It took the better part of a year to show up, but John Legend's Google Assistant cameo is finally available in the US. Ask the AI helper to "talk like a Legend" and the singer's dulcet tones will greet you when issuing certain commands, such as asking about the weather. Naturally, he'll have answers for questions about his own life, such as his wife Chrissy Teigen or his favorite type of music (take a wild guess). Some of those answers will be canned, but others will take advantage of WaveNet speech synthesis to deliver a customized response. Legend will only be available for a "limited time," and you'll have to be ready to hear the regular Google Assistant voice for those many queries where the crooner isn't available.

Bayesian Matrix Factorization (BMF) is a powerful technique for recommender systems because it produces good results and is relatively robust against overfitting. Yet BMF is more computationally intensive and thus more challenging to implement for large datasets. In this work we present SMURFF a high-performance feature-rich framework to compose and construct different Bayesian matrix-factorization methods. The framework has been successfully used in to do large scale runs of compound-activity prediction. SMURFF is available as open-source and can be used both on a supercomputer and on a desktop or laptop machine. Documentation and several examples are provided as Jupyter notebooks using SMURFF's high-level Python API.

Singer John Legend is the newest voice of the Google Assistant, the tech company announced Wednesday. Google Assistant users, get ready to have the silky voice of John Legend in your home. The tech company on Wednesday announced the 40-year-old singer as the voice of its virtual assistant for a limited time in the U.S. Legend's voice will be able to give users the weather forecast, sing happy birthday and tell jokes. His voice will also tell you a few things about the singer's personal life, including about his wife, Chrissy Teigen. There will also be a few Easter eggs.

Walmart shoppers can now do some online shopping using just their voice. The retail giant is partnering with Google to launch grocery shopping on any devices equipped with Google Assistant. Walmart Voice Order is rolling out to consumers beginning this month, the company said today. Walmart shoppers can now shop using just their voice. It'll become available for users with Google Home devices, as well as Assistant-equipped smart displays, Android phones and iPhones.

This week's giveaway, courtesy of Plex, could put a sleek multimedia machine in your home. Plex's popular grid-view software helps you organize and navigate your files, while giving you access to them on-the-go. The NVIDIA Shield is a cord-cutting Android TV device with 4K HDR output, Google Assistant and GeForce Now game streaming on board. When paired with a Plex Pass, antenna and tuner you can harness OTA live TV with DVR capabilities, putting those shows seamlessly alongside your own library for easy access. Plex lets you access all this content through its app from a computer, mobile device and even supported systems like Sonos or Amazon's Alexa, wherever you go.

Walmart customers once again will be able to voice-order their groceries with Google Assistant, another bid by the brick-and-mortar store to compete with Amazon. The retailer announced the partnership on Tuesday, and said it would gradually roll out the feature in the next few weeks. The development comes after Walmart unceremoniously left Google Express, Google's online shopping tool, back in January, reportedly to develop its own Google Assistant shopping feature. Walmart shoppers will soon be able to add items to their shopping carts by saying "Hey Google, talk to Walmart." The feature will be cross-platform, meaning customers can shop from any device that has the Google Assistant feature, ranging from smart speakers and displays to their Android watch or iPhone.

More than 900 Google workers have signed a letter objecting to the tech giant's treatment of temporary contractors, in what organizers are calling "an historical coalition" between Google's full-time employees [FTEs] and temps, vendors and contractors [TVCs]. In March, Google abruptly shortened the contracts of 34 temp workers on the "personality" team for Google Assistant – the Alexa-like digital assistant that reads you the weather, manages your calendar, sends a text message, or calls you an Uber through your phone or smart speaker. The cuts, which affected contractors around the globe, reinvigorated the debate over Googles's extensive use of TVCs, amid a growing labor movement within the company. In recent months, Google FTEs and TVCs have been increasingly vocal in protesting both their working conditions and the ethics of their employer. "For years, Google has boasted of its ability to scale up and down very quickly, and [sic] vocal in its ability to'navigate changes with agility,'" the letter reads.

Jefferson Graham takes a look at two products that bring Alexa and voice-activated controls to the auto, Garmin Speak and Roav Viv. LOS ANGELES -- "Alexa, what music should I listen to?" It's an interesting question that follows up with Amazon's Alexa asking follow-ups, one of the few times the personal assistant gets really conversational and makes suggestions. Alexa, via Amazon Music, gave me options: the late, legendary gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt or singers Adele or James Taylor. I went for Django, and with that, my personal DJ robot had followed through successfully, finding three artists I love. Such it is with music commands for personal assistants.

We describe experiments towards building a conversational digital assistant that considers the preferred conversational style of the user. In particular, these experiments are designed to measure whether users prefer and trust an assistant whose conversational style matches their own. To this end we conducted a user study where subjects interacted with a digital assistant that responded in a way that either matched their conversational style, or did not. Using self-reported personality attributes and subjects' feedback on the interactions, we built models that can reliably predict a user's preferred conversational style.

The Amazon Echo, Dot and other Alexa-enabled devices don't often play well together in the same house – particularly if they're within earshot of each other. That wasn't a problem because most of us had only one smart speaker – if we had any at all. Amazon says the number of households with more than one smart assistant-enabled device doubled last year. That lends credence to an independent survey taken late last year declaring that nearly 1 in 4 US households had a voice-enabled device inside – and about 40 percent of those have more than one. Which can only mean that more of us are experiencing the headaches of these early days in the Alexa multi-device experience.