For the next seven weeks, anyone who's inclined can go to 205 Hudson Street in New York City and take over someone else's apartment. Smart devices like the kettles, lighting and speakers of four homes connect directly to laptops in the corner of an art gallery. Cameras are trained on bathrooms, kitchens and living areas. Visitors can sit down and become a human Alexa, playing music, eavesdropping on conversations through microphones and communicating with the inhabitants via text-to-speech. Each home -- three in Brooklyn, one in San Francisco -- will be "live" for two hours a day.

Apple could be planning to introduce an emojii version of its Siri virtual assistant, according to a new patent application from the tech giant. The patent request, filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office, describes an emoji-based avatar for a smart home speaker that can adapt to a user's mood. Though not mentioned by name in the patent, the description of the smart speaker accurately resembles that of the Apple HomePod. Apple's patent application describes a "humanistic avatar, a simplified graphical representation of a digital assistant such as an emoji-based avatar" – essentially a cartoon version of Siri. Depending on what request is made through the smart speaker, the emoji assistant would be able to react appropriately.

The workplace chatbots are coming! The workplace chatbots are coming! And in a few years, there will be even more. According to Gartner, by 2021 the daily use of virtual assistants in the workplace will climb to 25 percent. That will be up from less than 2 percent this year.

When I reviewed First Alert's Onelink Safe & Sound smoke alarm in mid-2018, I found it to be a powerful entry in the smart smoke detector market. Its inclusion of Bluetooth and an Amazon Echo-compatible smart speaker set it apart from every smoke and carbon-monoxide detector on the market. But its $199 price tag also made it far and away the most expensive device of its type on the market--and that price hasn't budged since its release. Enter the Onelink Smoke Carbon Monoxide Alarm, which lowers the cost of the original product by stripping out its most compelling features: The smart speaker and Bluetooth. Like other products in this category, the Onelink Smoke Carbon Monoxide Alarm is designed to extend the capabilities of a smoke detector by linking it with your smartphone. It still functions by firing off a (rather loud) local siren whenever smoke or CO are detected, but it also (supposedly) sends push alerts to your mobile device, a feature that is most helpful for times when you aren't at home but still want the peace of mind that it's not on fire.

AI for business is an incredibly helpful tool for enterprises when used correctly. Just take a look at some numbers recently published in a Forbes Magazine article: 38% of 235 enterprises the NBRI looked at are already using AI for a variety of tasks; and more importantly, 62% of these enterprises expect to be using AI by 2018. But here's the rub: AI is a massively broad catch all term. Over the last few years, people have termed all sorts of machine coding techniques as'AI;' in fact, saying that your business uses AI is kind of like saying your garden has plants. In other words, AI is an umbrella for a whole host of technologies.

This is that Latent semantic analysis (LSA) do. It is based on how frequent you see the word on the exact topic. Like, there are more tech terms in tech articles, for sure. The names of politicians are mostly found in political news, etc. Yes, we can just make clusters from all the words at the articles, but we will lose all the important connections (for example the same meaning of battery and accumulator in different documents). LSA will handle it properly, that's why its called "latent semantic". So we need to connect the words and documents into one feature to keep these latent connections.

Rapid innovation and productivity breakthroughs require an accelerated digital transformation strategy that melds people, business processes, advanced analytics, and new human/machine interaction technologies. Today, it is the supervised machine learning segment of AI that is generating the most economic value. But as digital transformation accelerates, the abundance of data that AI can consume will drive the speed of AI adoption even faster, including its unsupervised learning segment. We need only look at how quickly conversational AI (CAI) has become part of our everyday lives as we query Alexa, Siri or Cortana. But in the enterprise the interactions can be extremely complex, such as "Hey CAI, summarize the minutes and action items from the recording of the last board meeting."

Natural language has already permeated daily life. The most common examples of natural language are technologies like Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant that recognize patterns in speech to infer meaning and serve up an appropriate response. NLP is also the engine powering some of Google's Gmail capabilities. Gmail uses NLP to automatically parse and understand the contents of your email messages and detect things like meeting invitations, package shipment notifications, and reminders. Another common example of NLP in action is web search engines.

Time: 8 am San Francisco / 11 am New York / 4 pm London Duration: 1 hour including live Q&A Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft and others are focusing their attention on artificial intelligence (AI) and investing heavily to improve virtual assistance and voice recognition applications. But massive volume growth and commoditization will lead to ever-changing component prices, longer lead times and, ultimately, device prices that could leave these assistants sitting idle on store shelves. So what's a smart speaker manufacturer or integrator to do? Join our Tech Convergence, Disruption, and Benchmarking (CDB) webcast, that's what! From components to performance and cost benchmarking, join us for a webcast on AI's hottest application - the digital assistant.

Google is telling Nest camera owners that it's not to blame for a recent string of creepy security incidents. The search giant, which owns Nest, sent an email to owners of its security devices telling them to reset their passwords and enable stronger account authentication settings in light of an uptick in hacked cameras. Last month, users began reporting a number of bizarre cases, where hackers appeared to take over their Nest security cameras to hurl insults at them, spy on their sleeping baby and even tell Amazon's Alexa to play'Despacito' by Justin Bieber. Nest told users that the company notifies users if they detect their email was part of another website breach. When this happens, the firm will proactively disable their Nest account as a security measure.