If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA TODAY's newsroom and any business incentives. The past few years, smart home technology has grown drastically in popularity, which means more smart devices are being sold at incredibly affordable prices. These gadgets can help with small everyday problems, acting as a personal assistant, helping you stream your favorite media, and assisting with cooking perfectly. You don't even have to spend too much.

Playlist recommendation involves producing a set of songs that a user might enjoy. We investigate this problem in three cold-start scenarios: (i) cold playlists, where we recommend songs to form new personalised playlists for an existing user; (ii) cold users, where we recommend songs to form new playlists for a new user; and (iii) cold songs, where we recommend newly released songs to extend users' existing playlists. We propose a flexible multitask learning method to deal with all three settings. The method learns from user-curated playlists, and encourages songs in a playlist to be ranked higher than those that are not by minimising a bipartite ranking loss. Inspired by an equivalence between bipartite ranking and binary classification, we show how one can efficiently approximate an optimal solution of the multitask learning objective by minimising a classification loss. Empirical results on two real playlist datasets show the proposed approach has good performance for cold-start playlist recommendation.

Google's aptly named AI helper, Google Assistant, is poised to have a great year in 2019. Not only will the digital assistant be spreading to numerous devices old and new, but there are a host of new features coming, too, several of which were shown off at CES 2019 last week. This list of upcoming Google Assistant updates is long, and it can be overwhelming trying to parse out all the different announcements and keep track of when these new features will finally be available. To help, we've curated a rundown detailing the best and most important updates coming for Google Assistant in the next few months, including what devices these new features have been announced for, their expected release dates, and how to enable them (when available). By far, the most hyped new Assistant feature at CES was the Interpreter Mode.

If you haven't upgraded to the glorious 4K HDR life yet, now's the perfect time to see what you're missing for cheap. Best Buy is selling a 43-inch 4K HDR Toshiba Smart TV with Amazon's Fire TV built-in for $200Remove non-product link. That price beats Amazon's all-time historical low by $50 and the current Amazon price by $100. The Toshiba 4K UHD Fire TV Edition features Amazon's Fire TV (obviously) and a voice remote with the Alexa digital assistant built-in. You can use Alexa to launch apps, search for programming, switch between TV inputs, and control smart home devices.

It turns out that even robots are having a tough time holding down a job. Japan's Henn-na "Strange" Hotel has laid off half its 243 robots after they created more problems than they could solve, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal. One of the layoffs included a doll-shaped assistant in each hotel room called Churi. Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa can answer questions about local businesses' opening and closing times, but Churi couldn't. When hotel guests asked Churi "What time does the theme park open?" it didn't have a good answer.

From the invention of smartphones to digital assistants like Siri or Alexa breakthrough technology has been an extremely hot topic in recent years. Many aspects of life revolve around technology, but some of the most incredible innovations, however, are unseen by the majority of us in our daily lives. Generally speaking, it was much more grim to receive a cancer diagnosis roughly 50 years ago than it is today. The 5-year survival rate for childhood leukemia was just 14 percent from 1960 to 1963, for example, but has more than quadrupled to 61.4 percent. There has been a number of significant advancements in the world of cancer care and more breakthroughs have been made since the start of the 21st century than any period of time prior.

"It's easier now that we're not being frequently called by guests to help with problems with the robots," one staff member reportedly said. The hotel initially hoped that the robots would help it to overcome a labour shortage in the rural area that it is based. It wanted to use the robots for everything from stirring cocktails to answering a plethora of guest queries. But the robots were not advanced enough to perform many of the tasks that it wanted them to do. Guests became frustrated when their in-room robot "Churi," which lagged behind other AI assistants like Siri and Alexa, failed to answer their questions. One guest was reportedly awoken every few hours because a robot thought he was asking it a question when he was in fact just snoring.

The power of artificial intelligence (AI) to transform the consumer journey has dominated industry conversations in recent years. At its lowest common denominator, AI enables brands to better synthesize mounds of data and incorporate those learnings to improve the commerce experience. This is brought to life in a variety of ways, from empowering store associates to enabling more powerful search to providing the personal touch. Artificial intelligence is expected to be the most impactful technology for commerce over the next five years.Getty AI, which refers to technologies capable of performing tasks normally requiring human intelligence, goes back centuries. The idea of cognitive computing gained steam in the 1930s when Alan Turing suggested that a machine could simulate any conceivable act of mathematical deduction.

When you're lost, Siri can be your best friend. But if she can't retrieve the right address from your contacts, she can drive you crazy. And so it is with the legion of virtual personal assistants that are entering our lives. From Amazon's Alexa to Google's Home, people are busy talking to intelligent machines as never before. It's estimated that more than 60 percent of internet traffic is now generated by machine-to-machine, and person-to-machine, communication.

Microsoft is splitting up search and voice assistant Cortana in Windows 10, giving each their own spot on the taskbar in the latest build for Windows Insiders testers. The change should go live for everyone in the next major update to Windows 10, which is planned for April. The move, according to Microsoft, should improve both functions as it "will enable each experience to innovate independently to best serve their target audiences and use cases." The search box will be solely for text queries, while Cortana will of course handle voice queries. Microsoft has placed more focus on improving search lately.