Baby Shark,

Apple is finally launching HomePod in China, but the timing is tricky as the premium device will have to wrestle with local competitors and a slowing economy. The firm said over the weekend that its smart speaker will be available in Mainland China and Hong Kong starting January 18, adding to a list of countries where it has entered including US, UK, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Mexico and Spain. The Amazon Echo competitor, which launched in mid-2017, is already available to Chinese buyers through third-party channels like "daigou", or shopping agents who bring overseas products into China. What separates the new model is that it supports Mandarin, the official language on Mainland China and Cantonese, which is spoken in Hong Kong and China's most populated province Guangdong. Previously, Chinese-speaking users had to converse with HomePod in English until a system update in December that added Siri support for the two Chinese dialects.

Will is a serial swiper, Alvin says he's addicted, and Meggy is about to give up. Dating apps are everywhere, but how do they affect our mental health?

Artificial intelligence (AI) has infiltrated numerous aspects of our lives in recent years, thanks to improvements in the field of machine learning, where computers ostensibly program themselves. This drive towards digital self-learning has led to major breakthroughs in our day-to-day interactions with machines, most notably the rise of digital home assistants such as Amazon Echo, and the recently launched Google Lens, which identifies objects based on visual cues from your phone's camera. One of the most widely-discussed advances has been the use of AI in translation. Not unlike the Babel Fish from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with AI translation, "you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language." The technology works by recognizing words individually and then, as MIT Technology Review puts it, "takes advantage of the fact that relationships between certain words…are similar across languages" to create its translations. It has already found its way into a number of our most commonly used websites and platforms, with even grander plans in the pipeline – but just how reliable is the technology?

This paper presents a non-trivial reconstruction of a previous joint topic-sentiment-preference review model TSPRA with stick-breaking representation under the framework of variational inference (VI) and stochastic variational inference (SVI). TSPRA is a Gibbs Sampling based model that solves topics, word sentiments and user preferences altogether and has been shown to achieve good performance, but for large data set it can only learn from a relatively small sample. We develop the variational models vTSPRA and svTSPRA to improve the time use, and our new approach is capable of processing millions of reviews. We rebuild the generative process, improve the rating regression, solve and present the coordinate-ascent updates of variational parameters, and show the time complexity of each iteration is theoretically linear to the corpus size, and the experiments on Amazon data sets show it converges faster than TSPRA and attains better results given the same amount of time. In addition, we tune svTSPRA into an online algorithm ovTSPRA that can monitor oscillations of sentiment and preference overtime. Some interesting fluctuations are captured and possible explanations are provided. The results give strong visual evidence that user preference is better treated as an independent factor from sentiment.

One of the big ways artificial intelligence (AI) has gained ground in the home and the enterprise is through conversational agents, according to a Thursday report from KPMG. Using these agents--which the report defines as "chatbots and intelligent assistants that interact with people via voice or text channels, on devices such as smartphones, automotive infotainment consoles, and smart speakers"--has become second nature to consumers, who speak to them daily in their homes, cars, online shopping sessions, and more. A further sign of the spread of conversational agents is smart speaker sales, which IDC predicts will hit nearly $12 billion by the end of 2018, and reach $28 billion in 2022, the report found. Additionally, AI applications are expected to increase from $644 million in 2016 to $37 billion by 2025, which is a factor of 56, the report found. Conversational agents aren't limited to consumers--these tools have a plethora of use cases in the enterprise, according to the report.

Digital marketing is an ever-changing landscape, thanks to the strides in digital technology. The prevalence of smartphones and tablets, along with internet penetration, have added more power to digital marketing. Going digital means using the entire gamut of technologies - from the use of artificial intelligence to wearables. As a brand, making an impact on every customer (internal or external), and opening up multiple channels of communication for customers is no more a luxury, but a necessity. Businesses know that the present and future of marketing is undoubtedly digital.

Although present and well known for long, these really picked up their pace in 2018 with their extensive industrial usage. In this article we are going to see how Artificial Intelligence has established itself in 2018 and how it is going to perform and change the world in 2019. AI can excite and scare us at the same time. After all, when Elon Musk talks about the threat that AI can possess, one has to wonder whether it will be our friend or foe. The hype around AI is ever increasing and does not seem to be dying soon.

This year, artificial intelligence will continue its push into mobile hardware and enterprise communication devices, challenging IT shops' enterprise mobility management (EMM) capabilities while at the same time offering potential security benefits. Also in 2019, voice-activated assistants such as Amazon's Alexa and Cisco's Spark Assistant will find their way into more corporate offices and conference rooms – becoming yet one more enterprise device encouraging the adoption of a unified endpoint management (UEM) strategy. "I do think 2019 will ring in a very disruptive era for personal devices," said Werner Goertz, a Gartner research director. "Virtual personal assistant speakers – these Alexa devices, these Amazon Echo devices – they've been rolled out into enterprises, into hospitality scenarios...and they're becoming manageable by IT professionals." A little more than a year ago, Amazon announced Alexa for Business "an intelligent assistant to simplify their interactions with the technology around them at work."

There are two reasons we say'please' and'thank you'. The first is pretty obvious. It gives the other person dignity. It implies that at some level, this engagement is voluntary. But of course, none of this is true when we're talking to Siri or Alexa. It helps us realize that we might be acting entitled.