Since its announcement at WWDC, Apple has been teasing a range of iOS 12 improvements scheduled for release in the fall. The roster includes a streamlined Siri, speeding up elderly iPhones, and a FaceTime overhaul, with no mention of HomePod updates. However, it has emerged that the smart speaker could soon receive a much requested feature: phone call support. According to a HomePod prompt unearthed by 9to5Mac inside the latest iOS 12 developer beta release, HomePod will soon let you make calls directly on top of its standard skillset. Gone will be the necessity of dialing a number on your iPhone before switching over to HomePod for audio output.

Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft are all working on artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance their virtual assistants. But a new report shows that Google's Assistant has come first in an IQ test that saw it compete with Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, and Microsoft's Cortana. It appears that the recent developments by the search giant have improved the Assistant quite significantly and made it a strong contender against Siri, which has got the second position in the test. All four voice-based virtual assistants were asked 800 questions. In summary, the google assistant was able to answer 86% of questions then Siri answered 79% questions correctly and Cortana was found to be laggard in the race. Artificial intelligence is greatly relevant for this progress.

Alexa Cast is a new feature on Amazon products for the streaming and control of media content. It's similar to Google's Chromecast and Apple's AirPlay, and it allows users to transfer the playback of media from a smartphone or tablet to a compatible device. At launch it's available in the Amazon Music app, which you'll need to download and install if you haven't already. It can control Amazon's Echo smart speakers; third-party Alexa-compatible speakers, such as the highly rated Sonos One and Sonos Beam soundbar (or any other Sonos speaker if either of those is already on your network); and Apple AirPlay devices. To use it, look for the "casting" logo in the Amazon Music app.

In a remarkable new app, Google has addressed one of the most pervasive grievances of our impersonal times: voice mail jail, or its technical name IVR (Interactive Voice Response). Although IVR's multiple menu options, long waits, and tinny music are a bother, they pale by comparison with the annoyance of the technology's characterless robotic voices. This is where a new feature of Google Assistant, called Google Duplex, a technology for automating for "real world" telephone tasks, has come to the rescue. And it does so by going against the grain by including the bane of all speakers, the dreaded "um" and "ah" words, also called filler words. Listen to the audio clip in this Google AI Blog post marked "Duplex calling a restaurant," where an automated male voice calls to make a reservation with a live receptionist. You'll hear him say "um" four times in 50 seconds.

Check Out: WorkDone Inc. – A Tokenized, AI Digital Workforce Platform Developer WE JUST MIGHT ADD THEM TO OUR PAI, IF IT'S COOL WITH YOU… Whether its autonomous vehicles, or digital assistants such as Apple's Siri, or Amazon's Alexa, the race to Artificial Intelligence dominance is on; sparking what some are calling The Next Industrial Revolution. Given that some of the most adopted technologies over the past few decades are the ones that simplify our lives, it's not difficult to imagine a future where artificial intelligence (A.I. or AI) transforms the way we work. In many cases, several tech experts believe artificial intelligence will ultimately replace humans with software and machines. That's why, when LA-based tech startup, WorkDone Inc., came across the vetting desk at Digital Arts Media Network ("DigitalAMN"), we were intrigued. WorkDone is developing an AI platform that caters to small and large organizations looking to deploy a digital workforce composed of software bots.

I recently covered Voice Summit the largest voice tech conference that brings the conversational design ecosystem together in one place. The conference was hosted at New Jersey Institute of Technology. I was amazed about the impact voice technology will have on our lives. Voice search will account 50 % of all search results by 2020. Voice technology is already in use in many home devices such as Amazon Alexa and Google home.

In this work, we study recommendation systems modelled as contextual multi-armed bandit (MAB) problems. We propose a graph-based recommendation system that learns and exploits the geometry of the user space to create meaningful clusters in the user domain. This reduces the dimensionality of the recommendation problem while preserving the accuracy of MAB. We then study the effect of graph sparsity and clusters size on the MAB performance and provide exhaustive simulation results both in synthetic and in real-case datasets. Simulation results show improvements with respect to state-of-the-art MAB algorithms.

The two main tasks in the Recommender Systems domain are the ranking and rating prediction tasks. The rating prediction task aims at predicting to what extent a user would like any given item, which would enable to recommend the items with the highest predicted scores. The ranking task on the other hand directly aims at recommending the most valuable items for the user. Several previous approaches proposed learning user and item representations to optimize both tasks simultaneously in a multi-task framework. In this work we propose a novel multi-task framework that exploits the fact that a user does a two-phase decision process - first decides to interact with an item (ranking task) and only afterward to rate it (rating prediction task). We evaluated our framework on two benchmark datasets, on two different configurations and showed its superiority over state-of-the-art methods.

LOS ANGELES – Law enforcement officials are looking into whether a New York man arrested in California for killing a woman he met on a dating app may have killed others. Danueal Drayton was arrested in Los Angeles last week and charged with raping and strangling a woman. Two law enforcement officials told The Associated Press on Monday that Drayton talked about killing at least five others in Connecticut and New York. Investigators are trying to determine whether his claims are true. The officials said Drayton did not admit killing Samantha Stewart, a nurse found dead in her Queens apartment, though police believe he's responsible for her murder.

They can identify patterns in voice commands and react to them according to predefined algorithms. In HR these are employed when the initial contact with applicants is being made – often when it comes to answering standard questions about an advertised position. As chatbots they can support an ongoing interaction between recruiter and applicant during the recruiting process, in this case they quite simply increase the recruiters accessibility or the applicant. Second field of application: „Natural Language Processing" (NLP), this technology supports the scanning of letters of application to characterize the applicants range and use vocabulary and his "wording" in general. NLP can assist in writing job advertisements, by using a language which is exactly targeted towards the preferred group of applicants.