Amazon is bringing its voice assistant to British television screens with the latest edition of its popular Fire TV stick. The £40 ($50) stick that transforms any TV screen into a streaming device will now come with Alexa - the female helper from Amazon Echo. The update will let viewers quickly search for content and rewind programmes using only their voice. Viewers can speak to the bot through an in-built microphone on the device's remote control TV viewers will be able to speak to Alexa through a microphone built into the device's remote control. The bot will be able to understand entertainment-specific commands such as'skip back 10 minutes' and'find suspense thrillers'.

The singer is officially back with a music video for "Chained to the Rhythm" featuring Skip Marely, and don't worry, it's a lot different than the hamster lyric video she delivered earlier this month. SEE ALSO: Katy Perry's new video features a hamster in a dollhouse because OK The elaborate video takes place in a futuristic, The Jestsons-esque town called Oblivia, where folks are launched over a wall, running on a giant hamster wheel and going through the colorful motions of life with a robotic elegance. WELCOME TO OBLIVIA WHERE EVERYTHING IS ALWAYS ROSY: https://t.co/X1vMe9s3zS Some folks are comparing the video to Netflix's science-fiction and technology focused show Black Mirror while others are finding political undertones in the pastel universe -- a reference Perry is clearly going for. Katy wants to tell us through the video that we need to look around, wake up & educate ourselves bc it's the only way to make a change.

By now, you would've heard of Meitu -- the top Chinese beautifying app that's taking the world by storm. The Chinese app maker is also capitalising on the selfie-obsessed with its range of "selfie phones." SEE ALSO: China's latest beauty app takes Snapchat-style filters to the extreme Its latest model, the T8, was just announced on Tuesday, and has placed fast autofocus 12 megapixel cameras on both front and back. The cameras use a dual pixel Sony IMX362 sensor -- the same sensor used for the rear camera of the Xiaomi Redmi Pro 2. Dual pixel cameras are touted to provide much faster autofocus, as well as clearer low-light pictures. The phone's built in beautifying software will also bring some form of artificial intelligence to the table, the company claims.

Amazon is bringing its Alexa voice assistant to British televisions with a £40 Fire TV stick that turns almost any TV into a smart streaming box. The new Fire TV stick comes with a voice-enabled remote, giving users access to voice controls and search for movies, music and TV shows. But it will also perform Alexa's other skills, allowing users to check their commute, get a weather forecast and to answer questions and control smart home devices by speaking into the remote and showing new so called video cards with information on screen. Jorrit Van der Meulen, vice president of Amazon Devices International, said that the company's focus with the new Fire TV stick was on performance and speed, making it 30% faster than the old device, to provide a smooth, rich and voice-controlled experience in a package barely larger than a flash drive. He said: "Fire TV was the number one selling item on Amazon in the UK in 2016, and now we've made it faster and given it the best of Alexa."

In this study, the authors develop a structural model that combines a macro diffusion model with a micro choice model to control for the effect of social influence on the mobile app choices of customers over app stores. Social influence refers to the density of adopters within the proximity of other customers. Using a large data set from an African app store and Bayesian estimation methods, the authors quantify the effect of social influence and investigate the impact of ignoring this process in estimating customer choices. The findings show that customer choices in the app store are explained better by offline than online density of adopters and that ignoring social influence in estimations results in biased estimates. Furthermore, the findings show that the mobile app adoption process is similar to adoption of music CDs, among all other classic economy goods. A counterfactual analysis shows that the app store can increase its revenue by 13.6% through a viral marketing policy (e.g., a sharing with friends and family button).

Daniel Ek, chief executive officer and co-founder of Spotify AB, gestures as he stands for a photograph after a news conference in Tokyo, Japan, on Thursday, Sept. 29, 2016. Spotify Ltd. is bringing its popular online music service to Japan, a large and lucrative market where fans have demonstrated a continuing fondness for CDs and even vinyl records. How did Spotify get so good at machine learning? Was machine learning important from the start, or did they catch up over time? I was at Spotify 2008–2015 and built up the machine learning team.

Google has launched its Fact Check tag in three more countries, as it steps up its efforts to combat fake news. The label will now appear in the expand story box in Google News search results and the Google News and Weather app in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. The feature first launched in the US last October, ahead of the Presidential election, and has since been rolled out in France and Germany. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar. Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo.

Many Collaborative Filtering (CF) algorithms are item-based in the sense that they analyze item-item relations in order to produce item similarities. Recently, several works in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) suggested to learn a latent representation of words using neural embedding algorithms. Among them, the Skip-gram with Negative Sampling (SGNS), also known as word2vec, was shown to provide state-of-the-art results on various linguistics tasks. In this paper, we show that item-based CF can be cast in the same framework of neural word embedding. Inspired by SGNS, we describe a method we name item2vec for item-based CF that produces embedding for items in a latent space. The method is capable of inferring item-item relations even when user information is not available. We present experimental results that demonstrate the effectiveness of the item2vec method and show it is competitive with SVD.

The cute spherical BB-8 was one of the many highlights of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and Spin Master's near life-size replica of him was one of our favorite things about last year's Toy Fair. Unfortunately, 2016 came and went without seeing the adorable robotic companion on the silver screen -- or this particular toy on store shelves. That looks to change later this year with the announced release of the $230 Hero Droid BB-8, just in time for the bot's appearance in the next episode of the Star Wars saga. On the surface, BB-8 appears to be the same droid from last year, with a plastic build modeled after its cinematic counterpart, even down to the traces of wear and tear. It's composed of two distinct pieces -- a round ball of a body and a half-sphere head.

Last year computer scientists unveiled the first song to be composed by artificial intelligence, the Beatles-esque ditty'Daddy's Car'. But it's not the first sign of AI infiltrating music-making – from self-generating soundtracks to unique albums created on demand, the robots are on the march. Jack Needham asks if we're ready for the AI revolution to reach our ears. When we think of the early relationship between humans, machines and music, we might think of Kraftwerk's analog pop or Delia Derbyshire's Radiophonic soundscapes – yet our fascination with machine music goes back much further than that. Late last year, University of Canterbury professor Jack Copeland and composer Jason Long restored the first piece of recorded machine music created in 1951 by Alan Turing, the British mathematician and artificial intelligence pioneer. The single-sided 12" acetate disc captures three melodies played by a primitive computer that filled most of the ground floor of Turing's laboratory.