Last month, we had our first glimpse of Google Assistant's interpreter mode for smart displays and speakers. Now, everyone with Google Home devices or smart displays (as well as some smart speakers) can try out the mode after Google started rolling it out to those devices, as noted by Android Police. You'll need to activate the mode (by saying something like "turn on interpreter mode or "Help me speak Spanish") in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese or Spanish. Once you've started it though, the interpreter will translate between 26 languages, with support for more on the way. When we tried the mode at CES, we found it to be slow and stilted, which could cause complications for more complex translations.

Dinner dates may soon be a thing of the past as Samsung hopes to match singletons based on what's inside their fridge. A new app, called Refridgerdating, has been launched by the Korean giant to help people let their taste buds dictate their love life. It works alongside Samsung's Family Hub Refrigerator which allows you to monitor and see inside your refrigerator via your phone. The app then takes a photo of the inside of the fridge and shares it to the social media platform for peckish Samsung fridge owners where they can then swipe right or left based on the contents of someone else's food preferences. It is designed to allow people to avoid the unfortunate moment they open the fridge and find it sparsely populated only frequented only by leftovers and takeaway.

Speakers powered by smart assistants are becoming dime-a-dozen commodities. In most cases, a smart speaker is good for voice commands, but I haven't found their musical reproduction particularly satisfying. The Riva Concert is part of Riva Audio's new Voice line of smart speakers that also includes the larger Riva Stadium. This sweet-sounding portable speaker is built to satisfy music lovers, with refined high-tech features you don't often see in smart speakers. Unpacking the Riva, I noted its heavy, solid build. Under the hood, you'll find a 50-watt Class D amplifier powering the three active drivers and three passive radiators.

We recently came across a wearable that is capable of reading people's minds. Experimenting with new form factors and interfaces, the Dr Xavier type of device allows the wearer to control devices and ask queries without speaking. Called AlterEgo, the wearable tech device, designed by researchers at MIT's Media Lab, can transcribe words that wearers verbalise internally. Simply put, the invention uses electrodes attached to the skin to capture words inside the wearer's head. "Our idea was: could we have a computing platform that's more internal, that melds human and machine in some ways, and that feels like an internal extension of our cognition?" said Arnav Kapur, who led the Intelligence Augmentation research of the Silent Computer Interface system at MIT's Media Lab.

Customer interaction and channels preferences have experienced significant changes over time and are constantly evolving and expanding across all industries, including banking. To consolidate customer satisfaction and cultivate customer advocacy, banks must endeavour to continue to meet these changing needs through use of innovative and progressive technology. Self-service banking interactions with technology were first introduced to customer's through implementation of ATMs, marking the advent of self-service banking. For staff, their introduction to the digital age began with some employees using text terminals that provided the first user experience with computing, though these character interfaces lacked intuitive design and required training. Channel options for customers experienced further expansion with availability of phone banking in the 1980s, while staff started using graphical windows screens.

As I noted in the first post in this series, there's a clear appetite among consumers for personalized financial services. This applies equally in the insurance industry. In my last post we saw a snapshot of five insurers delighting their customers with personalized services. But what are some other directions we expect insurers to take on the road to personalization? Working with carriers around the globe, we're seeing personalized services beginning to make inroads across all lines of business.

This is an integrative review that address the question, "What makes for a good explanation?" with reference to AI systems. Pertinent literatures are vast. Thus, this review is necessarily selective. That said, most of the key concepts and issues are expressed in this Report. The Report encapsulates the history of computer science efforts to create systems that explain and instruct (intelligent tutoring systems and expert systems). The Report expresses the explainability issues and challenges in modern AI, and presents capsule views of the leading psychological theories of explanation. Certain articles stand out by virtue of their particular relevance to XAI, and their methods, results, and key points are highlighted. It is recommended that AI/XAI researchers be encouraged to include in their research reports fuller details on their empirical or experimental methods, in the fashion of experimental psychology research reports: details on Participants, Instructions, Procedures, Tasks, Dependent Variables (operational definitions of the measures and metrics), Independent Variables (conditions), and Control Conditions.

Nest is adding Google Assistant functionality to Nest Guard, the base station for its Nest Secure home security system. The feature is rolling out from today through a firmware update, and it will enable owners to ask questions and get answers through the device--the same way it can be used on a smartphone or Google Home smart speaker. The announcement marks the first time Nest, which is owned by Google, has disclosed that there is a microphone in the Nest Guard unit. The specifications page on Nest's website doesn't mention a microphone alongside all the other sensors on the device. A Google spokesperson confirmed the internal microphone isn't enabled by default and the Google Assistant function needs to be affirmatively enabled by a user.

Take an e-commerce website, for example. Its digital supply chain includes the website's developers, its administrators, the cloud services company that hosts the website's data, the CMS provider, and the devices that consumers use to access the website. In addition, every third-party technology provider whose code provides functionality to the website -- e-commerce plugins, personalized recommendation engines, advanced analytics services, inventory tracking solutions, custom product builder, chatbots, etc. -- should also be considered part of the digital supply chain.

We may begin to hear the term itself used less frequently – but that's because it's moving out of the hype phase and quickly becoming a part of everyday life. Soon, it will be taken for granted that pretty much any device we own – cars, TVs, watches, kitchen appliances can go online and communicate with each other. In industry too, tools and machinery are increasingly intelligent and connected, generating data that drives efficiency and enables new paradigms such as predictive maintenance to become a reality, rather than a pipe-dream. In fact, it is predicted that by the end of 2019 there will be 26 billion connected devices around the world. Here are five predictions about how this is likely to play out over the next 12 months as we become increasingly used to the fact that the internet isn't just something we connect to using computers and smartphones, but virtually anything we can think of: According to research by Forrester, businesses will lead the surge in IoT adoption in 2019, with 85% of companies implementing or planning IoT deployments this year.