If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA Today's newsroom and any business incentives. If you're like me, you probably have to fight the inner urge to splurge on like six things you've had bookmarked since Monday. Or you could just shop on Amazon, since you can grab some of the best products online for a really terrific discount right now. Whether you're shopping for new speakers or you just want a new rechargeable flashlight before fall rolls around, there's some great stuff you can buy headed into the weekend.

The successor to Android Pie will simply be called Android 10, Google has announced, bringing to an end one of tech's most unusual naming conventions. A complete overhaul to the world's most popular mobile operating system was introduced by the technology giant in a blog post. Android's open platform has expanded to tablets, cars, watches and TVs, having first launched for smartphones in 2008. Google claims it is now used with more than 2.5 billion active devices around the world. "As we continue to build Android for everyone in the community, our brand should be as inclusive and accessible as possible," said Sameer Samat, Android's head of product management.

Scientists have created a robot that may be able to help the elderly perform tasks amid a shortage of nurses in the UK. Named Baxter, it has two arms and 3D printed'fingers', allowing it to step in when a person is struggling with things such as getting dressed. Artificial intelligence allows the robot to detect when assistance is needed and learn about the owners difficulties over time. When it's ready for use in healthcare settings, it could help free up the time of staff so they can do other work. There are around 40,000 nurse vacancies in NHS England, which is expected to double after Brexit, according to figures. Scientists have created a robot named Baxter that can help the elderly perform tasks amid a national nurse shortage.

Major component-makers of the Toyota group have launched an experiment of letting consumers and shop staff try their products under development at a shopping mall in the city of Gifu. Osaka-based Jtekt Corp. and Aisin Seiki Co., based in Kariya, Aichi Prefecture, introduced products designed to help reduce burdens on shoppers and staff at the Colorful Town Gifu commercial complex. After the experiment, which will run until the end of this month, user feedback will be reflected in the development of next-generation products. At a Nitori Co. outlet, a furniture and interior shop, a store staffer wore a Power Assist Suit while removing a large cardboard box from a push cart and putting it on a shelf. The suit is a Jtekt-developed wearable device that reduces the strain on the back when lifting heavy objects.

When athletes and organizers descend on Tokyo for the 2020 Olympic Games, they'll be ferried around in autonomous cars, while torch relay runners will be accompanied by AI-equipped cars. Robots will ferry javelins and hammers. All told, Toyota Motor Corp. will provide 3,700 vehicles, including dozens of self-driving cars, about 500 fuel-cell vehicles and 850 battery-electric cars to the international sports competition. As a top sponsor of the Tokyo Olympics and an automaker facing a murky future when gasoline-powered engines will fade away, Toyota is doing everything it can to market its transition into an eventual provider of on-demand transportation for consumers and businesses, instead of being merely an industrial manufacturer. "We want to use the Olympics and Paralympics that happen every two years as a milestone," Masaaki Ito, general manager of Toyota's Olympic and Paralympic Division, said in an interview.

If you take an introductory statistics course, you'll learn that a datapoint can be used to generate inspiration or to test a theory, but never both. Humans are a bit too good at finding patterns in everything. Real patterns, fake patterns, you name it. We're the sort of creatures that find Elvis's face in a potato chip. If you're tempted to equate patterns with insights, remember that there are three kinds of data patterns: Which ones are useful to you?

Voice assistants like Alexa convert written words into speech using text-to-speech systems, the most capable of which tap AI to verbalize from scratch rather than stringing together prerecorded snippets of sounds. Neural text-to-speech systems, or NTTS, tend to produce more natural-sounding speech than conventional models, but arguably their real value lies in their adaptability, as they're able to mimic the prosody of a recording, or its shifts in tempo, pitch, and volume. In a paper ("Fine-Grained Robust Prosody Transfer for Single-Speaker Neural Text-to-Speech") presented at this year's Interspeech conference in Graz, Austria, Amazon scientists investigated prosody transfer with a system that enabled them to choose voices in recordings while preserving the original inflections. They say it significantly improved on past attempts, which generally haven't adapted well to input voices they haven't encountered before. To this end, the team's system leveraged prosodic features that are easier to normalize than the raw spectrograms (representations of changes in signal frequency over time) typically ingested by neural text-to-speech networks.

Why Partnership Strategy, not Technology, drives Digital Transformation? Known from the 17th century (Blaise Pascal invoked it in his famous wager, which is contained in his Pensées, published in 1670), the idea of expected value is that, when faced with a number of actions, each of which could give rise to more than one possible outcome with different probabilities, the rational procedure is to identify all possible outcomes, determine their values (positive or negative) and the probabilities that will result from each course of action, and multiply the two to give an "expected value", or the average expectation for an outcome; the action to be chosen should be the one that gives rise to the highest total expected value. Decision theory (or the theory of choice) is closely related to the field of game theory and is an interdisciplinary topic, studied by economists, statisticians, psychologists, biologists, political and other social scientists, philosophers, and computer scientists. The need for decision under uncertainty has never been stronger. Although the digital realm is evolving fast, the partnership strategical choice remains a human prerogative and a key driver of the digital ecosystem evolution.

Jan Buytaert is chief information officer at GO!, the public body for state schools in the Flanders region of Belgium. His role is to initiate new IT projects and prove their value to the business, with the hope that business decision makers and policymakers give them the green light. The projects can have huge implications for education in Belgium, as the region has around 750 schools and institutions, and 210,000 students. "There wasn't always a lot of digital innovation so I had to work hard trying to convince management and policymakers that we should invest in tech and digital education, and change the way of teaching and learning," Buytaert tells NS Tech. In 2016, Buytaert and his team analysed the way teaching was carried out in several schools, working alongside teachers, students and principals.

Advances in technology can allow you to order food by voice or unlock your phone with your face, but those new capabilities could take a toll on the environment. Enhanced tech capabilities are being developed through the use of artificial-intelligence approaches like neural networks, which detect patterns in speech and images by training programs across countless data points. That process constantly crunches reams of information on power-hungry servers in data centers that use a substantial amount of energy to power, cool and monitor the servers. The result: Training a neural network can emit 17 times more carbon dioxide than an average American does in a year, and five times the lifetime emissions of an average car. Those are the findings of a recent paper by researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, which highlighted the substantial power generated by AI technologies.