lara: this week, click takes off with a behind—the—scenes look at amazon's delivery drone facility. this feels like science fiction a bit. it has that feel. spencer: you've met the pilot, now meet the copilot - - zoe's got her hands on microsoft's ai—driven office assistant. lj sounds out the tech behind noise—cancelling headphones. something to play with here. ijust want to pick each thing up and... you can, you can. and we go blackberry picking to check out the new movie chronicling the origins of a legend. you said they were the best engineers in the world! i said they're the best engineers in canada. i for years, we've talked about how drone deliveries were around the corner. i think one of the main reasons that the idea of drone deliveries is in the public consciousness is because an image went viral — quite a long time ago now — of an amazon drone delivering a parcel, which kind of suggested to us all that drone deliveries weren't so much over the horizon as they were literally around the corner. but when was the last time you had anything dropped off by quadcopter? never — deliveries still come in vans around my way! mm. we're just not there yet for that kind of last—mile delivery. there are trade—offs between the weight of what can be transported, and battery life. but aside from that, what about the safety? the idea of having all of these spinning blades above our heads, and then they've got to bring a pizza down to the pavement? now, apparently, last year there were almost 2,500 drone deliveries every day — but that was worldwide. so if you think about it in the grand scale of things, that's...that�*s not much, is it? and i suspect that most of those would be specialist deliveries in really remote areas. yeah. so...amazon, what gives? emma simpson has been to the company's research facility in seattle to find out what the buzz is all about. emma: you know what it's like — waiting for an online order, wondering when the van is going to turn up. but look into the distance. drone buzzing. this one's coming by air. in the small town of lockeford, california, amazon is using drones to deliver packages to customers. and this service is coming to the uk and italy too. jeff loves it. it's fun. i never thought i'd be getting packages delivered in my backyard. so when you order it, we see it within 20 or 30 minutes. so, obviously quicker than having to run to the store and getting the stuff. buzzing. what about the noise? the noise is... it's a little loud, but it doesn't disturb me. so, how does it work? we're the first to see behind the scenes at amazon's launch facility. and here, they have thousands of products on site. this particular one here is an eight—pack of aa batteries, which is our most popular one in the entire location. is that cos people want them quick? yeah, you know, it is. batteries are one of those things — when you run out, you know you need them, and you want them very fast. how fast can you get them? so, within 60 minutes. no order can weigh more than five pounds, and it has to fit into this box. it's all about speed. so this is the exciting bit. correct. this is where we get to load the package into the drone. in that? in that exact drone. correct. this feels like science fiction a bit. it has that feel. a few safety checks, and the parcel is loaded. mission accepted. pre—flight checks complete. cleared by all, launching... a flying robot that can deliver 3.5 miles away and knows exactly where to go. it will locate a qr marker that is on the ground at the customer's home, and it'll identify that the package that is in that drone belongs to that marker, which belongs to that customer. it'll descend to 12 feet, release the package, can take off and then return back to its home base. how does it know not to bump into anything? great question. so if you look over here, you've got our front—facing sensors. there's also sensors in the rear part of the drone. and when this drone is in flight, it is consistently looking ahead and behind to determine that there are no obstacles or threats that would prohibit it from making a safe delivery. and it's watching all the time. correct. and what it's doing is it's looking not just for static objects — so that could be a tree, a home, powerlines — it's also looking for dynamic objects, which could include birds, helicopters or even other drones. what about the noise? it's quite noisy. so, noise is something we're very, very aware of and we're continuously looking to decrease the decibel levels. our drone is within all of the regulations from the faa as far as noise admittance. and those regulations also include every flight path being monitored. there's a human observer keeping eyes on it too. amazon won't reveal how many customers are using this service, saying only that it's made thousands of deliveries across its two sites here in california and in texas. drones are never going to replace vans, but this is a glimpse of the future — online deliveries in just minutes. and in seattle, this is where the drones are designed and built. this is our headquarters for prime air. so this is our manufacturing and assembly area — manufacturing, assembly and test. and you can see we've got some of our mk27 drones staged here that have been completed. yeah, we saw this flying. yeah, well, it's pretty cool, isn't it? it works. there's now a new one being rolled out. here's the first glimpse of the mk30. this is a drone coming to the uk. it's smaller, it's lighter, it travels further and it's, most importantly, at least 40% quieter to our previous drone. is that safe? it's absolutely safe. it is hundreds of times safer than driving to the store, and that's straight off national highways statistics. along these corridors, you can see the story of amazon's drone programme, how the technology has changed. progress hasn't been quick, though. experts say amazon's fallen behind rivals in getting its service off the ground. no, they're not. you know, we... we are...um... we're not into the hype. what we're into is creating a product that is the safest, that can scale to where we want to go, and that we look at the long term in terms of our customers, what they need and when they need it. how sure are you that this is scalable and economically viable? i'm absolute about it. our goal is we want to be able to deliver 500 million packages globally in densely populated suburban areas by the end of the decade. i think it's going to be a norm that parcels are delivered by air. i don't think that's really in question anymore. it's still early days, though, for all drone operators, with tight rules and restrictions in place. but this online juggernaut believes the demand is there for ultra—fast deliveries from the skies. lara: that was emma simpson. now, if you're one for a quiet life, then you may enjoy what lj's got here. l]: the modern world can be really loud! it's no wonder so many of us try to make things...softer. i've always been fascinated byjust how much sound is cut out using noise—cancelling headphones. but have you ever wondered how they actually work? while it feels like modern—day technology magic, the idea is...quite old. way back in 1936, paul lueg patented a noise—cancelling system in a tube, using an intricate set—up of microphones and speakers. by the 19505, noise—cancelling systems were developed in the usa for pilots to hear better over the aircraft noise. but noise—cancelling really took off in the year 2000, when dr amar bose, of bose headphones fame, created the quietcomfort for passengers yearning for a break from the engines. now, big companies like apple, sony, sennheiser and more all create headphones with active noise—cancelling tech inside. to see inside how the technology works, i'm heading over to nothing, one of the newer phone and headphone companies in the market, for a quiet chat all about noise. hi, lj. hi, how you doing? welcome. thank you. great to see you. great to be here. welcome to our design studio. yeah, it's really cool. yeah. this is the workshop area. so there's lots of machines, lots of things going on. nothing's big obsession is with transparency — a perfect opportunity to get really close with the components. yeah, something to play with here. i just want to pick each thing up, and... you can, you can. this is our ear (2) set of tws headphones. i can see the battery. yeah, so you can see how... ..absolutely tiny all those components on there are. so whereabouts is the active noise—cancelling technology here? yeah, so that's happening on this pcb that sits within each earbud. so this is only one side, but there's almost one of these identical on each side. and do they work together to cancel the noise, or is it each side does it individually? yeah, individually, and they need to be really tightly synchronised. there's three microphones on each earbud and then a little chip, which is going to take the sound, from the microphones, of the world, do some processing to it, play it into your ear, and that will cancel the noise. so the microphone picks up the sound and plays some different sound into your ear at the same time? yep. and that cancels out the noise. yeah. it sounds insane. joseph chuckles. so it relies on a core concept about waves, which is how they interfere with each other. pure tone plays. so when two sound waves are playing, if they're out of phase... tone stops. ..they�*ll meet and cancel each other out. if you play some sound waves... pure tone plays. these are two sine waves at 250 hertz, playing together. so if you put them slightly out of phase, the volume drops slightly. a bit more out of phase... volume drops further. ..it drops a bit more. and then... tone stops. so the two sound waves are still playing at the same time, but one of them is doing that while the other one is doing that. yeah, so they're perfectly out of phase now. so that's kind of like... so we can't hear anything. and that's how noise cancellation works. yep. thank you. but noise cancelling can do more than improve our headphones. before my haircut, i went to zurich, where research scientists are experimenting with using the same technique to hide objects. hang on — what?! this really does sound like magic. the black dots here are loudspeakers. and what it allows us to do is then to project an anti—sound that will cancel any incoming sound and emit it on the other side. so sound waves will come here, hit this target, but it will be cancelled in any kind of echoes, and then it will propagate, it will be emitted on the other side, as if this object hadn't been there. and you can obviously put anything you like inside here. it will not give an acoustic footprint. look at it this way. if we make a noise in front of a building... tone plays ..we can hear its reflection and know where and what it is. echoing tone plays. but this device acts like a sound invisibility cloak. in a fraction of a second, it catches the original sound and then alters it, returning a new sound, as if there's nothing there. one of the major sources of noise in the oceans is what's called pile—driving. when you build big windmills offshore, or any kind of offshore construction, you drive down pillars into the seafloor. and that produces a lot of noise that hurts marine life. so we can also use this technology to cancel the sound that comes out of this pile—driving. this sound invisibility cloak is clearly still in the experimental phase. so, until there's a better solution to the loud, loud world, the headphones stay on! time for a look at the tech news now. there are autonomous drones to transport cargo time for a look at the tech news now. the drones have been delivering them to a wind farm in the north sea in a trial. political leaders, tech industry figures and academics gathered this week for a two—day summit to discuss artificial intelligence at bletchley park. what the uk is hoping is that by getting people from all over the world here today, including china, which is also sending representatives, they can also have some big conversations about how we might be able to make the most of this really very rapidly evolving technology while minimising the more serious threats that it will bring as it becomes better at what it can do. facebook and instagram are launching subscriptions for an ad free experience on their platforms. the venture will be available to people in most european countries in for a monthly fee. the feature will not be available in the uk. nasa has released a new issue of its graphic novel series called first women expanding our universe. the stories follows the astronauts as they work to accomplish mission objectives. nasa says it hopes the story will inspire the next generation of explorers. zoe kleinman has been to an ai event at excel london to check out microsoft's new office assistant. remember this guy? the original office helper. clippy was familiar to a generation in the early noughties, attempting to help users with microsoft office software. rip, clippy — the tech giant is betting big on a far more effective office ai assistant — copilot. it can draft emails and word documents, generate spreadsheet graphs and powerpoint presentations in seconds. it can also summarise discussions which take place in microsoft teams, without you having to be there. i was given an exclusive opportunity to try copilot out ahead of its wider launch. one of the things that we talk a lot about internally is the evolution of meetings. maybe sometimes you get double booked, maybe sometimes you know that you only need to go to a meeting forjust a couple of minutes of the content, rather than the whole thing. so there's no more fear of missing out, we now have the joy of missing out. and so this is what we call intelligent meeting recap — it's a feature of microsoft teams, and it uses al to bring together a summary of the meeting. and so, you know, it's really helpful. if i have an hour—long meeting, you know, i canjump and watch the ten minutes that i need to, etc. i can also see when i've been mentioned in the meeting — which is really helpful, especially if you miss it. but we are now able to use copilot to really understand, you know, what are the key topics in the meeting, what are the action items? and best of all, i can ask questions about the meeting. so... "create a table of the options discussed "with pros and cons." so you can again put copilot to work, to start to organise all of the things that weren't put in the powerpoint slide, they weren't put in the chat. these are just the things that were spoken out loud in the meeting. and so here we go. the different options — delay the launch by one month, delay it by two weeks. here's the pros, here's the cons. keep the launch as scheduled. within a matter of seconds, i'm able to sort of get right to the heart of the things that i actually care about in the meeting. this new function uses the same tech which underpins the hugely popular chatgpt chatbot which burst into public use last year. that was created by openai — a company microsoft has invested billions of dollars in. here on the show floor, it's all about al changing ourjobs. i think copilot is a useful but competitive colleague. watching it draft emails praising ideas that i knew hadn't been read by a human made me feel uncomfortable. and is itjudging us? microsoft says it's been programmed not to answer questions about how good we are at ourjobs. one of the things that we do behind the scenes is, when i ask copilot a question, we send a bunch of what we call meta prompts behind the scenes. you know, the very, very beginning of us using copilot, i could have asked questions like, "who's the least collaborative?" mm—hm. and it would have answered the question based on who didn't speak as much. but, ok, that's not really... that's an uninformed inference. if i said, you know, "was derek rubbish in that meeting?" it's not going to answer. right. that's right. yeah. so, exactly, because we'll provide... you know, again with those meta prompts, lots of little guards against those things. the boss of microsoft 365 is convinced jobs will evolve with the tech. with every technological inflection point, you know, there are newjobs created. i mean, 15 years ago, we couldn't have imagined, you know, such a thing as a social media manager. and it's really no different with al. we really believe that ai will generate far more newjobs than it impacts. it's not the only tech giant wanting al to become your new colleague. google's working on similar assistants in its office products, too. perhaps soon we'll be able to blame artificial intelligence — rather than autocorrect — for our mistakes. now, i wonder if you can remember the days before smartphones became really smart. because before the iphone and all the other touch—screen devices that followed, most phones looked like this — with numeric keypads, which means if you wanted to type words, you had to do this. yeah. you'd find the number that was by the letter you wanted and press it the right number of times. spencer chuckles. you'd be busy doing this. there we go. i think we've probably had "hello". we're good. excellent. but then along came the blackberry — which had a full — if microscopic — qwerty keyboard. little fingers! exactly. this one has been loaned to us by the founder of the mobile phone museum, ben wood, who joins us now. ben, hi. hi. - great to be here. thank you very much for loaning this to us. the blackberry was a real moment in time, wasn't it? it really was. it's a remarkable product and it is a part of smartphone history. it really was one of the first what we could call smartphones, before the iphone era. and companies went for blackberry in a big way. was it because of the security over email? initially, that was the thing. businesses loved it. and the main thing was it meant you could get away from your desk and do your email any time, anywhere. that was huge. but then consumers jumped on it, they loved it. there was a service called bbm — blackberry messenger — which was better than text messaging because it was free, and the public went mad for blackberrys. how easy was it to type on a blackberry, really? i mean, did i have to file my nails down to points? i seem to remember i did. your fingers are too big. i think, you know, when you look at this device now, people look at it and theyjust can't believe people used to type on it. the idea of using the device — they called it squirrelling — you'd be moving your thumbs over the keyboard. and then there was this kind of, like you're doing, the blackberry prayer, where you'd see people crouched over the device, squirrelling away. it's amazing everyone didn't have rsi. but then, of course, the smartphone came and that changed everything, didn't it? it did. and the launch of the iphone, january 2007, steve jobs walks onstage, he had pictures of the blackberry and he almost kind of shamed them and he said, "no—one needs a keyboard. "look at all the space that's taking up "on the front of the phone. "you want a nice big screen, "and this is going to be your input mechanism — "no stylus, you've got one." and the screen technology was so good, and the algorithms they had for text input were so good that the rest is history. yeah. 0k. well, ben, thanks for lending us this. the reason we're talking about blackberry is its memory hasn't completely faded. in fact, there is a new movie telling the story of its creation. tyres screech. yeah. — what can i do for you? 0k, picture a cellphone and an email machine all in one thing. what do you call it? it's called a blackberry. huh. try typing with your thumbs. what they did was, in many ways, invent the first smartphone. mike, are you familiar with the saying "perfect is the enemy of good"? not good enough is - the enemy of humanity. hi, my name is mattjohnson, and i'm the director and one of the stars of the blackberry movie. we are in a race to get this thing to market and we are a year behind. i need a prototype. when i was reading the book with my producer, matt miller, what i saw were three characters who were going through exactly the same things that i had gone through as a young film—maker. big picture, the film is about work. but i think, deeper than that, the film is about friendship and what people are willing to sacrifice in order to be great. it's the rise and fall of the blackberry company. remember that phone that people owned before an iphone? this is how they got started and how they got destroyed. sketchy. i know he's sketchy. the guy's a shark. i know how to market it, and i know who we can sell it to. i but i want 50% of the company, and i've got to be ceo. - i don't know who you think you are, but... deal. — are you joking? i was learning everything about what it did, how it worked, the technical history, the innovation inside of it, in writing about it. and i think that, in some ways, that was really important because it meant that i could approach it with a kind of beginner's mindset. their software team invented, in the �*90s, the concept of autocomplete email. as you type somebody�*s name, their name pops up from your list of contacts. there's so many ui niceties that i myself use every single day, that i was amazed came out of the think tank, essentially, that was research in motion in the late �*90s, early 20005. all we need's an iphone. we're in the middle of a hostile takeover! research in motion were solving a problem that was ten feet in front of their face... we need to sell a million blackberrys. uh... "uh!" ..whereas apple solved a problem that was five years ahead, and they invented a culture, like, that was... that was the major difference. get this baby in the hands of every fortune 500 executive you can find. i think to the average blackberry user who really did love the product — so i'm talking about consumer users, even, like, early business adopters — a lot of people who used it... because the blackberry, i'm sure you know, was mandated in a lot of professions — government, a lot of people in medicine, depending on what country you're in — like, blackberries were given to you. so it was almost like the phone that you got handed. you didn't have any choice. and i think, amongst those users, there... they love seeing this, it's almost like a piece of nostalgia. you said they were the best engineers in the world! i said they're the best engineers in canada. i come on, honestly, which of these do you prefer using? smartphone. of course. yeah. me, too. thanks for watching. we'll see you soon. it has been a bit drier today, with a mixture of sunshine and showers. still a number of flood warnings, though, focused more across southern england, from hampshire to here in kent, where we have got floodwaters from the river rother earlier. over the week ahead, it is not looking as wet and windy, and for much of the week it is going to be a mixture again of sunshine and showers. we have got some showers around at the moment, and again they will continue mainly for the western side of the uk, but we could see just for a while some heavier showers creeping into the far south—east of england, coming in from the english channel. some breaks in the cloud, particularly in the north—east of scotland, so we could have a touch of frost here. but with those clearer skies, you may be able to get a view of the northern lights in northern scotland. this was a picture taken by a weather watcher last night in aberdeenshire. should be quite a sunny start for many eastern parts of scotland and eastern england this time, before the cloud builds up a bit. the showers are mainly going to be out to the west once again. a day very similar to what we had today. those showers will get blown further east of england, crossing on to the pennines and the midlands. temperatures not changing too much at the moment. typically 11 to 13. low pressure close by, this has got the remnants of storm ciaran in it. it is much weaker now, continuing to fade away. still bringing a few showers as we head through tuesday. moving down from scotland into england and wales, but we should see more sunshine in the afternoon, as those showers start to fade away. temperatures of 11 or 12, near normal for this time of the year. but it will get pretty chilly as soon as the sun goes down before we see this weather front here coming in from the atlantic. that is going to bring a band of rain, probably our only proper band of rain over the week ahead. it will be accompanied by some strong winds, particularly windy through the irish sea, and the heaviest rain — about an inch or so — will be over the high ground in western scotland and north—west england. it is moving through fairly quickly, that's the good news, and there shouldn't be too much rain in the south—eastt. it will be followed by some sunshine, but some showers coming in over the irish sea and affecting northern ireland, perhaps western parts of scotland, where it will be a little bit chillier. otherwise temperatures aren't changing too much over the week ahead. we've got that rain on wednesday, but either side of that, sunshine and showers, heavy showers later in the week. live from london. this is bbc news. after meeting palestinian president mahmoud abbas in ramallah, the us secretary of state makes an unannounced visit to iraq. antony blinken says the united states is working to ensure the conflict in gaza does not spread. there's no doubt from my conversations with all of our colleagues who were in oman yesterday that everyone would welcome the humanitarian pause, because, again, it can advance things that we're all trying to accomplish, including getting hostages back, including getting a lot more assistance into gaza, including israel's military says its forces have "surrounded" gaza city, and vows to intensify its ground operation. they reached the beach at the southern part of the city of gaza and they've encircled gaza and today we have gaza north and gaza south. the israeli bombardment of gaza continues. our correspondent in gaza says tonight's air strikes have been the most intense since the beginning of the war. hello. the us secretary of state antony blinken has visted iraq, and the west bank, for a round of talks with leaders in the region. he has said discussions are ongoing about a "humanitarian