Apple Music is coming to Amazon's Echo smart speakers with Alexa – finally! Amazon and Apple will make the streaming service available to current Apple Music subscribers or potential customers starting the week of Dec. 17. As a subscriber to Apple Music, you always had workarounds for streaming Apple's service through an Echo, notably by pairing your phone or tablet via Bluetooth to the speaker. What you couldn't do, though, was ask Alexa to play the specific music you were in the mood to hear, and you were pretty much limited to volume and play controls. More: Spotify vs. Apple Music vs. YouTube Music: Which is best for your hard-earned cash?

Apple Music is coming to the Echo--but which speaker is best? If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA Today's newsroom and any business incentives. Apple and Amazon made a surprise move Friday, revealing to USA Today that Apple Music will finally support Alexa-enabled devices (like Amazon Echo speakers) in mid-December. Echo speakers are significantly cheaper than Apple's massive HomePod--especially due to Amazon's ongoing Cyber Week deals--meaning there's now a simple, affordable way to get Alexa and Apple Music in every room in your house.

Later in this post, I'm going to name three different machine learning service providers. Based on the one you pick, like a fortune teller, I'm going to tell you a little bit about yourself. Seems like all machine learning is good for is asking Siri to play a song or self-driving cars that are far too expensive for me to afford. They have a saying here in Texas: all hat, no cattle. What if machine learning could do useful things for me? Things that actually saved me and my team time?

Indeed, voice search is disrupting the world of text-based searches, but it is only part of the larger shift on how businesses need to think about communications with current clients and new consumers who have the potential of becoming a client. Conversational AI represents an easy way to get immediate answers and is shifting consumer behavior; voice search is a key player in the bigger picture of getting solutions fast but is only one part of it. The AI-based technology of natural language processing that enables voice search is pretty astounding, but in truth, Google doesn't understand natural language processing yet. The race is on with many participants who are trying to. Answer engine optimization (AEO) is a means in which SEO's are engaging with search engines to get their answer matched to a searcher's query. Search engine marketers can take advantage of AEO and conversational AI can help your business transition into the realm that fits trends in how users gain information. Conversational commerce is e-commerce conducted through various means of conversation. They may take the form of a live chat on e-commerce sites, a live conversation on messaging apps, through chatbots directly on websites, or via voice assistants.

Many companies want to ride on the wave of machine learning and AI and are looking for ways to develop such systems into their business. The technology of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and deep learning specifically are relatively new, and the number of experts in this domain is limited. The main mistake that some of these companies are doing is to start with the technology and not with the business needs. They are hiring a couple of data scientists and give them access to the databases, and ask them to build something interesting from the data. It is true that you can find some interesting anecdotes in the data, but for a successful system, the process should be different.

Interactive user interfaces need to continuously evolve based on the interactions that a user has (or does not have) with the system. This may require constant exploration of various options that the system may have for the user and obtaining signals of user preferences on those. However, such an exploration, especially when the set of available options itself can change frequently, can lead to sub-optimal user experiences. We present Explore-Exploit: a framework designed to collect and utilize user feedback in an interactive and online setting that minimizes regressions in end-user experience. This framework provides a suite of online learning operators for various tasks such as personalization ranking, candidate selection and active learning. We demonstrate how to integrate this framework with run-time services to leverage online and interactive machine learning out-of-the-box. We also present results demonstrating the efficiencies that can be achieved using the Explore-Exploit framework.

LOS ANGELES – The floor of the sprawling Los Angeles Auto Show is filled with fancy vehicles showing off their ultra-flashy, state-of-the-art infotainment systems, with giant screens that drivers really shouldn't be looking at while driving. Inside the car, "it makes more sense to use voice," says Ned Curic, the vice-president of Amazon's Alexa Auto division. "You want to keep your hands on the wheel and eyes on the road, so using your voice makes more sense." To that end, Amazon is looking to bring to bring the Alexa personal assistant to autos to help drivers with important tools like mapping and music navigation and to help find the nearest gas station and the like. Curic came to the Auto Show this week to make a pitch to automakers and third-party vendors.

Google is bringing a bunch of new features to its Assistant for the holidays, though you can probably thank Jeff Bezos, rather than Santa for them. The most notable feature is "visual lyrics" that will let you see and learn the words to your favorite songs on Google's Home Hub or another smart display device. Amazon has had such a feature for quite awhile, having introduced it over a year ago with its Alexa-powered Echo Show smart display. To sing along with Google's device, you'll need a Google Play Music subscription, and it will only work with select songs. Another Amazon feature that Google, er, paid homage to is "Pretty Please."

Now that the Home Hub is widely available, Google is releasing its other smart speaker update this year: namely, that Aqua Home Mini it was supposed to ship in late October (yes, roughly a month ago). The minty-colored puck costs the same $49 as other Minis and doesn't offer any functional advantages, but it might be just the ticket if Coral clashes with your living room or you want to coordinate with an Aqua-tinted Home Hub. It's not clear how widely available the color will be, but you can find it at Walmart in addition to the Google Store. At this point, the main question is whether or not the original Google Home will follow suit and help you create a more harmonious connected home. For now, you might have to make do with other colors if you demand a consistent look.

Virtual assistants such as Amazon's Alexa and Google Home have the capacity to analyse how happy and healthy a couple's relationship is, research has found. In-home listening devices will soon be able to judge how functional relationships are as well as interrupt an argument with an idea for how to resolve it, the study said. The research, by Imperial College Business School, stated that within the next two to three years, digital assistants could predict with 75 per cent accuracy the likelihood of a relationship or marriage being a success. The technology would reach a verdict through acoustic analysis of communication between couples – examining everything from everyday encounters to arguments. The virtual assistants would then be able to provide relationship advice and what researchers refer to as democratising counselling.