. shall i apply for a gym membership for you? rory, mute. now, one day we really will have artificially intelligent personal assistants which we can really talk to and who know us better than we know ourselves, like pretend rory. thank you, rory. you're welcome. mr rory cellan—jones, everybody. now, we're not there yet, but we are well on the way. what started in our phones with names like siri, corta na, and, uh, "ok, google," can now control our homes

and our cars too. amazon's echo led the way. and this week, google‘s home is launched in the uk. now, it is all very well having these intelligent personal assista nts to which we can ask anything into their permanently open ears, but the more we use them, the more trust we are going to have to place in them. ok, google, is obama planning a coup? according to "secrets of the fed..." for example, in his dayjob, the bbc‘s tech correspondent, rory cj, recently discovered that you can't always believe what they say. obama may, infact, be planning a communist coup at the end of his term in 2018. that fake news storyjust happened to be the top search result for that question. well, dan simmons has been looking at some of the other unintended consequences of living with these devices. as we transition from controlling things through screens to using our voice, for those

providing services things could start getting tricky. i'm in the bbc‘s blue room, a space where the broadcaster tests out new technology. and with voice—assistance, it's not all going smoothly. alexa, when‘s the next train to manchester? sorry, i didn't understand the question i heard. if you have to find out when the next train to manchester is, right now you have to say, "open the national rail app, tell me when the next train to manchester is," and go through a number of steps to achieve that. that's just not natural. you have to remember a number steps to find out content from somebody else. for the default service provider, it's very simple. "play me from a song," it'll be provided by a certain provider. "tell me the news," it'll be provided from a certain provider. and that's a great thing for those. for everything else, it's very difficult. this is a critical disadvantage at

this stage. a lot of work needs to be done to level the playing field. and that disadvantage applies to search results, too. up to now, websites aimed to be on the first page of results. with voice assistants, just one answer comes back. ok, google, how far‘s the moon? fine, if it's a right—wrong definitive answer you're after, the ones that companies constantly demo. the moon is 384,400 kilometres from earth. more controversial if you are looking for a product or service. for anyone else, how did it get to that position? only one person can have the first spot. everyone else will have to figure out what do they do, how do they work with amazons and googles to make sure their content and their results appear first. bell chimes. this is not the end of the world, it isjust the end of competition as we know it. oxford university is home to one of the world's most influential thinkers when it comes to competition.

if we use our assistants to buy stuff, ariel izraki believes there'll be consequences, and they won't be unintended ones. that shift from an on line environment to the digital helper, what is it that you have? you have a helper that is voice—activated, you are one step further from the ability to look for outside options. your ability to check whether the price you received is truly the best price. you tell your helper, "order me one, two, three," and you just assume that the helper will serve your needs. the likelihood is that, in a two—side market, the helper is actually serving the platform. today, your assumption, our default assumption, is that the price you receive is the competitive price. and you're suggesting that it won't be? i'm telling you that it's not. a walk down oxford's cornmarket street reveals something the professor believes won't be

around much longer online. can i ask you how much this is, for example? how much are we selling this for today? they are £5, sir. now, this gentleman over here, hello, sir, hello, how much would you sell this to him, and how much would you sell this to me? you just met us in the street. one price for everyone. one price for everyone? of course. that sign says so there. absolutely. but do you think that i would maybe pay a bit more? no. uh, no, to be honest with you, lately, tourists buy more from me. tourists buy more? yeah, than the locals. so, you think he may buy more than me? yes, unfortunately. for the seller, it's one price for everyone, but the professor says our digital assistants will get to know us so well, they'll recommend purchases with prices tailored to us too, effectively becoming a gatekeeper to the best deals. i went to see one of those gatekeepers, google, and asked them if sellers could purchase their way to the top result and get recommended

by their digital assistant. we really want to make sure that the consumer experience is the main focus for what we do. doing something like that will not help them find what they actually want. so we want to make sure we are focused on what they want. amazon told us "there is lots of potential and room for many participants. ourjob is to innovate on behalf of the customer and then let customers decide." but perhaps what these home assistants are most useful for is what they are becoming most known for, and that's controlling other things around the house. alexa, turn on the bar lights. 0k. alexa, bar lights off. 0k. phone rings. hi.

dan, are you there? look, i know we have not seen each other, and you think i am crazy, but i wasjust passing by, and... oh, wait, have you still got that stupid voice control thing, what was it? alexa. turn on the bar lights. 0k. hmm. alexa, turn on the microwave. have i got your attention now? alexa, unlock the front door. 0k. it's only me. we set that up. but the lights were real, even though the oven and the front door was faked a little bit by us, to just show you what the potential is of this technology if it cannot recognise your voice.

in actual fact, amazon tell us the unlock feature for doors is not available on the echo, and that may be the biggest admission there is that there is a lot to be done with security on these devices. welcome to the week in tech. it was the week that apple admitted its latest laptop, the macbook pro, was a bad design. a chinese man married the robot he built himself. and blizzard, the developer behind multi—player, overwatch, successfully sued a cheatmaker $8.6 million for [100,818 counts of copyright infringement. but graphene stole the show this week. a uk—based team announced they've created a graphene sieve that can remove salt form seawater. this could eventually provide millions of people clean drinking water. amazon chief, jeff bezos, says he's been selling a billion dollars' worth of shares a year

to fund blue origin, his tourist space project. the company hopes to send travellers into space in the next two years. and in massachusetts, a robotic arm picks up random objects and puts them on a conveyor belt all day. it then shares its wisdom with other bots so they can learn the skills too. it could be how warehouses are run in the future. but work chat must be dull. and a man flew with a homemade suit developed in his garage over the last 10 months. it uses six miniature jet engines mounted on the arms and back, and can fly hundreds of miles per hour, apparently. although richard is exercising restraint, he said, for now. amazon echo, google home, maybe one day even "rory." it certainly looks like the rise of the digital assistants is upon us. now, all of these assistants are trying to be wide—ranging, all—purpose artificial

intelligences. the technical term is "horizontal ai." but that's really hard. in order to cover a lot of subjects and do many tasks, these things have to understand a whole lot of things. take this example, rory, tell stephen i will call him in the office after my train journey tomorrow. first, it works out what i said. then it pulls out the important words. then comes the reasoning and context. it needs to scan my calendar and my train timetable and guess is that stephen is the stephen in the office, not stephen the friend, or stephen the other stephen. and finally, the right action needs to be performed, in this case, schedule the call with stephen at 10:20 and let him know. the question is, are these horizontal ais best—placed to do that? or should we maybe instead be talking to a number of specialist

"vertical ais" that do one job really, really well. well, one company that thinks that is x.ai, and we scheduled a call with its boss through his secretary, andrew. now, we had several e—mail exchanges with andrew, and it was only after about five messages that we worked out that andrew is actually an artificial intelligence, a specialist ai that only schedules meetings. and i have to say, it interpreted our written questions and requests to change the meeting times pretty well. and sure enough, on the line now is the man who invented andrew a couple of years ago. dennis, congratulations, you fooled us with andrew. do you think that will we have any general assistants in the future or will we be talking to many vertical ones? well, we imagine this will play in the short—term future where central ais, think siri, alexa, so on, they will answer simple questions, but they will also enable us to talk to a set

of vertical ais which are specialised in doing one job really well. and i think what's going to happen here is you will have a whole plethora of vertical ais on your payroll, so that you will have siri or cortana being your best friend, and they will be aware that we will have 13 agents on payroll to dojobs you don't want to do. i think we've seen this before. there is a whole app store for this with differentjobs to mine because you have different needs. it will be the same with intelligent agents. you will have different needs. thank you for your time. send our love to andrew. yes, of course. meanwhile, in san francisco, dave has been living

an incredibly smart life. set the temperature to 72 degrees. setting living room temperature to 72 degrees... cubic.ai bills itself as something of a digital butler — a faithful servant around your home. its voice control comes from an android app, and they're particularly proud of the way it understands the context of what you're you are saying. turn the lights on in the living room. turning light on in the living room. make it red. setting colour to red in the living room. typically, when you have different devices from different brands and manufacturers, you will a bunch of apps for every device, and it's really inconvenient tojump around and switch from one app to another. the app integrates with popular smart—home devices like the nest thermostat and cameras, as well as the philips hue lightbulbs. but like most smart home assistants, the commands are still pretty basic.

in the future, we will add scenes, and when you wake up in the morning, you can sayjust "good morning," the temperature will be comfortable for you and the lights will be on in certain areas. these home assistants are still quite temperamental, a little bit buggy and frustrating at times. but they are getting there, and starting to feel quite useful. the next challenge is to take those assistants outside of the home. ford recently opened this silicon valley research centre, and one of its main projects is to integrate smart assistance into its latest cars. the company has been working with amazon to building the alexa assistant. from your home, or in our case, the lobby in ford's building, you can find out important information about your car. alexa, ask my ford mobile for my tyre pressure. your vehicle's tyre pressure is not currently showing any warnings. that's handy, but where it gets really useful is when you can use it to control your car itself.

if you've ever had to sit in a freezing vehicle as it warms up in the morning, you might appreciate this. ask me ford to warm up my car. ok, say your pin. oh, what's my pin? five, six, seven, eight. sending start command to your car. so the car's just outside, so hopefully... i mean, it's not quite the roar of the engine, but it's surely the coolest you can do with this technology right now. out on the road, the assistant steps in to make typical in car functions a bit more hands—free. so i tap here? yeah, tap it there. alexa, continue reading my audio book. i'm here to show you how you can... ok, so i can pick up where i was at home. alexa, find the nearest coffee shop. here are a few nearby popular ones: patriot brew, vmware hilltop bistro, the...

the integration is fun, but far from perfect — alexa still suffers from the same problem that many assistants have: rather than talking naturally to it, you find yourself having to think about what phrase will unlock the information you need. when you're trying to drive, that feels like it could quite distracting. so alexa is a really natural language detection system, so it does understand the way — what you say, independent of how you say it. ijust wonder if people will be thinking about alexa's thinking, rather than what's straight ahead of them on the road. and so of course, as a driver, we always want to make driving safer, so you should always keep your hands on the steering wheel, eyes on the road, and be safe while you're driving. and then for your infotainment, and entertainment on the road, you could use your voice, which is really the safest way to interact with the car, in general. games looked a bit different in the early 805. forget dolby 5.1 audio. forget realistic lighting effects.

come to think about it, forget about 3—d graphics in most cases. attitudes to games won't exactly enthusiastic, either. sports games. well, sports games, to me, are perhaps the most appalling use of computers. here it is, this is a decathlon. well, doing a decathlon on a commodore by wagging a joystick like this is really not a substitute for going out and getting a spot of fresh air. ouch. there was one genre of games, though, where the graphics and audio didn't matter. where it didn't matter that you would often be presented with a still, 8—bit image, or sometimes just a black screen with a flashing white cursor — that screen itself was the window into worlds of limitless imagination. welcome to the experience of the text adventure. when computing power was limited, the text adventure that players

head—scratching puzzles and mysteries, all brought to life by typing instructions into the game. but the reason that i've taken us on this journey down 32 kilobyte memory lane is a game. it's a game that i've been playing on this, the amazon echo. and it's a title that reminds me of those old text adventures quite a bit. leading you through the abbey, abbess approaches one of the sisters. now, you might think playing a game on one of these is like trying to play a game on your microwave. because the echo, of course, lacks a screen, or any other way of interacting with it other than barking commands at it. but that is exactly how the game i'm about to play works. play runescape.

the player must solve a murder in a fantasy realm. the game plays like an interactive version of an audio book — you get a bit of dialogue, then it waits for a response. surprisingly, it commands quite a bit of your attention, and it's quite a relaxing way to play a game, although that relaxing mood is shattered when you hear this... sorry, that is not a valid command. which you hear quite a lot. would you like to talk to the abbess now? talk to the abbess. sorry, that is not a valid command.

go to the abbess. sorry, that is not a valid command. talk to the abbess. sorry... tell me, who is the murderer?! sorry, that is not a valid command. as the action progresses, it can shatter the illusion and become increasingly frustration when it does not understand what you are saying. which is obviously bit of a problem for a game you play by talking to it. sorry, that is not a valid command. when it does work, though, runescape on echo is a fun and immersive experience. it also points to the potential these devices have beyond reading at the weather to you or reciting rubbishjokes. runescape is available by the skill section of the alexa app. i've got a sick bay

filled with headaches... when star trek introduced a tri—corder that could scan a patient and come up with a diagnosis, it was in the realm of science fiction. but 50 years on, this dream is becoming a reality. and next week, we will find out the winner of a $10 million prize paying homage to star trek‘s medical device. the challenge? to design and build a tri—corder that will register 13 conditions and capture real—time vital signs. it could mean an end to unnecessary visits to the doctor. we figured out what the diagnostic process is, at least the way i'm doing it, and built the system with that in mind. so it's not like a single device, like the star trek series. it — you interact with it, on our prototype, with a tablet, and then you pull out little components.

so we have a little device like this, where the user will be guided — they are guided to listen to their breath sounds. so this type of device in your home is really a like medical centre, right in your house. so in the middle of the night, if your child is ill, if you're not feeling well, it's your first stop. there is a revolution coming in healthcare. and this is the type of device that is going to help give people the power to take care of themselves. and as soon as we know who has won, we'll let you know on twitter. so follow us @bbcclick. and thanks for all your interactions on twitter, too, which this week included choosing the name of our artificial intelligent to intelligence. so, say thank you, rory.

thank you, rory. i am getting paid for this, aren't i? see you soon. hello there, good morning. sunny weather at the masters, sunny weather here too, and believe it or not the temperatures are very similar as well. now, yesterday we had highs widely 20, 21 for england and wales. lovely day at aberystwyth and once again in aylesbury, with the blue skies. and more of that sunshine to come today too. we are going to see some changes come into the north—west, though. this cloud has been close by over the past day or two, and it will start to move into the uk over the next 2a hours, and bring with it a significant change in the weather. well, clear skies ahead of that means it is quite chilly first thing

this morning, and maybe one or two mist and fog patches across southern parts of england and into east anglia, but those won't last long at all. but once the sun comes up we're going to find the pollen levels rising, high again across england and wales, probably for the last day in a while. the sunshine will be there in the morning, lifting that mist and fog across england and wales. sunshine to start with across southern and eastern scotland, but more cloud moves down from the north—west, with some rain, and we could see cloud filling in across the irish sea too. so a different look to the weather in scotland and northern ireland on sunday. in the afternoon we have this cloud, the rain becoming light and patchy as it moves across scotland. not much rain for northern ireland, either, but temperatures will be lower. later in the afternoon, we'll see this rain across north—west england, so too west wales. it may arrive a little sooner across cornwall, but you can see in exeter it's still sunny into the afternoon, and for many central and eastern parts of england, lots of sunshine.

very warm as well. 2a or 25 degrees in eastern england, just like augusta. a warm day in sunderland for the football in the premier league, but that changes as the cloud arrives in merseyside. and this is the last of the warm air, on sunday, for quite awhile, i suspect, as colder air comes behind that weatherfront, on a north—westerly wind, once again that weather front producing little or no rain. again, it is dry across the south—east, as it has been for a long time now, and most places will be dry on monday. there will be more cloud developing than we've seen over the weekend, a few showers here and there. and those showers in northern scotland could be heavy enough to give some wintriness, particularly over the hills. it will be that cold, struggling to make single figures in northern scotland, and a drop of eight, nine degrees across parts of england and wales, a much chillierfeel to the day on monday, and quite a shock to the system too. that chilly north—westerly airflow gets cut off by high pressure building on from the atlantic. and around the top of that we get a westerly wind, which will blow in more cloud across scotland and northern ireland, quite gusty winds too.

some heavy rain for northern scotland. england and wales, though, should have lighter winds. it should be dry, and once again we will see some sunshine. welcome to bbc news, broadcasting at home and around the globe. i'm gavin grey. our top stories — as russia demands the us proves the syrian government used chemical weapons on its own people, britain's defence secretary says moscow is to blame for every single civilian death. clashes on the streets of venezuela — thousands protest against a political ban on the leader of the opposition. more details emerge about the main suspect in the stockholm lorry attack — the man, from uzbekistan, was known to the intelligence services. and a sticky situation in canada's maple syrup industry — we talk to the woman who's rebelling against her fellow producers.