An upcoming book is getting some media attention for including an unflattering characterization of Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Some original Google employees remember Brin as a "playboy" during the company's early days, as well as a manager who thought nothing of having intimate relationships with female employees, according to Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (as Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher. In addition to the salacious info, excerpts of the book published by Vanity Fair this week include a sobering reminder about what Brin and the company's other founder Larry Page, always considered their primary goal. In Fisher's book, Kevin Kelly, Wired's founding editor, told him: "When I met Page, I said, 'Larry, I don't get it. I don't see where you're going with this. And Larry said, 'We are not really interested in search. We are making an (artificial intelligence).' So from the very beginning, the mission for Google was not to use AI to make their search better, but to use search to make an AI." Author Steven Levy wrote something similar in his 2011 book about Google, "In the Plex."

Google was busy this week with upgrades and new features for its apps and devices, and a major security update for the Chrome browser. Here are some of the changes Google rolled out recently. The Assistant in Google Home will now tell you about events from URL and iCal calendars that have been imported into the Google Calendar app. After you've imported a calendar, tap the menu icon (upper left-hand corner) of the Home app, tap Settings and scroll down to Calendar at the bottom of the page. The calendars you imported should show up in your calendar list.

Football season is finally back, and that 75" HD flat screen you've had your eye on for ages is on sale. You've entered your payment details and are all ready to hit "Complete checkout"… but then you notice the delivery options. With order processing time, will your new TV arrive before the kickoff game? You spot a chat icon in the corner of the screen and click to ask about your potential delivery window. In just a few minutes, you find out the TV will definitely arrive in time, with no extra rush shipping fees. You place the order and start daydreaming of taking in all that pulse-pounding gridiron action in stunning HD.

Andrew Rebhan, MBA is a health IT research consultant with Advisory Board of Washington, DC. Natural language processing (NLP) techniques allow digital systems to streamline user interactions allowing machines to read text, understand meaning, and generate narratives from existing information. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have accelerated progress in a broad range of NLP applications for healthcare, including digital assistants for clinical staff, concierge services for patients, and digital scribes to streamline documentation processes. For example, last Fall Nuance Communications released its Dragon Medical Virtual Assistant to help health care providers interact with clinical workflows using NLP and other conversational AI functionality. Nuance announced at HIMSS18 that it will integrate its virtual assistant technology into Epic's EHR.

Google is having a hardware sale.Credit: Google Amazon typically offers Prime Day discounts on their Fire tablets, Kindle E-readers and Echo digital assistants. This year is no exception with the Echo Show already discounted $100 through Prime Day which starts on July 16th and ends on the 17th. It's offering deep discounts on some of its own hardware, and you don't have to pay the fee to be a Prime member or wait until Prime Day to take advantage. If you want a hands-free digital assistant so you can buy stuff from Amazon, the company's line of Echo devices is for you. If you want to have something that resembles a normal conversation with a digital assistant that leads the field when it comes to answering questions and providing information, Google's line of Home devices is what you want.

We never have been so closer to the future than we are now. There are news spreading across the media about the robots takeover of our jobs, driverless cars hitting the road with outstanding proficiency in driving standards, while at the same time, virtual assistants make us feel a bit less lonely telling us jokes and spending time with us. In fact, Siri, Alexa or Cortana have something machines didn't have before: a simulated human conscious capable of keep conversations with humans without being uncovered. AI is now at its most advanced development stage ever, but… do we need to worry about how smart are getting the robots? Will we ever need to?

"Touted as the new electricity, AI is the power behind many emerging technology platforms," says the report. Travel websites'learn' how to give more personalised results while chat platforms improve service. Although AI has a long way to go, it will undoubtedly be a huge player in the future, says the WTTC. Connected sensors, devices and machines can create a new form of dialogue with the'real' physical world. IoT has huge implications for airlines but also for hotels where smart home technology can provide some of the largest improvements to the travel experience of the future.

In today's day and age when almost every industry has an online presence with users interacting in online marketplaces, personalized recommendations have become quite important. Traditionally, the problem of collaborative filtering has been tackled using Matrix Factorization which is linear in nature. We extend the work of [11] on using variational autoencoders (VAEs) for collaborative filtering with implicit feedback by proposing a hybrid, multi-modal approach. Our approach combines movie embeddings (learned from a sibling VAE network) with user ratings from the Movielens 20M dataset and applies it to the task of movie recommendation. We empirically show how the VAE network is empowered by incorporating movie embeddings. We also visualize movie and user embeddings by clustering their latent representations obtained from a VAE.

In a truly fascinating exploration into two smart speakers – the Sonos One and the Amazon Echo – BoltVC's Ben Einstein has found some interesting differences in the way a traditional speaker company and an infrastructure juggernaut look at their flagship devices. The post is well worth a a full read but the gist is this: Sonos, a very traditional speaker company, has produced a good speaker and modified its current hardware to support smart home features like Alexa and Google Assistant. The Sonos One, notes Einstein, is a speaker first and smart hardware second. "Digging a bit deeper, we see traditional design and manufacturing processes for pretty much everything. As an example, the speaker grill is a flat sheet of steel that's stamped, rolled into a rounded square, welded, seams ground smooth, and then powder coated black. While the part does look nice, there's no innovation going on here," he writes.

The U.S. attorney's office in Atlanta said in a news release Friday that the Nigerians created fake online dating profiles with photos of models or public figures. Prosecutors said they targeted people with financial assets, spending weeks or months courting them.