Alexa's involvement in healthcare is about to extend well beyond putting Echo speakers in hospital rooms. Amazon has unveiled the first-ever HIPAA-compliant Alexa skills, letting you use the voice assistant to take care of sensitive medical issues. Joseph Health's skill can book a same-day appointment, for example, while Cigna and Express Scripts have introduced skills that respectively track wellness incentives and manage prescriptions. Livongo, meanwhile, has a skill for diabetics that can provide blood glucose readings and health tips. Other skills are coming from Atrium Health, Boston Hospital's post-surgery program and Swedish Health Connect.

Tinder ditched its Moments feature in 2015, but that doesn't mean the popular dating app is done with giving users access to ephemeral (aka disappearing) content. Later this year, those of you on Tinder can start posting Snapchat Stories directly to your dating profile, Snap announced today at its Partner Summit in Los Angeles. Thanks to Snap Kit, which lets third-party apps use Snapchat's augmented reality camera, you'll be able to use send Snaps to a new "My Tinder Story" option right inside the app. That means you'll have to use Snapchat if you want to use this feature, as the Tinder app will only be used for viewing, rather than publishing, your Snaps. Aside from Tinder, Snap is also bringing its new App Stories to House Party and Adventure Aide, two social apps that hope to use Stories to help their users better connect with one another.

Amazon has brought Apple Music to Alexa smart speakers for the first time in the UK. The feature was already available in the US but is slowly rolling out across the world. It means that people are no longer limited to only Amazon Music and Spotify as ways for Alexa to play music. Apple Music will work like those same services, allowing people to ask for a song or radio station and have it play from Apple Music. We'll tell you what's true.

Amazon's Echo speakers have a broadcast feature that will help you send a message to family members that might be scattered around the house. It's time for homework or to summon the troops for dinner. Sure, you could holler upstairs, but that seems so last century. You save your voice and text them instead. It's not just the kids we are texting – we're also texting each other, at home. So is texting under one roof becoming the modern-day equivalent of the dinner bell or intercom?

It took the better part of a year to show up, but John Legend's Google Assistant cameo is finally available in the US. Ask the AI helper to "talk like a Legend" and the singer's dulcet tones will greet you when issuing certain commands, such as asking about the weather. Naturally, he'll have answers for questions about his own life, such as his wife Chrissy Teigen or his favorite type of music (take a wild guess). Some of those answers will be canned, but others will take advantage of WaveNet speech synthesis to deliver a customized response. Legend will only be available for a "limited time," and you'll have to be ready to hear the regular Google Assistant voice for those many queries where the crooner isn't available.

Bayesian Matrix Factorization (BMF) is a powerful technique for recommender systems because it produces good results and is relatively robust against overfitting. Yet BMF is more computationally intensive and thus more challenging to implement for large datasets. In this work we present SMURFF a high-performance feature-rich framework to compose and construct different Bayesian matrix-factorization methods. The framework has been successfully used in to do large scale runs of compound-activity prediction. SMURFF is available as open-source and can be used both on a supercomputer and on a desktop or laptop machine. Documentation and several examples are provided as Jupyter notebooks using SMURFF's high-level Python API.

Singer John Legend is the newest voice of the Google Assistant, the tech company announced Wednesday. Google Assistant users, get ready to have the silky voice of John Legend in your home. The tech company on Wednesday announced the 40-year-old singer as the voice of its virtual assistant for a limited time in the U.S. Legend's voice will be able to give users the weather forecast, sing happy birthday and tell jokes. His voice will also tell you a few things about the singer's personal life, including about his wife, Chrissy Teigen. There will also be a few Easter eggs.

Walmart shoppers can now do some online shopping using just their voice. The retail giant is partnering with Google to launch grocery shopping on any devices equipped with Google Assistant. Walmart Voice Order is rolling out to consumers beginning this month, the company said today. Walmart shoppers can now shop using just their voice. It'll become available for users with Google Home devices, as well as Assistant-equipped smart displays, Android phones and iPhones.

This week's giveaway, courtesy of Plex, could put a sleek multimedia machine in your home. Plex's popular grid-view software helps you organize and navigate your files, while giving you access to them on-the-go. The NVIDIA Shield is a cord-cutting Android TV device with 4K HDR output, Google Assistant and GeForce Now game streaming on board. When paired with a Plex Pass, antenna and tuner you can harness OTA live TV with DVR capabilities, putting those shows seamlessly alongside your own library for easy access. Plex lets you access all this content through its app from a computer, mobile device and even supported systems like Sonos or Amazon's Alexa, wherever you go.

Walmart customers once again will be able to voice-order their groceries with Google Assistant, another bid by the brick-and-mortar store to compete with Amazon. The retailer announced the partnership on Tuesday, and said it would gradually roll out the feature in the next few weeks. The development comes after Walmart unceremoniously left Google Express, Google's online shopping tool, back in January, reportedly to develop its own Google Assistant shopping feature. Walmart shoppers will soon be able to add items to their shopping carts by saying "Hey Google, talk to Walmart." The feature will be cross-platform, meaning customers can shop from any device that has the Google Assistant feature, ranging from smart speakers and displays to their Android watch or iPhone.