There are hundreds of smart home devices available today, but some of them are more popular than others. In fact, there's a select group of smart gadgets that have near cult followings--we're talking thousands of users who swear by these devices. Here's why people are obsessed with them and whether they're worth the investment. The second-gen Echo is the best in its class. It should come as no surprise that the Amazon Echo makes this list.

Though Conversational AI has been around since the 1960s, it's experiencing a renewed focus in recent years. While we're still in the early days of the design and development of intelligent conversational AI, Google quite rightly announced that we were moving from a mobile-first to an AI- first world, where we expect technology to be naturally conversational, thoughtfully contextual, and evolutionarily competent. In other words, we expect technology to learn and evolve. Most chatbots today can handle simple questions and respond with prebuilt responses based on rule-based conversation processing. For instance, if user says X, respond with Y; if user says Z, call a REST API, and so forth.

Machine learning has been driving innovation in product features for several years, becoming a vital component of enhancing the consumer experience. However, in terms of what machine learning (ML) -- and specifically, artificial intelligence (AI) -- can do, we've only seen the tip of the iceberg. As a business leader, you may feel a bit like Chevy Chase in Fletch trying to flub your way into appearing knowledgeable about machine learning (it's all ball bearings nowadays…). Nevertheless, it's vital to understand what machine learning is and how to get the most out of it for your business. While it sounds technical, machine learning, in the simplest sense, is a branch of artificial intelligence that uses computer algorithms to learn from data and make better predictions.

Hyundai's Digital Key allows drivers to unlock and start their car with a smartphone using near-field communication technology. It will debut on the 2020 Hyundai Sonata. Self-driving cars are coming – someday. But for now, carmakers and suppliers are focused on technologies that improve vehicle safety, security and convenience. With the 2019 New York Auto Show set to begin next week with media previews, car companies are looking for ways to stand out from the competition in an era when quality and reliability are similar across brands.

If you use a smart speaker, you know all of the conveniences and delights that make it more than just a glorified paper weight. But, admit it, you've probably given it some privacy side-eye from time to time. After all, it is a microphone that just sits in your house waiting for a wake word to start recording what you say. Here's how to tighten the reins on what Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri can hear, when, and how it gets used. It's a good time to take stock.

WATCH (May 24, 2018): Amazon's Alexa records family's conversation, sends it to random contact Amazon staff can listen to commands and questions users pose to the Alexa voice assistant -- and they sometimes do. The company acknowledged that the conversations aren't totally private in a statement to Global News after the news was first reported by Bloomberg. "We only annotate an extremely small number of interactions from a random set of customers in order to improve the customer experience," Amazon said in the statement. Amazon explained that the company uses samples collected to better train "speech recognition and natural language understanding systems." READ MORE: Alexa recorded one family's conversations and sent them to a friend, without them knowing Bloomberg reported Wednesday that Amazon has "thousands" of employees who are trying to improve Alexa's speech recognition technology.

Given an incomplete ratings data over a set of users and items, the preference completion problem aims to estimate a personalized total preference order over a subset of the items. In practical settings, a ranked list of top-$k$ items from the estimated preference order is recommended to the end user in the decreasing order of preference for final consumption. We analyze this model and observe that such a ranking model results in suboptimal performance when the payoff associated with the recommended items is different. We propose a novel and very efficient algorithm for the preference ranking considering the uncertainty regarding the payoffs of the items. Once the preference scores for the users are obtained using any preference learning algorithm, we show that ranking the items using a risk seeking utility function results in the best ranking performance.

Walt Disney World recently showed the Associated Press what it takes to put their shows together. It's a shift for a resort that hasn't allowed many peeks behind the curtains of the fantasy it creates. Maybe romantic Disney fairy tales come true after all. Data from the popular global online dating site Plenty of Fish reveals that singles who have expressed an interest in Disney are 3.6 times more likely to leave the app in a relationship compared to singles who more generally list interests in music and movies. That was certainly true for Disney fan Abby Schiller.

Amazon's Echo speakers have a broadcast feature that will help you send a message to family members that might be scattered around the house. If you have an Amazon Echo product, you aren't the only person privy to your private conversations. Thousands of people across the globe are employed by Amazon.com to listen to Echo recordings, transcribe and annotate them and feed them back to the software so that Alexa can better grasp human speech, according to a report from Bloomberg. The employees – ranging from Boston to India – signed nondisclosure agreements barring them to speak publicly about the program. According to Bloomberg, they work nine hours per day, with each reviewer going through as many as 1,000 audio clips per shift.

Yes, someone might listen to your Alexa conversations someday. A Bloomberg report has detailed how Amazon employs thousands of full-timers and contractors from around the world to review audio clips from Echo devices. Apparently, these workers transcribe and annotate recordings, which they then feed back into the software to make Alexa smarter than before. The process helps beef up the voice AI's understanding of human speech, especially for non-English-speaking countries or for places with distinctive regional colloquialisms. In French, for instance, an Echo speaker could hear avec sa ("with his" or "with her") as "Alexa" and treat it as a wake word.