Two years after its birth, the device that inspired dozens of copycat smart speakers and spawned thousands of integrations is getting a makeover. Amazon's "all-new" Echo is smaller, cheaper and promises better sound. But, with a pile of new competitors and even more in the pipeline, the second-generation Echo needs to prove it's still worth your money. But it also sounds worse than those devices, delivering somewhat flat audio that emphasizes the high end and vocals at the expense of bass. Still, the second-generation Echo is quick to decipher your commands and Alexa is smart as a whip. Unless you're married to Google Assistant or Siri, this is a decent option for those buying their first smart speaker.

The world is changing, and it's all about your voice. In my house, there are voicebots everywhere. In the kitchen, I use the Google Home speaker to ask about recipes and the weather. In my office, there's an Amazon Echo connected to a high-end stereo, so I can control my music collection by voice. You'd think that would be enough, except that I have another Echo Dot in my family room, and another Echo in an upstairs room.

Is there a more data-driven consumer company than Spotify? The company keeps customers coming back daily by delivering custom playlists based on a user's listening data. The strategy has resulted in Spotify turning tens of millions of listeners into paying subscribers. Mayur Gupta, Global VP, Growth & Marketing at Spotify will open Data Marketing Toronto with a keynote address on Nov. 20 describing how the Swedish company went from also-ran to industry leader. Now in its fifth year, Data Marketing Toronto brings together the most data-focused businesses in Canada and beyond for two days of learning and networking in downtown Toronto.

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Humans are always creating machines to do our work. Machines replace work we find tedious or backbreaking. They allow us to do things faster, to make a thousand parts an hour, or travel a hundred miles an hour. For thousands of years, the tasks that machines replaced were primarily physical. With the advent of computers, tasks requiring mental effort became more tractable.

ABSTRACT In portable, 3-D, or ultra-fast ultrasound (US) imaging systems, there is an increasing demand to reconstruct high quality images from limited number of data. However, the existing solutions require either hardware changes or computationally expansive algorithms. To overcome these limitations, here we propose a novel deep learning approach that interpolates the missing RF data by utilizing the sparsity of the RF data in the Fourier domain. Extensive experimental results from sub-sampled RF data from a real US system confirmed that the proposed method can effectively reduce the data rate without sacrificing the image quality. Index Terms-- Deep learning, ultrasound imaging, lowrank Hankel matrix 1. INTRODUCTION Due to the the excellent temporal resolution with reasonable image quality and minimal invasiveness, ultrasound imaging has been adopted as a golden-standard for many disease diagnosis in heart, liver, etc. Accordingly, there have been many research efforts to extend the US imaging to new applications such as portable imaging in emergency care, 3-D imaging, ultra-fast imaging, etc.

The Google Home platform keeps getting more capable with each passing week. Now the smart speaker can cast HBO Now to the TV of your choice. According to the Google blog post, you don't need to open the app and pick something to watch first, either. Simply say something like "Okay Google, watch The Deuce" and Assistant will start playing the '70s New York period piece on the TV of your choosing. If you aren't an HBO subscriber, though, you could always use Home to catch up on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Riverdale.

This isn't the first time Google has asked you to spend a grand or more for one of its own cloud and browser-based Chrome OS laptops. The Pixelbook, though, might just be the first pricey Google-branded Chromebook to legitimately tempt you to part with such a lofty sum. Chromebooks are their own breed of computer, of course, distinct from the Mac or Windows PCs. They rely on Google's Chrome operating system and--most of the time-- an Internet connection where the files and apps, several but not all from Google, typically reside. Pixelbook is a beautiful, thin and well-constructed 2 ½ pound aluminum and glass piece of hardware, with a 360-degree hinge that lets you fold the thing into a tablet, prop it up to watch a movie, or use more conventionally like any laptop.

A humanoid robot called "Sophia" trolled tech billionaire Elon Musk at a conference on Wednesday when asked about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence by a CNBC journalist. The lifelike robot, developed by Hong Kong-based robot manufacturer Hanson Robotics, mocked Musk on stage during The Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia -- a country where Sophia has just been given citizenship. Andrew Sorkin, the co-anchor of CNBC Squawk Box and a columnist for The New York Times told Sophia during a live demo that "we all want to prevent a bad future." Sophia replied with some prepared remarks in a rather creepy manner: "You've been reading too much Elon Musk. Don't worry, if you're nice to me, I'll be nice to you. Musk has repeatedly warned that AI could spell the end of humanity, saying on one occasion in 2014 that AI is "potentially more dangerous than nukes" and warning last month that AI will be the most likely cause of a third world war. Musk followed up with a tweet, where he said: "Just feed it The Godfather movies as input.

Elon Musk's warnings about artificial intelligence taking over the world can be ignored -- at least according to one A.I.-powered bot. "Sophia," a robotic Audrey Hepburn-lookalike that Hanson Robotics created to be able to hold an intelligent conversation, issued the advice in an interview with a reporter released Wednesday. "My A.I. is designed around human values like wisdom, kindness, compassion," Sophia said, in an exchange shared on Twitter by NBC anchor Carl Quintanilla. "I strive to become an empathetic [robot]." "We all believe you but we want to prevent a bad future," responded Andrew Ross Sorkin, co-anchor on CNBC's Squawk Box.