Amazon is opening up its US Alexa store to let anyone share skills they've created for the voice assistant. Until now, it's been the domain of developers, who have already added more than 80,000 skills to the store. Last year, Amazon released its Alexa Blueprints tool, which lets anyone create a skill without needing to know how to code. You can use the tool's templates to make things like custom greetings and quizzes. Along with opening up the skills store, Amazon is rolling out more templates, which are particularly targeted towards bloggers, creators and organizations.

The Federal Trade Commission is celebrating Valentine's Day by reminding people to not get scammed when looking for love. The agency received more than 21,000 reports about romance scams in 2018 with total reported losses of $143 million. Of those who said they lost money in a romance scam, the median amount lost was $2,600 -- seven times more than the median loss for other types of frauds tracked by the FTC. Romance scammers often use online dating sites and create fake profiles or use a real person's identity, the FTC says. Scammers also cultivate targets on Facebook and social media sites not specifically designed for dating.

Over the last several months, researchers have shown that computer systems can learn the vagaries of language in general ways and then apply what they have learned to a variety of specific tasks. Built in quick succession by several independent research organizations, including Google and the Allen Institute, these systems could improve technology as diverse as digital assistants like Alexa and Google Home as well as software that automatically analyzes documents inside law firms, hospitals, banks and other businesses. "Each time we build new ways of doing something close to human level, it allows us to automate or augment human labor," said Jeremy Howard, the founder of Fast.ai, an independent lab based in San Francisco that is among those at the forefront of this research. "This can make life easier for a lawyer or a paralegal. But it can also help with medicine." It may even lead to technology that can -- finally -- carry on a decent conversation.

Waze is playing even more nicely with Apple after it enabled CarPlay support back in September. The latest version of its iOS app lets you use Siri Shortcuts to find your way to a destination. You'll be able to set up shortcuts for things like your morning commute, the drive home and directions to your favorite places. The benefits of using voice control for navigation while driving are fairly obvious, and Waze's addition of Siri Shortcuts offers users more of an alternative to Apple Maps. The update will surely come as a boon for those who use it to steer clear of traffic, crashes and construction.

You may want to use some extra caution. A new notice released Tuesday by the Federal Trade Commission highlights a surge in'romance scams,' or scenarios where scammers trick love-lusting internet users into sending them money, only to later disappear. The scams cost victims an astonishing $143 million in 2018, up from $33 million the previous year and making it the most costly type of consumer fraud reported to the FTC. A new notice from the Federal Trade Commission highlights a surge in'romance scams,' or scenarios where scammers trick love-lusting internet users into sending them money Romance scams, where criminals create phony profiles to trick love-lusting victims into sending them money, are on the rise. To avoid falling prey, here's what you can do: These romance scams typically involve a user creating a phony profile and approaching someone via a dating app or website.

In many ways, Hely Lyly is your typical grandma. She's retired, sings in a chorus, takes fitness classes, participates in a book club and spends a good chunk of her day taking care of her grandchildren. These days, though, Lyly, 68, has a new gig -- as an artificial intelligence evangelist. "AI is now my new hobby," Lyly said, chuckling. Lyly is one of nearly 100 senior volunteers mentoring their peers on the fundamentals of AI.

First announced in March last year, Amman-based Mawdoo3 has finally launched its Arabic personal voice assistant, Salma. The personal assistant was recently launched at TechWadi Annual Forum 2019 last month in California. After the launch, Salma has been made available as a standalone iOS and Android app. According to its (her?) website, the personal assistant can share weather forecasts, currency exchange rates, and prayer times. It (she?) can also help users set an alarm on their phone, play music from their favorite apps, or call anyone from their address book – all with a quick voice command.

For decades, science fiction authors, futurists, and movie makers alike have been predicting the amazing (and sometimes catastrophic) changes that will arise with the advent of widespread artificial intelligence. So far, AI hasn't made any such crazy waves, and in many ways has quietly become ubiquitous in numerous aspects of our daily lives. From the intelligent sensors that help us take perfect pictures, to the automatic parking features in cars, to the sometimes frustrating personal assistants in smartphones, artificial intelligence of one kind of another is all around us, all the time. While we've yet to create self-aware robots like those that pepper popular movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars, we have made smart and often significant use of AI technology in a wide range of applications that, while not as mind-blowing as androids, still change our day-to-day lives. One place where artificial intelligence is poised to make big changes (and in some cases already is) is in education.

It could be the end of 999 calls. Scotland Yard is developing new technology that would allow victims of crime to use voice-activated personal assistants, such as Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant, to contact the police. Under plans being drawn up by Britain's largest force, people would simply have to shout for help - and any compatible in-range technology would notify the police. A report seen by The Sunday Times reveals that Scotland Yard think voice assistants - currently used by around 3m Brits - will "change the face of police contact". It states that the plans being drawn up by the Metropolitan Police Force would allow "an incoming demand from a home automation bot, rather than from a human". "The contact may be triggered by the human issuing a command to their bot, or it may be automatically generated by the bot through AI [artificial intelligence," the report states.

Recommending the right products is the central problem in recommender systems, but the right products should also be recommended at the right time to meet the demands of users, so as to maximize their values. Users' demands, implying strong purchase intents, can be the most useful way to promote products sales if well utilized. Previous recommendation models mainly focused on user's general interests to find the right products. However, the aspect of meeting users' demands at the right time has been much less explored. To address this problem, we propose a novel Long-Short Demands-aware Model (LSDM), in which both user's interests towards items and user's demands over time are incorporated. We summarize two aspects: termed as long-time demands (e.g., purchasing the same product repetitively showing a long-time persistent interest) and short-time demands (e.g., co-purchase like buying paintbrushes after pigments). To utilize such long-short demands of users, we create different clusters to group the successive product purchases together according to different time spans, and use recurrent neural networks to model each sequence of clusters at a time scale. The long-short purchase demands with multi-time scales are finally aggregated by joint learning strategies. Experimental results on three real-world commerce datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our model for next-item recommendation, showing the usefulness of modeling users' long-short purchase demands of items with multi-time scales.