A year after Microsoft and Amazon first announced skills to bring Amazon's personal assistant to Windows users and the Microsoft assistant Cortana to the Amazon Echo connected speaker, the new features are available to consumers. The idea is that from Windows, users will be able to voice shop on Amazon, and on the Amazon Echo speaker, users will be able to hear e-mails and set up calendar appointments from the Microsoft Outlook program. "The goal is to have two integrated digital assistants who can carry out tasks across different dimensions of daily life -- at home or work, and on whatever device is most convenient," Microsoft's Jennifer Langston wrote on a company blog. But before you can get them to work, first you'll need to "enable" their skills. Amazon sends customers to the Alexa smartphone app to add skills, while Microsoft sends people to the web.

All online travel agencies are scrambling to meet the AI driven personalization standard set by Amazon and Netflix. In addition, the world of online travel has become a highly competitive space where brands try to capture our attention (and wallet) with recommending, comparing, matching and sharing. In this post, we aim to create the optimal hotel recommendations for Expedia's users that are searching for a hotel to book. We will model this problem as a multi-class classification problem and build SVM and decision tree in ensemble method to predict which "hotel cluster" the user is likely to book, given his (or her) search details. The data is anonymized and almost all the fields are in numeric format.

More and more technology and digital services are built upon, and driven, by AI and machine learning. But as we are beginning to see, these programmes are starting to replicate the biases which are fed into them, notably biases around gender. It is therefore imperative that the machine learning process is managed from input to output – including data, algorithms, models, training, testing and predictions – to assure that this bias is not perpetuated. Bahar Gholipour notes this bias as AI's so-called'black box' problem -- our inability to see the inside of an algorithm and therefore understand how it arrives at a decision. He claims that'left unsolved, it can devastate our societies by ensuring that historical discrimination, which many have worked hard to leave behind, is hard-coded into our future.'

An integration between Amazon's Alexa and Microsoft's Cortana is now in public preview, according to a Wednesday blog post from Microsoft. The collaboration between two of the most well known digital assistants was first announced in August 2017 and later demoed in early 2018. Relying on two digital assistants, and having them work together, could make it easier for users to stay on top of their work and personal lives, the post noted. For now, Cortana and Alexa can be enabled as a skill on each other, the post said. Cortana can be summoned on Echo devices, and Alexa can be called on Windows 10 PCs and Harman Kardon Invoke speakers.

More people will be able to access the Alexa-Cortana collaboration their companies unveiled last year, now that the team-up is available as a public preview. Unfortunately, you can only take it for a spin if you're in the US, but this is still a much wider release than the limited beta Microsoft and Amazon rolled out a few months ago. So long as you're a customer based in the country, you'll now be able to summon Alexa through Windows 10 devices and Harman Kardon's Invoke speakers and Cortana through Amazon's Echo devices. The two tech giants are working together to bring the experience to more devices. If you want to access Cortana on an Echo speaker, just say "Alexa, open Cortana" to use the assistant to check your emails, schedule and to-do lists.

A year ago, Amazon and Microsoft pledged that their digital assistants, Alexa and Cortana, would become friends. That future has now arrived: Beginning today, you'll be able to invoke Alexa from Windows 10's Cortana, and Cortana from an Alexa device like the Echo. Today (or possibly tomorrow, according to a Microsoft representative) Alexa and Cortana will become skills in their respective devices. Put another way, you'll be able to say "Hey Cortana, open Alexa" on a Windows 10 PC or Harman Kardon Invoke. On an Amazon Echo, you can say "Alexa, open Cortana."

Jefferson Graham's review of the Amazon Fire TV Edition smart TV, with Alexa voice control of channels--which works sometimes, and other times don't. If you have an antenna. Cable and satellite subscribers will have to endure some hurdles. The 43-inch console, which went on sale earlier this summer, is unlike any TV I've never seen. Want to choose a channel?

Persistent people were more likely to get responses from online daters even if they were "out of their league." A link has been sent to your friend's email address. A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. Persistent people were more likely to get responses from online daters even if they were "out of their league."

Should I buy a Chromebook or a Windows laptop? Whether you're seeking out the best computer for your child or just weighing which inexpensive computer is right for your home, considering a Chrome OS-powered Chromebook as a PC alternative is a smart choice--and we can help you choose the right one. A notebook PC powered by Microsoft Windows offers several advantages: Windows offers the most flexibility to run just about any app, as well as the choice of any browser you choose. You can tweak and configure your PC as you choose. That convenience demands more computing horsepower, and often a higher price compared to most Chromebooks. But you'll find some great deals among our top Windows picks, too.

Denon has made an extensive update to the HEOS HomeCinema soundbar we reviewed in 2017. The all-new HEOS HomeCinema HS2 doesn't look radically different, but there are lots of features under the hood that render this a significant update. Indeed, Denon pumped a seemingly endless supply of new tech into this product, transforming it into smart speaker in the process via Amazon Alexa. It's a very slick feature, especially if you live in a smart home filled with devices you can control with voice commands using Amazon's digital assistant. Once you've activated the HEOS Home Entertainment Skill on your Alexa account (read here for details on that), you'll be able to say things like "Alexa, play Steely Dan in the living room" or "Alexa, pause the living room" or "Alexa, volume down in the living room," and so on. As fun as all that can be, I found voice commands to be an incomplete substitute for a remote control--which is a little problematic because Denon doesn't provide one for this speaker.