There are lots of options when it comes to smart lighting, but if you want to do it right, you've got to go with a smart dimmer switch. Even the best smart bulbs become dumb with the accidental flick of a light switch, but these dimmers always stay powered since they have a direct power line. After all of our testing, it's clear that Lutron's Caséta Wireless system (available at Amazon for $99.95) is the best dimmer around. While dimmers, and even smart dimmers, have existed for decades, these new models are taking off thanks to smart assistants like Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, and Google Home, which allow for voice control and remote usage from cell phones and tablets. Even though pretty much all dimmers work the same, there can be big differences in the quality of their app-connected smarts.

Microsoft could be entering the wireless headphone market. The tech giant is reportedly developing'Surface Buds' in an effort to take on Apple's wildly successful AirPods, Thurrott reported, citing sources close to the situation. The device is being developed as part of a secret project, codenamed'Morrison,' and could be coming as soon as later this year. Microsoft could be entering the wireless headphone market. The tech giant is reportedly developing'Surface Buds' in an effort to take on Apple's wildly successful AirPods It's not year clear how Microsoft intends to differentiate its earbuds from others that are currently available from competitors.

Hundreds of human reviewers across the globe, from Romania to Venezuela, listen to audio clips recorded from Amazon Echo speakers, usually without owners' knowledge, Bloomberg reported last week. We knew Alexa was listening; now we know someone else is, too. This global review team fine-tunes the Amazon Echo's software by listening to clips of users asking Alexa questions or issuing commands, and then verifying whether Alexa responded appropriately. The team also annotates specific words the device struggles with when it's addressed in different accents. According to Amazon, users can opt out of the service, but they seem to be enrolled automatically.

Logitech's Harmony division makes better universal remote controls than just about anybody. Its latest model, the $250 Harmony Express, might be its most practical, even if it's not the company's most powerful. The Harmony Express doesn't have all the bells and whistles of the company's top-of-the-line Harmony Elite ($350 MSRP), which Logitech will continue to sell. The Express doesn't have a touch-sensitive display, it doesn't have as many programmable buttons, and it can't execute complex macros that incorporate both home entertainment gear and smart home devices. The Express can do much of what the Elite can for a lot less money, and--since it has Amazon's Alexa onboard--it can do some things the Elite can't.

Logitech's popular Harmony universal remotes have long been the go-to solution for tech-savvy nerds who want to replace the bounty of ugly rectangles littering their coffee tables with a single, all-powerful option. But universal remotes are still pretty complex on their own, with dozens of buttons and, in some cases, LCD screens. You're basically swapping several remotes for something that looks like it belongs in one of NASA's Mission Control Centers. Now, there's something simpler: the Harmony Express, a compact universal remote that replaces a slew of buttons with Amazon Alexa voice controls. The $250 Express isn't meant to replace the Harmony Elite, which Logitech released back in 2015 and is still one of the best high-end universal remotes around.

Robot vacuums today are not the clunky furniture destroyers from yesteryear. Modern automated floor cleaners now connect to the internet, which allows you to control your robot with smart apps, as well as with digital assistants like Alexa and Google Home. When smart connectivity first debuted, our testing showed it was a bit of a gimmick. However, over time, smart technology has evolved to the point it's a major plus when done right. Recent smart robot vacuums have features like onboard cameras so they can act like security cameras as well as floor cleaners.

Industrial recommender systems usually consist of the matching stage and the ranking stage, in order to handle the billion-scale of users and items. The matching stage retrieves candidate items relevant to user interests, while the ranking stage sorts candidate items by user interests. Thus, the most critical ability is to model and represent user interests for either stage. Most of the existing deep learning-based models represent one user as a single vector which is insufficient to capture the varying nature of user's interests. In this paper, we approach this problem from a different view, to represent one user with multiple vectors encoding the different aspects of the user's interests. We propose the Multi-Interest Network with Dynamic routing (MIND) for dealing with user's diverse interests in the matching stage. Specifically, we design a multi-interest extractor layer based on capsule routing mechanism, which is applicable for clustering historical behaviors and extracting diverse interests. Furthermore, we develop a technique named label-aware attention to help learn a user representation with multiple vectors. Through extensive experiments on several public benchmarks and one large-scale industrial dataset from Tmall, we demonstrate that MIND can achieve superior performance than state-of-the-art methods for recommendation. Currently, MIND has been deployed for handling major online traffic at the homepage on Mobile Tmall App.

Smart bulbs help you automate and fine-tune your lighting situation, and today you can get a four-pack of our favorite white LED bulb, the Philips Hue White Ambiance A19, for $40 on Amazon. That's down from a list price of $50 and the lowest we've ever seen it. These LED bulbs provide detailed control options, allowing you to personalize the dim, set schedules, turn lights off and on from anywhere, and more using the Philips Hue app. You can also control the bulbs using your voice when you connect them with an Amazon Echo, Google Home, or Apple HomeKit. And you won't have to replace them often--each bulb lasts over 25,000 hours, or 20 years.

A new challenger could be approaching Apple's iconic AirPods (pictured above). Microsoft is developing a pair of Surface-branded wireless earbuds, according to Brad Sams' oft-reliable sources at Thurrott.com. Microsoft surprised the world by releasing the surprisingly good Surface Headphones last October. The sleek, premium-priced $350 headset features an intuitive control scheme and some wickedly good noise cancellation chops, courtesy of four active mics that keep tabs on the sounds around you. "Spin the noise cancellation dial on Microsoft's new cans, and the world fades away," we wrote at the time. Of course, you could also use the Surface Headphones to converse with Microsoft's Cortana digital assistant via its mobile app.

Spotify, Pandora and YouTube are currently the top games in town for listening to online music for free, via ads. Possibly add Amazon to the list. Billboard reports that Amazon looks to launch a similar service, which would be available only if you ask Alexa. The songs could be accessed via the Echo connected speakers, which are made by Amazon. Amazon currently offers some 2 million songs available free to Echo owners who also pay $119 yearly to subscribe to the company's Prime for expedited shipping and online music, movies and TV.