Voice recordings captured by Amazon's Alexa can be deleted but the automatically produced transcriptions remain in the company's cloud, according to reports. After Alexa hears its'wake' word, the smart assistant starts listening and transcribing everything it hears. All the voice commands said to the virtual assistant can be deleted from the central system, but the company still has the the text logs, according to CNET. This data is kept on its cloud servers, with no option for users to delete it, but the company claims it is working on ways to make the data inaccessible. Amazon workers are listening to private and sometimes disturbing voice recordings to improve the voice-assistants understanding of human speech.

Machine learning models learn what we teach them to learn. Machine learning is at the heart of recommender systems. If a machine learning model is trained on biased data, the resulting recommender system may reflect the biases in its recommendations. Biases arise at different stages in a recommender system, from existing societal biases in the data such as the professional gender gap, to biases introduced by the data collection or modeling processes. These biases impact the performance of various components of recommender systems, from offline training, to evaluation and online serving of recommendations in production systems. Specific techniques can help reduce bias at each stage of a recommender system. Reducing bias in our recommender systems is crucial to successfully recommending dream jobs to hundreds of millions members worldwide, while being true to LinkedIn's vision: "To create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce".

Thanks to the Big Data revolution and increasing computing capacities, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made an impressive revival over the past few years and is now omnipresent in both research and industry. The creative sectors have always been early adopters of AI technologies and this continues to be the case. As a matter of fact, recent technological developments keep pushing the boundaries of intelligent systems in creative applications: the critically acclaimed movie "Sunspring", released in 2016, was entirely written by AI technology, and the first-ever Music Album, called "Hello World", produced using AI has been released this year. Simultaneously, the exploratory nature of the creative process is raising important technical challenges for AI such as the ability for AI-powered techniques to be accurate under limited data resources, as opposed to the conventional "Big Data" approach, or the ability to process, analyse and match data from multiple modalities (text, sound, images, etc.) at the same time. The purpose of this white paper is to understand future technological advances in AI and their growing impact on creative industries. This paper addresses the following questions: Where does AI operate in creative Industries? What is its operative role? How will AI transform creative industries in the next ten years? This white paper aims to provide a realistic perspective of the scope of AI actions in creative industries, proposes a vision of how this technology could contribute to research and development works in such context, and identifies research and development challenges.

In this paper we survey the methods and concepts developed for the evaluation of dialogue systems. Evaluation is a crucial part during the development process. Often, dialogue systems are evaluated by means of human evaluations and questionnaires. However, this tends to be very cost and time intensive. Thus, much work has been put into finding methods, which allow to reduce the involvement of human labour. In this survey, we present the main concepts and methods. For this, we differentiate between the various classes of dialogue systems (task-oriented dialogue systems, conversational dialogue systems, and question-answering dialogue systems). We cover each class by introducing the main technologies developed for the dialogue systems and then by presenting the evaluation methods regarding this class.

This guide has been updated to include the new line of Echo devices, many new products with Alexa built in, and products that work with Alexa via Alexa Skills. Since Amazon unveiled the Echo smart speaker in 2014, Amazon has steadily become the hottest name in smart home products on the market. Suddenly, every tech company wants to integrate its products with Amazon's customizable virtual assistant, Alexa. The integrations keep coming, at such a pace that it can be hard to know exactly which products work with Alexa. Amazon's website tries to keep on top of things, but its interface can be tough to navigate.

Location data has been a sore subject for Google. In 2018, an Associated Press investigation found that Google continued storing phone location data even when users turned off a "location history" setting in Android. The company also revealed plans to overhaul Chrome to let users rein in so-called tracking cookies, which are bits of software that follow people around on the web. The move, which could have major repercussions for the digital advertising industry, would require companies to identify cookies used by third-party websites and advertisers to track users. "Unimpressive," declared Princeton computer scientist Jonathan Mayer, who said the scheme would be easy for advertisers to evade.

Microsoft is witnessing a skills gap for companies to take advance Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies and implement it in real commercial applications. Speaking exclusively to TechRadar Middle East, Kevin Dallas, Corporate Vice-President for AI and Intelligent Cloud Business Development at Microsoft, said that from a technology point of view, AI is obviously the most "transformational technology for our generation". However, he said that there are three foundation elements needed in order to create powerful AI solutions. "The compute power may be sitting in the cloud, or it could be locally on your edge device. It really starts to get complex when you look deep into it. You need to be a data scientist to understand the data. You need to understand cloud computing, advanced computing, and also need to understand advanced algorithms" "It's really important for us as an industry to make sure that we get this right in terms of delivering work benefits to our society. It starts from the top where the executives see the opportunities, and we have consumers who believe that the world is going to be a better place with AI. But in the middle, we have this capability gap in terms of delivering these new AI infused applications and services," he said.

Recent years have seen the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) adoption in the marketing and media industries. While often a buzzword for marketers to make their work sound more exciting, the real benefits to brands center on the use of machines to carry out deep learning and make humans' jobs easier. AI is certainly growing in notoriety, with up to 85% of UK businesses said to be set to invest in the field by 2020. In addition, studies have shown the gradual uptake of soft robotics in the home – 23-32% of households in the US and 18% of households in the UK have at least one voice assistant, the most popular models being either Amazon's Alexa or Google Assistant. Moreover, Apple claimed in 2018 that a staggering 500 million of its users now frequently make use of Siri, its pre-installed voice assistant.

A MailOnline investigation into how much personal information Alexa is recording and storing on its users has revealed the smart assistant eavesdrops on housemates' gossip, private conversations about insurance policies - and even the family dog. Amazon insists Alexa can only be activated when the allocated'wake word' is uttered - being Alexa, Computer or Echo. The tech giant - along with Apple's Siri and, until recently, Google's Assistant - says it saves every single interaction a person has with the device to improve the service - with some'unintentional' snippets also being recorded if it mistakes another noise for a'wake word'. However, evidence seen by MailOnline shows this cannot be the case, or the process is fundamentally flawed, as a host of sounds and conversations were recorded without a clear or legitimate wake word being uttered - some when there was not even a human nearby. A MailOnline investigation into these'secret' archives has revealed an eerie snippets of users' friends, families and children being recorded while they were completely unaware - and without a clear or legitimate wake word being uttered.

Google is launching a larger 10in version of its smart display as it attempts to supplant Amazon's Alexa as the top smartspeaker maker. Announced at Google's I/O developer conference in California on Tuesday, the new Google Nest Hub Max, which will launch on 15 July costing £219 in the UK. It spearheads the firm's new push to combine its Nest and other smart home products into one brand. The Nest Hub Max is a larger version of the popular Google Assistant-powered Home Hub, launched in October last year. Like other smart displays it answers questions and accepts commands via voice, but can also show information and video on its 10in 1080p screen providing more detail and allowing non-verbal interaction.