Amazon's decision to design its second-generation Amazon Echo smart speaker with a removable sleeve makes the device customizable. But there's a hidden feature I wasn't aware of until I installed Ninety7's Sky Tote Portable Battery Base: a set of electrical contacts tucked behind a rubber plug on the bottom of the speaker. These contacts enable the Echo 2 to draw power directly from the Sky Tote's large battery, which is charged in turn by the AC adapter that comes with the Echo 2. Operating your Echo 2 on battery power allows you to take the smart speaker with you into any room in your home or even into the yard if your Wi-Fi network is strong enough to reach there. That's a much less expensive alternative to putting an Echo in every room for smart home control, or investing in a multi-room audio system so you can listen to music everywhere. You can also take a battery-powered Echo 2 on picnics and camping trips if you create a mobile hotspot with your smartphone.

If you want to control a Roku player or Roku smart TV by voice, you have lots of options. Many Roku devices include a remote control that supports voice commands, and you can also control Roku hands-free with an Amazon Echo or Google Home smart speaker. But along with all those voice control options comes several limitations, especially when it comes to launching videos or TV channels directly. Knowing what Roku can and can't do will spare you some headaches when you're barking out orders. We'll talk through how to get set up with Roku voice controls, a list of supported voice commands, and some tips for making your experience smoother.

Most companies utilize demographic information to develop their strategy in a market. However, such information is not available to most retail companies. Several studies have been conducted to predict the demographic attributes of users from their transaction histories, but they have some limitations. First, they focused on parameter sharing to predict all attributes but capturing task-specific features is also important in multi-task learning. Second, they assumed that all transactions are equally important in predicting demographic attributes. However, some transactions are more useful than others for predicting a certain attribute. Furthermore, decision making process of models cannot be interpreted as they work in a black-box manner. To address the limitations, we propose an Embedding Transformation Network with Attention (ETNA) model which shares representations at the bottom of the model structure and transforms them to task-specific representations using a simple linear transformation method. In addition, we can obtain more informative transactions for predicting certain attributes using the attention mechanism. The experimental results show that our model outperforms the previous models on all tasks. In our qualitative analysis, we show the visualization of attention weights, which provides business managers with some useful insights.

Your current TV is showing its age. Its resolution is resolutely HD (so very 00s) and it doesn't even respond to voice commands, no matter how loud you bawl. Maybe the time has come to upgrade to something cutting edge. Connected smart TVs are now standard fare. With integrated streaming services, you can season binge from Netflix and Amazon Prime Video without the need for an additional set top box or dongle – or multiple remotes.

Predictive analytics systems are currently one of the most important areas of research and development within the Artificial Intelligence domain and particularly in Machine Learning. One of the "holy grails" of predictive analytics is the research and development of the "perfect" recommendation system. In our paper we propose an advanced pipeline model for the multi-task objective of determining product complementarity, similarity and sales prediction using deep neural models applied to big-data sequential transaction systems. Our highly parallelized hybrid pipeline consists of both unsupervised and supervised models, used for the objectives of generating semantic product embeddings and predicting sales, respectively. Our experimentation and benchmarking have been done using very large pharma-industry retailer Big Data stream.

Apple has once again summoned the media to its Cupertino, California headquarters. Monday's festivities are expected to be a star-studded sneak peak of a new $9.99 monthly entertainment subscription service, offering series and movies from the likes of Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey and Brie Larson. The place to find the service is expected to be on the Apple TV app, which is available for the set-top box and on iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad. Reporters are eager to hear how Apple plans on expanding its base to TVs and other set-top boxes like Roku and Amazon Fire TV Stick. Additionally, Apple is expected to unveil a "Netflix of magazines," that will offer publications like the Wall Street Journal and People for $9.99 monthly.

You know, the first one you see when you turn on the Apple TV set-top box, which alerts you to the latest movies available for rent, TV shows to purchase and the like? Apple sees a bigger future for the app, as a launchpad for a new entertainment service, and a place where folks can subscribe to other subscription services, like HBO and Showtime. This week the company unveiled a new line of iMac computers and iPads, as well as an update to its popular AirPods bluetooth earbuds, to clear the deck and get all the focus on entertainment. Is Apple about to challenge the leaders in streaming? Monday, Apple is expected to sneak peek a new $9.99 monthly entertainment subscription service, offering series and movies from the likes of Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey and Brie Larson.

Smart ceiling fans--models with wireless remote controls and digital-assistant compatibility--are a relatively new thing. But you can still control a legacy fan if you replace your in-wall switch with something like Lutron's Caséta Fan Control. It's not an inexpensive option, especially if you don't already have a Caséta bridge connected to your router, but it is a very good one. The Caséta bridge isn't required if you have no intention of integrating this fan controller into your broader smart home system, but most TechHive readers will. Lutron's Clear Connect Wireless technology is at the heart of the Caséta product line, and it's a robust competitor to the broader Z-Wave and ZigBee ecosystems.

It's cheaper and easier than ever to add some smarts to your home, and today you can make two of your dumb devices smarter for the lowest price we've ever seen. B&H Photo Video is selling the TP-Link HS107 Wi-Fi dual-outlet smart plug for $25Remove non-product link with the on-page coupon today, down from a list price of $35. The coupon applies $10 off for each plug that you buy, so you can get multiple at this price. This smart plug comes with two individually controlled outlets, so you'll be able to plug in and control two devices at once. Using the connected Kasa app, you'll be able to turn devices off and on or create schedules from anywhere using your mobile device.

Your message has been sent. There was an error emailing this page. Vacuuming is one of the most loathed household chores. While it doesn't come with the ick factor of cleaning the toilet or the tedium of dusting, pushing and dragging a noisy, cumbersome vacuum is its own kind of torture. No wonder most of us only break it out the bare-minimum-recommended once a week.