USA Today's Jefferson Graham suggests tips on the best way to shop through Amazon's home assistant, Alexa. LOS ANGELES -- Alexa is great for listening to music and answering trivia questions, but when it comes to shopping...well, that's another story. If you have one of the classic Echo speakers, you know that there are no visuals to see the product in question and once Alexa makes suggestions, it's hard to comparison shop or get the best prices. But Amazon wants you to buy this way, and throws some special deals that can only be accessed by asking Alexa for them. On Prime Day, many specials will be Alexa-only.

Apple unveiled some refreshed MacBook Pros this week, and I promised we'd be getting a unit to review ASAP. Sure enough, look what arrived in the mail today: a shiny, new 13-inch Mac. As you can see, the exterior design is the same as the previous-gen MacBook Pro's, from the unibody aluminum enclosure to that giant Force Touch trackpad. Most of the changes here are under the hood (think: quad-core processors on the 13-inch model), so it's going to take a few days to test things like speed, graphics performance and battery life. We'll post a full review next week (and, ya know, spend the weekend indoors putting this thing through its paces).

Frank is always pressed for time. He has spent almost a decade as the head of a retail store for a large chain. Over the last few years, he has been steadily handed over the reins of four other stores in the chain. His knowledge and expertise are beyond doubt. The problem is that while work has multiplied several folds and his responsibilities have grown, he still has only 24 hours in a workday.

USA Today's Jefferson Graham suggests tips on the best way to shop through Amazon's home assistant, Alexa. A link has been sent to your friend's email address. A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. USA Today's Jefferson Graham suggests tips on the best way to shop through Amazon's home assistant, Alexa.

You can read this situation a couple different ways. On the one hand, some will conclude that Apple either performs the same types of data collection that Google does or that it wants to, and that bringing Giannandrea onboard is an effort to match the search giant in this area. But another potential option is that the value of Google's data about its users may be less central to the question of why Siri has lagged behind its competitors than is immediately apparent. We're not claiming the data hypothesis isn't true -- we've got no insight on it one way or the other -- but it's also the sort of explanation that could be a contributing factor without constituting the overriding reason why a situation looks the way it does. Either way, Apple is clearly planning to make some significant changes to its AI/ML development programs.

Apple is creating a new AI/ML team that brings together its Core ML and Siri teams under one leader in John Giannandrea. Apple confirmed this morning that the combined Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning team, which houses Siri, will be led by the recent hire, who came to Apple this year after an eight-year stint at Google, where he led the Machine Intelligence, Research and Search teams. Before that he founded Metaweb Technologies and Tellme. The internal structures of the Siri and Core ML teams will remain the same, but they will now answer to Giannandrea. Apple's internal structure means that the teams will likely remain integrated across the org as they're wedded to various projects, including developer tools, mapping, Core OS and more.

In recent months there was much talk of the arrival of artificial intelligence to cell phones. In fact, it is the feature that most companies highlight when describing their products. LG, for example, announced that it would launch a new version of its LG V30 that will incorporate artificial intelligence to its camera, as well as other optimizations that come hand in hand with Google Assistant. Last year Huawei announced, with all pomp, the arrival of its chip Kirin 970, which integrates a unit of neuronal processing and that is part of Mate 10, and Apple boasted the neuronal engine of A11 Bionic, present in the iPhone 8, 8 Plus and X. Samsung, meanwhile, announced its Exynos 9810 chip, which is also based on neural networks as Snapdragon 845 of Qualcomm. The Galaxy S9 and S9 will include one of these last two processors, depending on the country where it is marketed.

Add in the latest smart wireless headphones--Apple's expected next-generation AirPods or competing ones from Bose or Shure--along with talking microwave ovens and TVs from Samsung, LG and others, and anyone at home or in an open-plan office could soon be within earshot of hundreds of microphones. Most of them will be listening for a wake word like "Alexa," "Hey Siri," or "OK Google," just as our phones and smart assistants do now. The roadmaps of tech giants and startups alike show how sound is poised to become the first ubiquitous connection between users and the artificial-intelligence hive mind the internet is becoming. Driving this change are massive volumes of components, originally designed for smartphones and other mobile devices, that have dropped in price and grown in functionality over the past decade. For a hundred years, microphones consisted of a relatively large membrane whose vibrations were converted to electrical impulses.

As Amazon's gadgets seem to go from strength to strength, I sat down with David Limp, the senior vice president of devices and services at Amazon, to learn about the Alexa's next steps and the company's future plans. However, since one of the big successes of the company's devices division has been the Kindle ebook reader, I began by asking David Limp about that. "We've just got done with another Prime Day, which was a record day. On Kindle, which is coming up on its 10-year anniversary this November, a big milestone for us, it was the best-selling day in the history of Kindle. So, 10 years and you know if you were to listen to the pundits talk, they say nobody's buying readers anymore. But I can assure you lots of people are. And we're really excited that people still love dedicated readers and we're going to continue inventing there."

If you've been eyeing Acer's Alexa-enabled laptops, you may want to check out the company's deals on Amazon for Prime subscribers. The manufacturer has slashed $50 off all available models' prices, which really isn't that much -- good thing Acer is also giving out a free Echo Dot speaker with every purchase. These laptops come built-in with Amazon's voice assistant, and you can ask it questions and access skills like you would on one of the tech giant's Echo speakers. The available models include some of the first Alexa-equipped laptops on the market, including convertibles like the Acer Nitro 5 Spin made for students and casual gamers. There's also the Spin 5, another convertible that has various configurations, including different display sizes and processors.