Nintendo Switches It Up

After months of speculation and buildup, Nintendo on Thursday officially unveiled its new gaming system, the Nintendo Switch. Previously known only by the codename "NX," rumors about this latest video game console began last year with a hint from Satoru Iwata, the company's late president. At the time Iwata suggested only that Nintendo was working on a new video game system, and few details have leaked since then. The Switch is Nintendo's first home gaming system since it launched the Wii U in 2012.

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Microsoft AI Beats Humans at Speech Recognition

Microsoft's Artificial Intelligence and Research Unit earlier this week reported that its speech recognition technology had surpassed the performance of human transcriptionists. The team last month published a paper describing its system's accuracy, said to be superior to that of IBM's famed Watson artificial intelligence. The error rate for humans on the widely used NIST 2000 test set is 5.9 percent for the Switchboard portion of the data, and 11.3 percent for the CallHome portion, the team said.

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New Tag Helps Google News Readers Unearth Facts

Google last week launched a Fact Check tag to help readers find fact-checking in major news stories published in the United States and the UK. Readers will see tagged articles in the expanded story box on news.google.com and in the Google News & Weather apps for iOS and Android. One factor the Google News algorithms consider in determining whether an article might contain fact checks is the Schema.org ClaimReview markup. Another is whether sites follow commonly accepted criteria for fact checks.

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Assange Lives to Leak Another Day

The status of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange grew a bit murky on Tuesday after the group accused the U.S. State Department of pressuring Ecuadorian officials to block him from posting additional emails linked to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. The Ecuadorian foreign ministry on Tuesday acknowledged placing temporary restrictions on Assange's access, saying in a statement that it did not wish to interfere in a foreign election. It also said that it was acting on its own and not in response to any outside pressures.

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Apple Downshifts Driverless Vehicle Plans

Apple appears to be shifting its driverless car ambitions into a lower gear. Changes in the company's automotive strategy reportedly have resulted in hundreds of job cuts and the shelving of plans to build a car of its own. "Project Titan" -- Apple's internal name for the automotive initiative -- has a new focus. It will develop an autonomous driving system that will give the company the option of partnering with an established auto maker or producing a robo car of its own.

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Meet Maui 1, the Slick New Hawaiian Netrunner

Maui 1 "Aurora," which launched this summer, is one of the latest newcomers in the continuously changing list of Linux distributions. Maui Linux, with its new Hawaii desktop environment, is a replacement and rebranding of the discontinued Netrunner project. Its developers are attempting to continue the Kubuntu-based heritage, while adopting some of the latest technologies impacting other Linux distros in varying stages. The demise of Netrunner and the birth of Maui 1 occurred simultaneously.

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Battlefield 1 Delivers Great War Action, Say Early Reviewers

Electronic Arts' new epic first-person shooter Battlefield 1 could be the war game to end all war games, based on the first wave of reviews published Monday. This latest title in the popular franchise from Swedish developer DICE is an action-packed, rip-roaring take on World War I. There's a single-player campaign that features a story worthy of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, which lets the player partake in key moments in the global conflict. There's also intense online multiplayer action with support for 64 players.

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