Amazon's Echo devices kicked off the smart speaker craze, with a variety of options to fit any connected home. The Amazon Echo Kids Edition is no exception, bringing the smarts of the rest of the lineup to a kid-friendly package, and today you can get one on Amazon for $35--half off a list price of $70 and its lowest price ever. This round, compact smart speaker comes with the power of Alexa built in, so kids can take advantage of voice control capabilities, as well as Alexa's expanding skill set. Kids can ask their Echo to play music, control smart devices, tell jokes and stories, answer questions, and more. To give kids access to plenty of family-friendly content, this smart speaker comes with a one-year subscription to FreeTime Unlimited.

A security flaw in gay dating app Jack'd has left private intimate photos publicly exposed on the internet. Anyone with a web browser who knows where to look can access millions of private photos, even if they do not have a Jack'd account. Researcher Oliver Hough told BBC News he had reported the flaw to Jack'd a year ago but it has still not been fixed. The company has not responded to a request for comment. News site The Register first reported the flaw on 5 February, even though it had not been fixed, in order to warn the app's users.

It's a sunny afternoon in early January and, at the moment, Google owns this town. The search giant has come here for a marketing blitz at CES, the biggest tech showcase in the world. Its sole mission is trumpeting the Google Assistant, its digital concierge software for controlling your smart thermostat, getting your flight information and reading you headlines. Huffman, vice president of engineering for the Assistant, is standing with me in a big glass orb on the High Roller, Sin City's version of the London Eye observation wheel. We've just about reached the apex of the ride.

Evolving continuously is referred to be as a revolution. Yes, we the mankind are igniting the speed of revolution by tremendously improving our lifestyles technically and socially at lightning speed. Robotics is one such evidence of Human intelligence which proved that there is no word called as Impossible in our dictionary. Robotics is an amalgam of different engineering branches like Mechanical, Electrical and Computer Sciences. Each and every department plays a key role in designing and developing the new ideas of Robot science.

I started at Slate not too long ago, and in my first weeks in the magazine's New York office, I was faced with a problem that is familiar to anyone who's ever started a new office job. I was surrounded by dozens of new faces and struggled to connect them to names. Which man with a scruffy beard was the one in charge of podcasts again? Who was the friendly woman at my desk pod offering me some of her snacks? I found myself wishing, as I often do, that everyone was wearing a nametag.

From virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa, to recommendations from a music or movie streaming service, to self-driving cars, Artificial Intelligence is all around us. And yet, few technologies are as polarizing and misunderstood. The notion of Artificial Intelligence often generates either awe or fear in most people, but whether you believe it will save the world or enslave the world, the first thing you need to know is that there is more than one type of AI. General Artificial Intelligence (also known as "Artificial General Intelligence" or "AGI") is what most people are thinking of when they talk about AI: a computer that's as "smart" as a person--one that exhibits reason and common sense, makes decisions, perceives the world around it and can learn new things on its own. Such a system would require immense computational power that, when combined with advanced robotics, would be able to carry out any task a person could do, as well as many others we could not.

Conversational interfaces are permeating all aspects of our digital experiences. Digital assistants work alongside human agents to provide customer support. Chatbots are used to both market products and enable their purchases. IoT and other smart devices like Google Home or Amazon Echo enable hands-free operation through voice commands. Businesses are also starting to replace clunky enterprise UI for streamlined natural language interfaces to improve productivity and output.

Customer service careers could be wiped out in the next five years by AI-based chatbots and customer service voice assistants. That is the prediction of Gary Blower, a solution architect and senior technical consultant at software and development company Clearvision. Blower, who previously worked as a technical specialist for RBS, said this could become the norm as soon as 2024, with AI powerful enough to pass'the Turing test', in which robots are indistinguishable from humans. "I didn't think this was the case a couple of years ago, but now I look at the widespread adoption of Amazon's Alexa, Siri, and Google Voice that are essentially machine learning, based on algorithms." Blower suggested that there are a number of commercial and banking companies which are already implementing smart tech in the place of human customer service, which makes the public "hard-pressed to get hold of a human being."

One pressing issue of product recommendation systems today is the scalability of algorithms with large, real-world datasets. It's possible that a recommendation algorithm will work well and produce accurate results with small datasets, yet may start producing inaccurate or inefficient results with large ones. In addition, some algorithms are computationally expensive to run – the larger the dataset, the longer it will take, and the more it will cost the business to analyse and make recommendations from it. Advanced, large-scale assessment methods are required to deal with both issues.

Without question, 2018 was a big year for artificial intelligence (AI) as it pushed even further into the mainstream, successfully automating more functionality than ever before. Companies are increasingly exploring applications for AI, and the general public has grown accustomed to interacting with the technology on a daily basis. The stage is set for AI to continue transforming the world as we know it. In 2019, not only will the technology continue growing in global prevalence, but it will also spawn deeper conversations around important topics, fuel innovative business models, and impact society in new ways, including the following seven. In 2018, we witnessed major strides in MLaaS with technology powerhouses like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon leading the way.