Waze is playing even more nicely with Apple after it enabled CarPlay support back in September. The latest version of its iOS app lets you use Siri Shortcuts to find your way to a destination. You'll be able to set up shortcuts for things like your morning commute, the drive home and directions to your favorite places. The benefits of using voice control for navigation while driving are fairly obvious, and Waze's addition of Siri Shortcuts offers users more of an alternative to Apple Maps. The update will surely come as a boon for those who use it to steer clear of traffic, crashes and construction.

You may want to use some extra caution. A new notice released Tuesday by the Federal Trade Commission highlights a surge in'romance scams,' or scenarios where scammers trick love-lusting internet users into sending them money, only to later disappear. The scams cost victims an astonishing $143 million in 2018, up from $33 million the previous year and making it the most costly type of consumer fraud reported to the FTC. A new notice from the Federal Trade Commission highlights a surge in'romance scams,' or scenarios where scammers trick love-lusting internet users into sending them money Romance scams, where criminals create phony profiles to trick love-lusting victims into sending them money, are on the rise. To avoid falling prey, here's what you can do: These romance scams typically involve a user creating a phony profile and approaching someone via a dating app or website.

In many ways, Hely Lyly is your typical grandma. She's retired, sings in a chorus, takes fitness classes, participates in a book club and spends a good chunk of her day taking care of her grandchildren. These days, though, Lyly, 68, has a new gig -- as an artificial intelligence evangelist. "AI is now my new hobby," Lyly said, chuckling. Lyly is one of nearly 100 senior volunteers mentoring their peers on the fundamentals of AI.

First announced in March last year, Amman-based Mawdoo3 has finally launched its Arabic personal voice assistant, Salma. The personal assistant was recently launched at TechWadi Annual Forum 2019 last month in California. After the launch, Salma has been made available as a standalone iOS and Android app. According to its (her?) website, the personal assistant can share weather forecasts, currency exchange rates, and prayer times. It (she?) can also help users set an alarm on their phone, play music from their favorite apps, or call anyone from their address book – all with a quick voice command.

For decades, science fiction authors, futurists, and movie makers alike have been predicting the amazing (and sometimes catastrophic) changes that will arise with the advent of widespread artificial intelligence. So far, AI hasn't made any such crazy waves, and in many ways has quietly become ubiquitous in numerous aspects of our daily lives. From the intelligent sensors that help us take perfect pictures, to the automatic parking features in cars, to the sometimes frustrating personal assistants in smartphones, artificial intelligence of one kind of another is all around us, all the time. While we've yet to create self-aware robots like those that pepper popular movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars, we have made smart and often significant use of AI technology in a wide range of applications that, while not as mind-blowing as androids, still change our day-to-day lives. One place where artificial intelligence is poised to make big changes (and in some cases already is) is in education.

It could be the end of 999 calls. Scotland Yard is developing new technology that would allow victims of crime to use voice-activated personal assistants, such as Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant, to contact the police. Under plans being drawn up by Britain's largest force, people would simply have to shout for help - and any compatible in-range technology would notify the police. A report seen by The Sunday Times reveals that Scotland Yard think voice assistants - currently used by around 3m Brits - will "change the face of police contact". It states that the plans being drawn up by the Metropolitan Police Force would allow "an incoming demand from a home automation bot, rather than from a human". "The contact may be triggered by the human issuing a command to their bot, or it may be automatically generated by the bot through AI [artificial intelligence," the report states.

Recommending the right products is the central problem in recommender systems, but the right products should also be recommended at the right time to meet the demands of users, so as to maximize their values. Users' demands, implying strong purchase intents, can be the most useful way to promote products sales if well utilized. Previous recommendation models mainly focused on user's general interests to find the right products. However, the aspect of meeting users' demands at the right time has been much less explored. To address this problem, we propose a novel Long-Short Demands-aware Model (LSDM), in which both user's interests towards items and user's demands over time are incorporated. We summarize two aspects: termed as long-time demands (e.g., purchasing the same product repetitively showing a long-time persistent interest) and short-time demands (e.g., co-purchase like buying paintbrushes after pigments). To utilize such long-short demands of users, we create different clusters to group the successive product purchases together according to different time spans, and use recurrent neural networks to model each sequence of clusters at a time scale. The long-short purchase demands with multi-time scales are finally aggregated by joint learning strategies. Experimental results on three real-world commerce datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our model for next-item recommendation, showing the usefulness of modeling users' long-short purchase demands of items with multi-time scales.

Monday, Feb. 11, kicks off the week with amazing deals on popular products. 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. Every day, we comb through hundreds of sales on Amazon to find the ones that are actually worth your time. We look beyond price, which can often be deceptive in making things that aren't actually on sale look like amazing deals, and consider everything from consumer reviews to price histories to our own test results to determine which deals you should care about.

Devices like Amazon's Alexa (pictured), Microsoft's Cortana and Apple's Siri are becoming crucial health tools Smart speakers are set to be used as'virtual medical coaches' to monitor patients in their own homes, a major report says. Devices like Amazon's Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana and Apple's Siri are becoming crucial health tools, according to an official report on the'digital future' of the NHS. The 100-page document, written by US geneticist Eric Topol, said robots and artificial intelligence will make medical diagnoses more accurate and unburden doctors to give them more time with patients. And it said within 20 years virtual medical coaches, operating through voice recognition speakers in people's homes, would help manage chronic conditions such as diabetes, asthma, depression and high blood pressure. These programmes will use artificial intelligence and'deep learning' about someone's illness and normal behaviour to'pre-empt hospitalisation' by spotting when something is wrong.

Tinder and Grindr are about to face close scrutiny over their age policies. The UK's Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, Jeremy Wright, plans to ask the dating app giants about their age verification and safety systems after a Sunday Times report revealed dozens of incidents of sexual assault and exploitation against children who managed to sign up for the app, including over 30 instances of rape. He wanted to know what tools Tinder and Grindr had in place to "keep children safe from harm," and vowed "further action" if the dating services didn't provide adequate answers. The two companies said they already use a mix of automated and human oversight to keep underage people off their apps. Grindr in particular was "constantly working to improve" its screening process, according to a spokesperson.