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 Personal Assistant Systems


I'm already dreading Apple's camera-equipped AirPods

Engadget

Well, it seems like those-rumored AirPods with cameras are close to being real, according to the latest report from Mark Gurman . The new earbuds are said to use low-resolution cameras on their stalks to capture low-resolution imagery, which will ultimately be fed to Apple's long-delayed AI Siri assistant. And the more I hear about them, the more they sound like Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses, just without the ability to take clear photos and videos. The camera-equipped Airpods are reportedly in Apple's design validation testing (DVT) stage, where workers are using prototypes to test their capabilities. There's no word on when we may actually see them, but according to Gurman they were initially slated to debut as early as the first half of 2026, only to be pushed back by AI Siri delays.


Perplexity opens up its Personal Computer AI assistant to all Mac users

Engadget

Last month, Perplexity sought to better compete with the likes of Claude Cowork and get out ahead of Apple's delayed, generative AI-powered version of Siri by bringing Personal Computer to macOS . The AI assistant was previously only available to those on Perplexity's $200 per month Max plan, but now the company has opened it up to all Mac users. The company says everyone can download the new Perplexity macOS app and use Personal Computer for everyday queries, attachments and dictation. Usage is tied to Pro and Max plans' credit limits, Perplexity noted. Personal Computer can run tasks across local files, other apps, the web and Perplexity's own servers, according to the company.


Apple to pay iPhone owners 250 million settlement over claims of false advertising... see if you qualify

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Doctor's awful mistake led to five days of agony, amputation and eventual death for promising young high school graduate, 18, $100m lawsuit alleges I was so fat I needed two plane seats. Then I lost 208lbs and kept it off for 10 YEARS using'nature's Ozempic' supplement. It was so effortlessly effective... and I could even still eat chocolate! I've discovered the perfect'type' of man that'll drive any woman crazy. The sex is so good, it's ruined every other guy for me: JANA HOCKING Leaked CIA Iran war dossier shreds Trump's boasts... as chilling intel reveals vast missile arsenal Young family were beaming picture of happiness... then affair scandal erupted and three of them were found dead Apple to pay iPhone owners $250 million settlement over claims of false advertising... see if you qualify Why this photo of Princess Charlotte has left Harry'very sad': Friends tell RICHARD EDEN all about his plan for Archie and Lili... and why Meghan has become a'challenge' Panic over SIX Americans who returned to US from deadly rat virus ship... as health officials scramble to find infected all over the world Trump's bombshell private admission sends grim warning to Netanyahu as Israel braces for reckoning Deeply personal reason Aaron Rodgers may have to suddenly retire from NFL... and forgo $15 million for mystery wife Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni's battle continues as she demands he pay legal fees for his failed defamation lawsuit days after their shock settlement Billionaire, 70, settles bitter yearslong divorce with ex-wife after shacking up with new fiancée who's almost half his age I survived hantavirus that's spreading on the cruise ship.


Get Microsoft 365 for 30 off--includes an AI assistant and 1TB storage

PCWorld

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Microsoft 365 is down to $69.99 for a full year, giving you premium Office apps, 1TB storage, and built-in AI tools across your devices. If you're already using Word, Excel, or PowerPoint --even occasionally--this is one of those upgrades that just makes your setup smoother across the board. Microsoft 365 is currently $69.99 for a 1-year subscription (MSRP $99.99), and it bundles together the apps you actually use with features that go beyond basic document editing. That means your files are accessible across devices, backed up, and easy to share without emailing attachments back and forth. One of the bigger upgrades here is the built-in AI assistant, Copilot .


WIRED's Smart Home Ecosystem Guide (2026)

WIRED

The answer may already be in your home. To achieve a smart home, you need a voice assistant to run it. A smart home assistant, usually folded into a smart speaker, will let you command your smart home with your voice and run your various routines. It also acts as a center for every gadget you want to add to your home. And you can add almost anything these days, from smart garage control to even voice-commanding your blinds .


AI company deletes the 3 million OKCupid photos it used for facial recognition training

Engadget

It follows a settlement with the FTC from last month. When online platforms violate their own privacy policies to sell your photos, have no fear: They just might have to pay an undisclosed settlement fee 12 years later. According to, AI company Clarifai says it has deleted 3 million profile photos taken from dating site OkCupid in 2014. It follows a settlement reached last month between the FTC and Match Group, OkCupid's owner. The Delaware-based Clarifai reportedly certified the data deletion to the FTC on April 7.


Google now lets you have full conversations with Gemini for Home

Engadget

The feature is rolling out for all the smart home program's supported languages and regions. Google announced today that it is upgrading the Gemini for Home service with a continued conversations feature. Continued conversation allows a user to have a natural discussion with the Gemini platform without prefacing every follow-up request with the Hey Google prompt. The microphone will remain active on a smart device for a few seconds after the Gemini AI assistant provides its reply. During that window, the lights on the hardware will pulse or glow, indicating that you can keep chatting normally with the chatbot without needing a wake word.


Alexa lets you order food like a real conversation

FOX News

Amazon Alexa+ introduced voice-powered food ordering through Uber Eats and Grubhub, letting users build and modify delivery orders hands-free on Echo devices.


Spectral bandits for smooth graph functions

Valko, Michal, Munos, Rémi, Kveton, Branislav, Kocák, Tomáš

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Smooth functions on graphs have wide applications in manifold and semi-supervised learning. In this paper, we study a bandit problem where the payoffs of arms are smooth on a graph. This framework is suitable for solving online learning problems that involve graphs, such as content-based recommendation. In this problem, each item we can recommend is a node and its expected rating is similar to its neighbors. The goal is to recommend items that have high expected ratings. We aim for the algorithms where the cumulative regret with respect to the optimal policy would not scale poorly with the number of nodes. In particular, we introduce the notion of an effective dimension, which is small in real-world graphs, and propose two algorithms for solving our problem that scale linearly and sublinearly in this dimension. Our experiments on real-world content recommendation problem show that a good estimator of user preferences for thousands of items can be learned from just tens of nodes evaluations.


Spectral Thompson sampling

Kocak, Tomas, Valko, Michal, Munos, Remi, Agrawal, Shipra

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Thompson Sampling (TS) has attracted a lot of interest due to its good empirical performance, in particular in the computational advertising. Though successful, the tools for its performance analysis appeared only recently. In this paper, we describe and analyze SpectralTS algorithm for a bandit problem, where the payoffs of the choices are smooth given an underlying graph. In this setting, each choice is a node of a graph and the expected payoffs of the neighboring nodes are assumed to be similar. Although the setting has application both in recommender systems and advertising, the traditional algorithms would scale poorly with the number of choices. For that purpose we consider an effective dimension d, which is small in real-world graphs. We deliver the analysis showing that the regret of SpectralTS scales as d*sqrt(T ln N) with high probability, where T is the time horizon and N is the number of choices. Since a d*sqrt(T ln N) regret is comparable to the known results, SpectralTS offers a computationally more efficient alternative. We also show that our algorithm is competitive on both synthetic and real-world data.