Amazon has admitted that employees listen to customer voice recordings from Echo and other Alexa-enabled smart speakers. The online retail giant said its staff "reviewed" a sample of Alexa voice assistant conversations in order to improve speech recognition. "This information helps us train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems, so Alexa can better understand your requests, and ensure the service works well for everyone," Amazon said in a statement. We'll tell you what's true. You can form your own view.

Tens of millions of people use smart speakers and their voice software to play games, find music or trawl for trivia. Millions more are reluctant to invite the devices and their powerful microphones into their homes out of concern that someone might be listening. Inc. employs thousands of people around the world to help improve the Alexa digital assistant powering its line of Echo speakers. The team listens to voice recordings captured in Echo owners' homes and offices. The recordings are transcribed, annotated and then fed back into the software as part of an effort to eliminate gaps in Alexa's understanding of human speech and help it better respond to commands.

Amazon, Apple and Google all employ staff who listen to customer voice recordings from their smart speakers and voice assistant apps. News site Bloomberg highlighted the topic after speaking to Amazon staff who "reviewed" Alexa recordings. All three companies say voice recordings are occasionally reviewed to improve speech recognition. But the reaction to the Bloomberg article suggests many customers are unaware that humans may be listening. The news site said it had spoken to seven people who reviewed audio from Amazon Echo smart speakers and the Alexa service.

Dealing with devices plugged into outdoor outlets can be challenging, and we don't know of any in-wall smart receptacles rated for the job. Their internal electronics just can't tolerate damp conditions, freezing temperatures, and blistering summertime sun. That's where pig-tail smart plugs like TP-Link's Kasa Smart Wi-Fi Outdoor Plug (model KP400) come in. The bad news is that these types of smart plugs carry premium price tags. The good news is that TP-Link's KP400 is not only more capable than the competing iDevices Outdoor Switch we reviewed last December, it's also a whole dollar cheaper.

Google has been steadily rolling out G Suite updates like AI grammar suggestions in Google Docs, streamlined two-step verification, new Tasks features and shortcuts to make Google Doc and Sheet creation faster. Today, at the Cloud Next '19 event, Google announced its newest batch of G Suite changes. The updates include features like Google Assistant integration. While that's still in beta and primarily works with Calendar, G Suite customers can now ask their Assistant when and where a meeting is. Google Assistant has worked with Calendar for a while, but only on personal accounts.

Forbes' Jillian D'Onfro leads a panel of AI industry experts (left to right) Marco Casalaina, Salesforce, Chuck Ganapathi, Tact.ai, and Lorrissa Horton, Cisco. Today's voice-powered AI assistant has many names--Siri, Alexa, Cortana--but as this developing technology becomes ubiquitous in both consumer and enterprise environments, Chuck Ganapathi has a suggestion for his industry colleagues: "Let's not pretend it's a human," the founder and CEO of Tact said Monday during the Voice AI in the Enterprise panel at the Forbes CIO Summit in Half Moon Bay, California, taking a jab at Google's eerily lifelike Duplex AI system. What's more, he said, the enterprise must be careful not to hark back to the secretary pools of old: Voice assistants at work shouldn't automatically sound like they're women. His company intentionally gave its AI-based customer-relationship management system a gender-free name and gives users multiple voice options at setup. He also commended the work of a European agency called Virtue that launched the first "genderless" digital assistant voice this spring.

Sonos and Ikea have teamed up to release a line of connected speakers that include a table lamp and a bookshelf. Both devices connect to the WiFi, can be controlled by an app and let users play music from their favorite service like Spotify or Apple Music. The lamp and bookshelf, part of a line called'Symfonisk,' are priced at $179 and $99, respectively, and are expected to become available for purchase in August. Sonos and Ikea have teamed up to release a line of connected speakers that include a table lamp and a bookshelf. While both devices are priced within the same affordable range typically found in Ikea products, they pack the high quality of any other Sonos speaker.

Voice assistants usually only give you brief summaries of the news -- helpful if you're in a hurry, but that's about it. Amazon is betting that you'll want something deeper. It's rolling out an Alexa feature in the US that provides long-form news from Bloomberg, CNBC, CNN, Fox News, Newsy and NPR. Ask Alexa to "tell me the news" or to "play news" from a specific outlet and you'll get detailed audio from all providers, and video from CNBC and Newsy. You can skip stories if you'd rather not examine every story in vivid detail.

If you're not happy with the Wi-Fi router your ISP gave you, there's a great deal today on an affordable and highly rated router. The TP-Link Archer A7 AC1750 Smart WiFi router is $47 on Amazon when you clip the extra $10 off coupon on the product page, located just underneath the sales price. That extra discount makes this price the all-time low for the Archer A7 on Amazon. If the coupon doesn't show up for you, $57 is still a great price for this router, which usually sells for $65 to $70. It's also packed with bandwidth prioritization "quality of service" (QoS) technology to ensure intensive uses like online games and 4K Netflix streams get the best experience possible on your network.

Recommender system research suffers from a disconnect between the size of academic data sets and the scale of industrial production systems. In order to bridge that gap, we propose to generate large-scale user/item interaction data sets by expanding pre-existing public data sets. Our key contribution is a technique that expands user/item incidence matrices matrices to large numbers of rows (users), columns (items), and non-zero values (interactions). The proposed method adapts Kronecker Graph Theory to preserve key higher order statistical properties such as the fat-tailed distribution of user engagements, item popularity, and singular value spectra of user/item interaction matrices. Preserving such properties is key to building large realistic synthetic data sets which in turn can be employed reliably to benchmark recommender systems and the systems employed to train them. We further apply our stochastic expansion algorithm to the binarized MovieLens 20M data set, which comprises 20M interactions between 27K movies and 138K users. The resulting expanded data set has 1.2B ratings, 2.2M users, and 855K items, which can be scaled up or down.