It was 7:55 p.m. on a Saturday night, and I had just arrived at a small improv workshop and stage space in San Francisco's Mission District. Mere moments after I sat down, someone placed a stool in front of the stage, draped a red cloth over it and placed what would turn out to be an integral part of the evening's performance: an Amazon Echo. It wasn't there to tell jokes -- it's notably not a very good comedian. Instead, it was both prop and participant in a unique improv show called "Alexa, Improvise." From mechanical comics to riffing robots, the integration of artificial intelligence and comedy have been attempted before, with varying degrees of success.

Last week, Amazon updated Fire TV Cube with the Alexa Announcements feature (which lets you dictate a message that the other Echo devices in your home will broadcast) and notifications from your smart doorbell and camera. With Follow-Up Mode, you can ask Alexa for additional information or to carry out further actions after your initial request. So, when you say something like "Alexa, show me comedy movies" and it displays a selection of such films on your TV, you can ask it to play a certain flick without having to say "Alexa" again. You might also use Follow-Up Mode to ask for extra info about the weather or items on a list. You'll need to switch on the feature from the settings in the Alexa app if you'd like to use it.

ABSTRACT Representation learning is an essential problem in a wide range of applications and it is important for performing downstream tasks successfully. In this paper, we propose a new model that learns coupled representations of domains, intents, and slots by taking advantage of their hierarchical dependency in a Spoken Language Understanding system. Our proposed model learns the vector representation of intents based on the slots tied to these intents by aggregating the representations of the slots. Similarly, the vector representation of a domain is learned by aggregating the representations of the intents tied to a specific domain. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first approach to jointly learning the representations of domains, intents, and slots using their hierarchical relationships. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the representations learned by our model, as evidenced by improved performance on the contextual cross-domain reranking task.

Ed Baig gives a look at the new Apple Watch Series 4. One key new feature: fall detection. The changes in the consumer marketplace this year have been largely driven by new tech products. Our world has been shaped in large part by just a handful of revolutionary consumer products and the companies behind them. Such milestones include the first modern automobile, first sold by Mercedes in 1901, and the first smartphone, introduced to the market by IBM in 1994. While the impact new products have on the world rarely rises to the significance of the first personal automobile, each year brings a new lineup of consumer products, some of them the first of their kind, to the market – and 2018 is no exception.

If you've spent any time looking at DIY smart home security products, you'll have come across Ring and Nest. These aren't the only companies in this space, but they are two of the biggest names, and each is fighting hard to win your business. Many articles compare the features, specifications, pluses and minuses of specific Nest and Ring products--including the in-depth reviews here on TechHive--but choosing one is about much more than the gadget you're buying. Your choice can affect a lot of the other technology in your smart home, so you need to consider the big picture. You'll find wo of the biggest tech companies on the planet behind this competition: Google acquired Nest in 2014 for $3.2 billion, while Amazon bought Ring in 2018 for reportedly more than $1 billion.

For the productivity-obsessed, a more joyful and efficient life starts with good habits. Our sensible routines prepare us for success: plan your day, wash your face, early to bed, early to rise, etc. If you have an iPhone and you've updated to iOS 12, you can streamline those routines on your phone across apps, and maybe even create new habits. Shortcuts (née Workflow) was introduced to iPhones and iPads in this fall's software update. The feature allows you to create an ordered series of steps, called "actions," and consolidate them into a single shortcut.

Alexa is getting even more personalized. Amazon has rolled out a slew of software updates for its digital assistant that are aimed at making users' lives easier. The updates include location-based reminders, an email tool and a feature called'Hunches,' in which Alexa is able to remind users if it thinks they've forgotten something. Amazon has rolled out a slew of software updates for its digital assistant. The updates include location-based reminders, an email tool and a feature called'Alexa Hunches' The new features were first announced at Amazon's Alexa-focused product event this fall, but are now set to arrive on voice-activated Echo devices.

In 1909, the American mechanical engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor helped to usher in the era of manufacturing automation when he published "The Principles of Scientific Management." Also known as Taylorism, scientific management aimed to improve economic and labor efficiency by analyzing and streamlining workflows. Training workers to perform tasks by specialization was instrumental in manufacturing's move from custom craftsmanship to mass production. Taylor's scientific management principles evolved into lean management, in which multi-skilling and problem solving among workers became critical to goals of continuous optimization and eliminating waste. And Taylorism is seen in the rise of knowledge work, a term first coined in 1959 by the influential management guru Peter Drucker in his book, "The Landmarks of Tomorrow."

Recommender systems use algorithms to provide users with product or service recommendations. Recently, these systems have been using machine learning algorithms from the field of artificial intelligence. An increasing number of online companies are utilizing recommendation systems to increase user interaction and enrich shopping potential. Use cases of recommendation systems have been expanding rapidly. They across many aspects of eCommerce and online media, and we expect this trend to continue. Recommendation systems (often called "recommendation engines") have the potential to change the way websites communicate with users.

It talks about linking the Google Assistant straight from the Google search bar and positioning it as your own personal Google – a way of pointing to personalized search. Google's recent announcement tells more about what the Google Assistant can do for you, emphasizing the number of models supported and how it makes over a million Actions possible. Google seems to be going beyond its original plans for Assistant and putting effort into expanding its powerful natural language search capabilities. The competitive arena of voice and personalized search has several major challengers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple, each vying for dominance of the smart assistant and smart device market. At this time, Google continues to depend on structured data markup and AMP to assist in providing content matches for the Assistant, meaning that search marketers who invest in both may find a welcome competitive edge. Improvements in Voice Interactions with Technology: Enrique Alfonseca, Staff Research Scientist for Google Assistant wrote a December 21, 2017 article titled the Evaluation of Speech for the Google Assistant. As Google often does, it clued publishers, webmasters, and business owners into new digital marketing changes ahead of time, especially as the mobile-first world comes alive. The information is helpful as search engine optimization spends offer the best ROI is SEO's remain fluid and adjust to maximize new opportunities. Industry wide adoption: Yesterday, January 10, 2017, DISH unveiled its compatibility with the Google Assistant.