An Amazon Echo may have captured audio of a cold-blooded killing in New Hampshire, and prosecutors have won the rights to the recordings, a judge ruled Friday. Authorities investigating a 2017 double homicide in the town of Farmington believe that the Alexa voice assistant on the Echo may have recorded one of the killings. The double homicide took place when Timothy Verrill allegedly stabbed Christine Sullivan, 48, and Jenna Pellegrini, 32, to death. Verrill pleaded not guilty to killing the two women. Prosecutors believe the Echo captured both the killing of Sullivan and the removal of her body.

Many able-bodied people take for granted the fact that they can easily perceive the world around them and move and communicate freely. AI for accessibility is enabling people with visual impairments to more easily search websites containing images, read handwritten text or describe scenes and images on a screen. AI also helps narrate the world around them and helps them "see" people, objects and scenery. Predictive text enables people with limited mobility to type words quicker and easier than ever before. Speech-to-text services help people with hearing disabilities by generating closed captions, enabling them to more easily communicate.

Bose is masterful at building compact speakers that deliver performances out of proportion to their size, but it's been viewed as having been outmaneuvered by competitors such as Sonos when it comes to building smart speakers that respond to voice commands. The brand-new Bose Home Speaker 500 should change that perception, but not all Bose fans will be pleased with the path the company has taken to get there. While Bose wisely built on the five-year heritage of its SoundTouch series of self-powered speakers and soundbars--some of which are compatible with Amazon Alexa devices, although they don't recognize voice commands themselves--the new mobile app that controls the $400 Home Speaker 500 (and its companion soundbars, the $550 Soundbar 500 and $800 Soundbar 700) rely on different mobile apps. If you already have SoundTouch speakers and want to add one of Bose's new smart speakers to another room, you won't be able to control all of them with the same app. Some consolation: You can use any of Bose's smart speakers to trigger a SoundTouch (or any other Alexa-compatible speaker).

Ring's second-generation home security camera--the Ring Stick Up Cam Wired--can be deployed indoors or out (the first-gen model was strictly an outdoor camera). The company already makes some of our favorite outdoor cameras, and it has a promising new alarm system on the market. This camera is just as good. In TechHive's tests, we found its image quality to be among the best available, and its motion-sensing abilities are equal to or better than many competitors. A well-designed mount allows it to be aligned vertically on almost any surface, and the thoughtful addition of power over ethernet (PoE) support means you can easily install it in places with bad Wi-Fi and/or that are far from an electrical outlet.

There's nothing fancypants about Best Buy's Insignia Voice speaker, but it's usually cheaper than the Google Home Mini. Its audio quality is so-so, but it takes Google commands and can play music that won't burn your ears. Google Assistant can play white noise to help you sleep, and if you ask it the temperature, the Voice will digitally show it. Stick this one in your bedroom, where you can make use of its light-up digital clock.

This week in AI, chipmaker Esperanto raised $58M. Samsung makes moves with its digital assistant. China unveils an AI news anchor. Here's what went down in artificial intelligence this week. Become a CB Insights customer.

LISBON: Forget swiping through endless profiles. Dating apps are using artificial intelligence to suggest where to go on a first date, recommend what to say and even find a partner who looks like your favourite celebrity. Until recently smartphone dating apps - such as Tinder which lets you see in real time who is available and "swipe" if you wish to meet someone - left it up to users to ask someone out and then make the date go well. But to fight growing fatigue from searching through profiles in vain, the online dating sector is turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to help arrange meetings in real life and act as a dating coach. These new uses for AI - the science of programming computers to reproduce human processes like thinking and decision making - by dating apps were highlighted at the four-day Web Summit which wraps up Thursday in Lisbon.

Abstract--Matrix factorization (MF) has been widely used to discover the low-rank structure and to predict the missing entries of data matrix. In many real-world learning systems, the data matrix can be very high-dimensional but sparse. This poses an imbalanced learning problem, since the scale of missing entries is usually much larger than that of observed entries, but they cannot be ignored due to the valuable negative signal. For efficiency concern, existing work typically applies a uniform weight on missing entries to allow a fast learning algorithm. However, this simplification will decrease modeling fidelity, resulting in suboptimal performance for downstream applications. In this work, we weight the missing data non-uniformly, and more generically, we allow any weighting strategy on the missing data. To address the efficiency challenge, we propose a fast learning method, for which the time complexity is determined by the number of observed entries in the data matrix, rather than the matrix size. The key idea is twofold: 1) we apply truncated SVD on the weight matrix to get a more compact representation of the weights, and 2) we learn MF parameters with element-wise alternating least squares (eALS) and memorize the key intermediate variables to avoid repeating computations that are unnecessary. We conduct extensive experiments on two recommendation benchmarks, demonstrating the correctness, efficiency, and effectiveness of our fast eALS method. Atrices are a common data structure to represent the relation between two types of entities in learning systems [1]-[3]. In relational learning, matrix factorization (MF) is a popular approach for dimension reduction by representing the rows (entities of one type) and columns (entities of another type) as two low-rank matrices. The optimization of dimension reduction is usually achieved by minimizing the reconstruction error between the low-rank model and the original data. Xiangnan He and Tat-Seng Chua are with the School of Computing, National University of Singapore, Singapore, 117417. Jinhui Tang is with the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China, 210094.

Prosecutors are once again hoping that smart speaker data could be the key to securing a murder conviction. A New Hampshire judge has ordered Amazon to provide recordings from an Echo speaker between January 27th, 2017 and January 29th, 2017 (plus info identifying paired smartphones) to aid in investigating a double homicide case. The court decided there was probable cause to believe the speaker might have captured audio of the murders and their aftermath. Law enforcement had charged Timothy Verrill with murdering Christine Sullivan and Jenna Pellegrini at the home of Sullivan's boyfriend Dean Smoronk. Verrill had access to the home's security code and had been seen on surveillance cameras with the two women, leading investigators to believe that Smoronk's Echo might have picked up additional information.

If you've so far withstood the temptation to install a smart speaker in your home, worried about the potential privacy pitfalls and a bit embarrassed about the notion of chatting aimlessly to an inanimate object, brace yourselves. This Christmas, the world's biggest tech giants, including Amazon, Google and Facebook, are making another bid for your living room, announcing a range of new devices that resemble tablets you can talk to. Facebook's is called Portal, Google's the Home Hub, and Amazon has unveiled the second version of its Echo Show. You can still speak to the digital assistants embedded in these devices, but their screens enable hands-free video calling (apart from the Google one), can act as a control pad for various smart devices you may have around your home, such as thermostats or security cameras and (this feature is on heavy rotation in all the promotional material) you can use them to prompt you through a recipe without resorting to smearing your buttery fingers over your phone or laptop. But before you make the leap and send off that letter to the north pole, you may want to ask a few questions.