In 2018 the world saw a marriage of policy and technology to give consumers more control over their data. In 2019, as the relationship between humans and technology continues to become more intertwined, I believe we'll see an even more marked shift in how we deal with data, from stricter guidelines outlining how marketers can access it to a greater dependency on the devices we use to make sense of it. In 2019, marketers need to keep up or be left behind. In May, the EU took a major step toward protecting the digital rights and privacy of its citizens when it implemented GDPR, launching a new standard that changed how companies handle consumer privacy and gave people new rights to their own data. GDPR spawned an international awareness and conversation about data privacy, data mining and control over individual usage.

Well spare a thought for all those people in the world who share their name with the digital assistant.

Conversational agents are exploding in popularity. However, much work remains in the area of non goal-oriented conversations, despite significant growth in research interest over recent years. To advance the state of the art in conversational AI, Amazon launched the Alexa Prize, a 2.5-million dollar university competition where sixteen selected university teams built conversational agents to deliver the best social conversational experience. Alexa Prize provided the academic community with the unique opportunity to perform research with a live system used by millions of users. The subjectivity associated with evaluating conversations is key element underlying the challenge of building non-goal oriented dialogue systems. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive evaluation strategy with multiple metrics designed to reduce subjectivity by selecting metrics which correlate well with human judgement. The proposed metrics provide granular analysis of the conversational agents, which is not captured in human ratings. We show that these metrics can be used as a reasonable proxy for human judgment. We provide a mechanism to unify the metrics for selecting the top performing agents, which has also been applied throughout the Alexa Prize competition. To our knowledge, to date it is the largest setting for evaluating agents with millions of conversations and hundreds of thousands of ratings from users. We believe that this work is a step towards an automatic evaluation process for conversational AIs.

A festive update for the Amazon Echo has enabled a brand new set of Christmas features for its Alexa voice assistant. Owners can ask the smart speaker to sing a Christmas carol, tell a Christmas story, or even find out if Alexa believes in Santa Claus. A number of other Alexa Skills available for download include Christmas Radio, Christmas Sounds, and Christmas Countdown - all of which are free to enable. An Alexa Skill from the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) allows people to ask their Amazon Echo device for the whereabouts of Santa Claus. "Just try saying'Alexa, where's Santa'," the Skill's description states.

Get used to people in your house saying "What?" a lot. If you just got a new smart speaker from Amazon or Google, you'll be barking commands out loud, and people around you may wonder what's going on. You'll be engaging in the next step of computing, voice style, using Google or Amazon speakers (or perhaps Siri in Apple's HomePod or Microsoft's Cortana in Invoke from Harman Kardon) to ask for a specific music selection or playlist, the weather, latest news or podcast, the answer to a math problem or how to spell a word. The smart speaker market is dominated by Amazon and Google, so we'll focus here on those two. They were among the most heavily marketed during the holidays, with massive discounts for the entry-level Echo Dot and Google Home Mini at under $25, so we expect them to be under many trees.

Want to save time on Web forms? Go to Settings Safari Autofill and pre-load your contact info. This new device will also have iOS 12 on it. Check out this handy list of the most important new features you should learn about in Apple's latest mobile operating system. You should also read up on all the ways iOS 12 will make you safer. One last recommendation: Get rid of the clutter.

In her nearly 13 years at Match Group Inc., where she became chief executive in January, Ms. Ginsberg has watched the stigma of online dating fade almost entirely. Today, many people even proudly pursue a multiapp dating strategy. Match owns well-known dating apps including Tinder, Hinge and OkCupid, along with lesser-known brands such as PetPeopleMeet.com, The Dallas-based company is expanding in Latin America, Japan, South Korea and India to tap what it estimates is a market of 600 million singles. Her first year at the helm has been an eventful one. After unsuccessfully trying to acquire the dating app Bumble, Match sued its rival last spring for infringing patents for "swiping" and other features that have made Tinder popular.

Now it's time for All Tech Considered. SHAPIRO: We've spent the last few weeks taking stock of the changes 2018 brought to the tech world and our relationship with the technology we use every day. Now let's look at one particular advancement. The voice of artificial intelligence took a big step forward this year. SIRI: My name is Siri.

If I was reviewing Anki's Vector as just another smart speaker or Alexa-enabled device, it would be hard to recommend. It takes too long to answer, has a limited set of skills (and Skills), and often won't respond to its wake word until the second or third attempt. But the thing is, even with all its flaws, Vector is just so darn likable. When it's not responding to your queries, Vector sleeps (and snores). He reacts to loud noises.

The internet is full of misinformation, and the internet of things is no exception. Smart speakers like Amazon's Alexa have been known to lie to children, with kid-friendly modes designed to shield them from life's harsher truths, from the reality of where babies come from to the career path of Stormy Daniels. But no question could be of greater significance for kids at this time of year than the one about the existence of the man who knows whether they've been bad or good. Google, Amazon, and Apple are not about to get themselves put on parent's naughty list--or worse, get unplugged--by telling kids there is no Santa. All three tech companies have special Christmas-themed answers in place this festive season, from whether Santa is real to whether you've been naughty or nice.