Banks have begun to use AI to leverage their customer data to drive engagement and increase loyalty through hyper-personalized experiences. These types of tailored offers are the future of marketing for all industries and this article explores what we can learn from banks' strategies, writes, Justine Melman, VP of Marketing and Communications, Flybits. Welcome to the 2019 edition of The Modern Content Marketer's Buyer Guide. About 10 years ago, marketers realized that content is a critical piece of their pie, and have since been working overtime to generate content to help win the prospect's attention. Imagine you're on a business trip and you've just touched down in a new city.

As part of Firebrand Talent's #Digitalks event series, Lisa Bouari, Executive Director at OutThought, recently spoke to audiences on the topic'AI Assistants: How to take your business to the next level'. The key areas Lisa focused on are detailed below. I'm not sure about you, but I wasn't surprised to hear the latest stats from Gartner suggesting that 25% of organisations will use Chatbots in their customer service by 2020. It's a large number when we consider the thousands of organisations that are yet to adopt this technology – but the take-up rate and activity in the marketplace would suggest we are well on our way. IBM states that 70% of consumers also prefer to message over calling, for customer support.

Fox News Flash top headlines for Oct. 29 are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com Apple has resumed the controversial practice of allowing humans to review Siri commands and dictation with the latest iPhone software update. After an investigative report, the California-based tech giant ended the practice in August. Although using humans to audit audio is common in Silicon Valley -- Amazon and Google have also taken flak for the practice -- seen by critics as undermining Apple's attempts to market itself as a guardian of privacy.

We are living in an era where messaging apps deal with all sorts of our daily activities, and in fact, these apps have already overtaken social networks as can be indicated in the BI Intelligence Report. In addition to this clear point, the consumption of messaging platforms is further expected to grow significantly in the coming years; hence this is a huge opportunity for different businesses to gain attention where people are actively engaged. In this age of instant gratification, consumers expect companies to respond to them quickly without any delay, and this, of course, requires a lot of time and effort for the company to hire and invest in their workforce. Thus, it's now the right time for any organization to think of new ways to stay connected with the end-user. Many organizations undergoing a digital transformation have already started harnessing the power of Artificial Intelligence in the form of AI-assisted Customer Support System, Talent Screening using AI-assisted interviews, etc.

User behavior data in recommender systems are driven by the complex interactions of many latent factors behind the users' decision making processes. The factors are highly entangled, and may range from high-level ones that govern user intentions, to low-level ones that characterize a user's preference when executing an intention. Learning representations that uncover and disentangle these latent factors can bring enhanced robustness, interpretability, and controllability. However, learning such disentangled representations from user behavior is challenging, and remains largely neglected by the existing literature. In this paper, we present the MACRo-mIcro Disentangled Variational Auto-Encoder (MacridVAE) for learning disentangled representations from user behavior. Our approach achieves macro disentanglement by inferring the high-level concepts associated with user intentions (e.g., to buy a shirt or a cellphone), while capturing the preference of a user regarding the different concepts separately. A micro-disentanglement regularizer, stemming from an information-theoretic interpretation of VAEs, then forces each dimension of the representations to independently reflect an isolated low-level factor (e.g., the size or the color of a shirt). Empirical results show that our approach can achieve substantial improvement over the state-of-the-art baselines. We further demonstrate that the learned representations are interpretable and controllable, which can potentially lead to a new paradigm for recommendation where users are given fine-grained control over targeted aspects of the recommendation lists.

NEW YORK – Apple is resuming the use of humans to review Siri commands and dictation with the latest iPhone software update. In August, Apple suspended the practice and apologized for the way it used people, rather than just machines, to review the audio. While common in the tech industry, the practice undermined Apple's attempts to position itself as a trusted steward of privacy. CEO Tim Cook repeatedly has declared the company's belief that "privacy is a fundamental human right," a phrase that cropped up again in Apple's apology. Now, Apple is giving consumers notice when installing the update, iOS 13.2.

The current iPhone upgrade to iOS 13.2 brings a variety of features, not the least of which is improved privacy for those who use Siri. Responding to the outcry over how it handles the data collected by its voice assistant, Apple has offered users a way to delete all of the recordings that Siri collects during use. The company has also stopped sharing audio recordings with human staffers in order to improve its service. Instead, it asks you to opt in to that feature via a pop-up that appears when you upgrade to this latest version of its mobile operating system. If you were too quick to opt in when you upgraded and have decided you don't want to share your voice with Apple (or if you opted out and have decided that you don't mind if a few Apple employees listen to your voice), you can easily change your mind. In addition, you can now ask Apple to delete all of your audio information from Siri (which used to be a very convoluted and unsure process).

Get great prices on the things you actually want. If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA Today's newsroom and any business incentives. In my opinion, there couldn't be anything more exciting than waking up to a great deal on a product you actually want. And this morning, I woke up to several on Amazon.

On the heels of several new acquisitions and product announcements in recent months, Motorola Solutions is announcing a new radio equipped with a voice assistant, which the company says is the first of its kind. The public safety radio is called APX NEXT, building upon the company's prior APX two-way radios, and the virtual assistant that controls it has been dubbed ViQi (pronounced "Vicky"). The company's news release on Thursday said the radio is FirstNet-ready, built with LTE connectivity, and is the first APX radio to feature a touchscreen, designed for field use including with rain or gloves. Motorola Solutions Chief Technology Officer Mahesh Saptharishi said that besides being able to control the radio, the virtual assistant responds to commands like "ViQi, run a license plate," and can also look up driver's license information and vehicle identification numbers. He said other functions will come with future updates.

In the battle of the buds, our "taste test" was striking. A friend and I both compared listening to the Foo Fighters "Learn to Fly" on Amazon's new Echo Buds and the product it aims to emulate, what Apple calls the best-selling headphone "in the world," the AirPods. The Amazon product "sounded tinnier," said Jan Schreiber, a Laguna Beach, California-based photographer. The AirPods had richer bass and a fuller sound. We switched to other songs, and the verdict didn't change.