Palm helped popularize the idea of a modern smartphone with its Palm Treo, but after failing to keep up with the iPhone and Android the company has been reborn. Its new product: A 3.3-inch companion device to work alongside those phones, not replace it. Palm is back – well, sort of. We're not talking about a comeback of the PDA maker, back when that meant personal digital assistant. This Palm has Steph Curry on its team and is making a play for the as-yet undefined market – the one for a mini clone phone.

AI will continue to transform our homes. One of the most prolific uses of AI can be found in the humble smart speakers that nearly one-quarter of Americans have in their homes. It's become increasingly clear that tech companies look to these AI assistants to create new sources of revenue. For example, Amazon's Echo speakers allow people to easily buy products from its website through voice commands, and recent data shows that Amazon Prime members spend $400 more on the company's site if they own an Echo speaker than members who don't have one. Amazon could add $10 billion to its top line by 2020 thanks to the company's sales through its smart speakers, according to RBC Capital Market predictions.

We consider recommendation systems that need to operate under wireless bandwidth constraints, measured as number of broadcast transmissions, and demonstrate a (tight for some instances) tradeoff between regret and bandwidth for two scenarios: the case of multi-armed bandit with context, and the case where there is a latent structure in the message space that we can exploit to reduce the learning phase.

Amazon yesterday filed a patent with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office related to detecting physical and emotional wellbeing of users based on interactions captured in voice data. The first example in the patent application depicts a user coughing while asking Alexa about being hungry. Alexa responds by suggesting a chicken soup recipe and when refused then offers to order cough drops with one-hour delivery. The voice recognition system is using sounds such as a cough or sniffle to determine if a user is unwell. However, the patent is not limited by these sounds and could be extended to different types of normal speech.

Alexa is no longer "new." The smart-tech revolution is now in full swing, and Amazon Echo is at the heart of it. According to Edison Research, nearly 40 million people own voice-activated speakers, which is about one in six U.S. adults. Echo changed the game, and millions of households have integrated Alexa into their daily lives. For many technophiles, it's not a question of whether to invest in smart technology, but what kind.

To date, using Google's real-time translations has officially required a set of Pixel Buds. But what if you'd rather not use the official audio gear? You might not have to. Droid Life has noticed that Google quietly changed a support page to state that real-time translation is available for "all Assistant-optimized headphones and Android phones," not just Pixel Buds and Pixel phones as the page said as recently as October 11th. Users have already verified that this works on a basic level -- you can use the Pixel 3's USB-C headphones to translate on a non-Pixel phone.

Move over mobile marketing: A little voice is whispering that your time as "the next big thing" is almost up. Actually, that whisper is more of a shout, and it's "Echo"-ing across the digital landscape, as voice-response technology is rapidly emerging as the most disruptive force to hit the industry since the internet became a visual medium. Just how loud will this sonic boom be? If your brand is starting to hear Siri's siren-like call to action, here are some insights and considerations you might find helpful: Research from OC&C Strategy Consultants projects that voice shopping will jump to $40 billion in 2022 (up from $2 billion today). However, the last-touch voice commerce experience has yet to reach the mass adoption levels that retailers like Amazon initially envisioned.

It's becoming ubiquitous and invisible,

Turns out, artificial intelligence isn't just helpful for powering chatbots and voice assistants. It may also be able to help brands create emotionally intelligent ads. A suite of big-name marketers like Microsoft and Gap have started relying on AI to optimize the content of their ads, tapping into ad-tech startups like Persado to generate personalized ads based on the language a user is most likely to respond to. Think of it as an AI-powered, automated copywriting machine. The Persado platform can be used across web, email, text, and social ads.

Virtual assistants are a fast-growing phenomenon, not only with the use of consumer products such as Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple's Siri, but as part of automated communications with many industries, such as airlines and banking. The healthcare market has lagged behind, but in September, Nuance and Epic released the first version of a conversational virtual assistant. It operates on Nuance's Dragon Medical cloud-based platform and is available through Epic Haiku, a mobile app for physicians that interfaces with the Epic EHR. The assistant is an upgrade to the app, used by physicians, which provides secure access to clinic schedules, hospital patient lists, health summaries, test results, and notes, while supporting dictation. The immediate impact has the potential to reduce provider burnout, diminish difficulty locating information in the EHR, and change the physician-patient dynamic.