Samsung has finally unveiled its own smart speaker in a bid to take on Amazon, Apple, and Google. At the firm's Unpacked event in Brooklyn, New York today, Samsung teased a look at its Galaxy Home speaker, equipped with the Bixby voice assistant. But, Samsung remained tight-lipped on most of the details. The firm hasn't yet revealed how much it will cost or when it will officially launch, but promised more information is to come at the developer conference in November. At the firm's Unpacked event in Brooklyn, New York today, Samsung teased a look at its sleek Galaxy Home speaker, equipped with the Bixby voice assistant.

Samsung's Bixby digital assistant is taking the next step in its challenge of Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and Apple's Siri, and will soon be available in a high-end speaker with an integrated smart home hub. At the launch of its Galaxy Note 9 smartphone today in New York, Samsung said a Bixby speaker, called Galaxy Home, is on the way. The speaker will feature an integrated SmartThings hub, which will enable it to control the vast array of smart home devices in the SmartThings ecosystem. That should make it much more powerful than the Amazon Echo Plus, which is equipped with a ZigBee radio, but doesn't support the equally popular Z-Wave platform. We knew a smart speaker was coming from Samsung sometime this year, but not much else.

Samsung has been developing a speaker based on its own digital assistant, Bixby, for a while. During its Galaxy Note 9 event in New York City, the company finally revealed the Galaxy Home smart speaker, a clear rival to Apple's HomePod, the Google Home and Amazon's Echo line. The device, which features the rumored tripod design with a round body, is powered by Harman's AKG audio and was engineered to "make music sound amazing." Of course, since this is a smart speaker after all, you'll be able to use your voice to control it. Samsung says there are eight microphones built-in for far-field voice recognition, which will make it possible for it to hear your commands from long distances within your home or office.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man on a dating app will pursue a date with a single word: "hey." And according to a new study, that may be the best strategy for attracting a partner who is out of your league. Elizabeth Bruch and Mark Newman at the University of Michigan, US, studied the messaging patterns of 94,478 men and 92,457 women on a free online dating website. The users were located in New York, Boston, Chicago and Seattle, all were seeking heterosexual relationships, and their genders were self-identified. They found that women receive more messages than men, and most of the messages sent on the service go to only a small fraction of users.

SEATTLE, July 31, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- DefinedCrowd Corp., a smart data company for AI, announced the closing of a $11.8M Series A funding round today. Led by New-York/Zurich based Evolution Equity Partners, the round brought in Kibo Ventures, Mastercard and EDP (Energias de Portugal) as new investors, and secured additional capital from current investors Sony, Portugal Ventures, Amazon Alexa Fund, and Busy Angels. "DefinedCrowd's SaaS platform has very quickly positioned the company as an innovative leader to solve AI/ML's global most pressing problem, the need for continuous access to highly accurate data. Evolution Equity Partners is honored to lead this growth-targeted Series A round that comes at an inflection point for DefinedCrowd to manage its triple digit revenue growth trajectory and customer on-boarding globally," says Dennis Smith, Founder and Managing Partner at Evolution Equity Partners and the newest member of DefinedCrowd's Board of Directors. The capital secured in this Series A round will be used to develop DefinedCrowd's product offerings, expand the team, and rapidly increase market-share globally.

To answer the question posed in the subhed, no, Polk didn't create the Command Bar by taking a hole saw to the middle of its chassis and dropping an Amazon Echo Dot in there. But the feature is unquestionably designed to look like that, and this soundbar does support Amazon's Alexa digital assistant. Soundbars are hot these days, and they run the gamut from sub-$100 cheapies to the ludicrously priced, but wow-it's-impressive Creative X-Fi Sonic Carrier. Polk is going after the better-than-entry-level market with this $300 speaker. That makes it $100 cheaper than the recently reviewed Sonos Beam, and it comes with a nicely matched subwoofer.

When you buy an item on a favored website, does the site show you pictures of what others have bought? Retailers have been building such systems for years, many built using the programming language R. For older implementations of recommender systems, it's time to consider improving performance and scalability by moving these systems to the cloud --the Azure cloud. Recently, we were asked to help a customer improve the performance and process surrounding the R implementation of their recommender solution and host the model in Azure. Many of their early analytic products were built in R, and they wanted to preserve that investment. After a review of their solution, we identified bottlenecks that could be vanquished.

Winning a competition really can stoke a man's ego – to the extent that they may be more likely to cheat on their partners, a new study suggests. Researchers have found that men experience a testosterone boost when they believe they've bested another man at something, causing some to view themselves as a more valuable'sexual prospect.' And, it all boils down to the belief that they have won, as opposed to the actual effort of the task itself. The study showed that winning causes hormonal fluctuations in men that can influence their sexual behaviour and make them more likely to approach attractive women. Researchers have found that men experience a testosterone boost when they believe they've bested another man at something, causing some to view themselves as a more valuable'sexual prospect.'

Primary care serves as patients' first point of contact with the healthcare system and is a continuing focal point of comprehensive, accessible, and community-based care [1]. More than just a gate-keeping process for specialist referrals, it has been widely recognized for its focus on caring for the longterm health of patients rather than solely for treating specific diseases or conditions. As such, primary care helps deliver more equitable health outcomes across populations and meets 80-90% of individuals' health needs throughout their lives [2]. To this end, a recent special report from the Economist stated that "good primary care is an essential precondition for a decent healthcare system" [3]. The World Health Organization (WHO) emphasized several defining features for effective and socially productive primary care, including comprehensiveness, person-centeredness, and continuity of care [4]. In particular, person-centeredness refers to the "clinical method of participatory democracy" that allows patients to participate in decisions that affect their health.

The promises of AI are great, but understanding the considerations needed to build and implement AI within an organization is challenging. Building the right solution, leveraging the skill sets available and solving the highest-priority problems for the banking organization is the key to success. Subscribe to The Financial Brand via email for FREE!From business innovations and media headlines to TV and movies, it seems that artificial intelligence (AI) is virtually everywhere. While still in its early stages across the financial services industry, AI adoption is expected to accelerate over the next few years. And it's expected to save companies big bucks.