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 Personal Assistant Systems


Why companies want to mine the secrets in your voice

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Voicesense makes an intriguing promise to its clients: give us someone's voice, and we'll tell you what they will do. The Israeli company uses real-time voice analysis during calls to evaluate whether someone is likely to default on a bank loan, buy a more expensive product, or be the best candidate for a job. It's one of a crop of companies looking for the personal insights contained in our speech. In recent years, researchers and startups have taken note of the rich trove of information that can be mined from voice, especially as the popularity of home assistants like Amazon's Alexa make consumers increasingly comfortable talking to their devices. The voice technology market is growing and is expected to reach $15.5 billion by 2029, according to a report by business analytics firm IdTechEx.


The Rise of Voice Payment Technology in Banking Intellias Blog

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AI is entering our everyday lives. We can ask a computer to order a pair of Converse sneakers, book a hotel, or schedule a romantic dinner with our spouse. Shouldn't we also be able to pay for stuff with our voices? Industries from eCommerce to banking harness voice technologies with every new piece of software released. Voice-enabled virtual assistants gain more recognition each year, and the financial sector is among the top beneficiaries of this innovation.


Why AI will make healthcare personal

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For generations healthcare has been episodic โ€“ someone gets sick or breaks a bone, they see a doctor, and then they might not see another one until the next time they get sick or injured. Now, as emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence open up new possibilities for the healthcare industry in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, policymakers and practitioners are developing new ways to deliver continuous healthcare for better outcomes. Consumers already expect access to healthcare providers to be as smart and easy as online banking, retrieving boarding passes and making restaurant reservations, according to Kaiser Permanente CEO Bernard J Tyson. Nearly three-quarters of Americans with health insurance (72%), for example, say it's important that their health insurance provider uses modern communication tools, such as instant message and two-way video. Innovative healthcare organizations such as Kaiser Permanente are listening.


How Will Artificial Intelligence Affect Our Lives - CITI IO

#artificialintelligence

Artificial Intelligence or, in short, AI, is slowly becoming a part of our everyday lives. While we don't yet have the perfect AI system, that can think and make decisions for itself, there are advanced artificial neural networks that can collaborate on solving difficult situations. Furthermore, modern AI systems are capable of observing and learning based on the information provided. For instance, the voice assistants most of us love to use (Siri, Alexa, Google) use AI algorithms that process the information you provide (searches, discussions, browsing history) and learn about your specific behavior. This way, they advance in the relationship with us and create a more human-like experience.


Modeling Complementary Products and Customer Preferences with Context Knowledge for Online Recommendation

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Modeling item complementariness and user preferences from purchase data is essential for learning good representations of products and customers, which empowers the modern personalized recommender system for Walmart's e-commerce platform. The intrinsic complementary relationship among products captures the buy-also-buy patterns and provides great sources for recommendations. Product complementary patterns, though often reflected by population purchase behaviors, are not separable from customer-specific bias in purchase data. We propose a unified model with Bayesian network structure that takes account of both factors. In the meantime, we merge the contextual knowledge of both products and customers into their representations. We also use the dual product embeddings to capture the intrinsic properties of complementariness, such as asymmetry. The separating hyperplane theory sheds light on the geometric interpretation of using the additional embedding. We conduct extensive evaluations on our model before final production, and propose a novel ranking criterion based on product and customer embeddings. Our method compares favorably to existing approaches in various offline and online testings, and case studies demonstrate the advantage and usefulness of the dual product embeddings as well as the user embeddings.


Wirecutter's best deals: Save $30 on the Jabra Elite Active 65t wireless earbuds

Engadget

This post was done in partnership with Wirecutter. When readers choose to buy Wirecutter's independently chosen editorial picks, it may earn affiliate commissions that support its work. Read Wirecutter's continuously updated list of deals here. Down to $160 from a typical street price of $190, this is a solid deal on these IP56-rated water-resistant wireless earbuds. The lowest we've seen the Jabra Elite Active 65t in new condition to this point is $140, but that holiday deal was comparatively short-lived.


IKEA delays its smart blinds until later this year

Engadget

IKEA is delaying the launch of its smart blinds until later in 2019 in order to work on a firmware update. The Verge reports that the Swedish furniture maker pushed back the release date for the smart blinds, which were expected in Europe last month and in the US in April, because it found an opportunity for "improved functionality". IKEA said that the belated launch means that the smart blinds will be compatible with Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant right away, instead of in a later firmware update. Both the KADRILJ and FYRTUR smart blinds are attractive due to their low price; the KADRILJ starts at around $113 dollars and the FYRTUR starts at around $136 dollars, based on their European pricing. Some existing smart blind options such as Somfy or Velux start at twice that amount.


Apple buys Laserlike news AI startup

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They say Apple confirmed the acquisition, which probably equates to the usual "from time to time we buy companies but we don't discuss it so back up off us already." The group joins John Giannandrea's new artificial intelligence org, which he's been building out over the last little while. Where and how this will fit in, beyond the thin "make Siri better" angle, there's no word yet. But you have talent and you have tech and, hopefully, both of those will help get Apple's virtual assistant where it needs to be for the age of voice and AI to truly begin.


Best TVs: Our top picks, plus plain-language explanations of the most important specs and features

PCWorld

LG says OLED TVs will comprise 20 percent of the company's high-end TV portfolio in 2019, with the world's first 8K OLED (model 88Z9) and the 65-inch roll-up 4K OLED (model 65R9) joining its W-, E-, and C-series 4K models. There are 14 new models in the company's LED-backlit LCD series--the Nanocell line--in screen sizes ranging from 49 to 86 inches. New LG TVs will get a mid-year upgrade that will add Amazon Alexa support to the existing support for Google Assistant. Samsung doesn't have an answer to LG's eye-popping roll-up OLED, but it will offer 8K QLED TVs--the Q900 series--in screen sizes ranging from 65 inches to an eye-popping 98 inches. The company's 4K quantum-dot TVs (the Q60, Q70, Q80, and Q90 series) are available in screen sizes ranging from 43 to 82 inches.


Artificial Intelligence: Trouble or Opportunity? Analytics Insight

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Artificial intelligence (AI) works as the driver of exponential economic value creation by making its way into our lives. You can assume the development of AI through Amazon's Alexa and Facebook's M to Google's Now and Apple's Siri and thus you can track your future growth, incredible opportunities and expected problems. Today, you can take the example of IBM's Watson. Watson is a question-answering computer system which can give answers to questions created in natural language, hypothesis generation and evaluation; and dynamic learning that is developed in IBM's DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. Watson was named after IBM's first CEO, industrialist Thomas J. Watson.