Tinder is finally allowing users to animate their profile prictures. The dating app today confirmed its'loops' feature is available globally, after it was initially tested in Canada and Sweden. It allows two second video loops to be uploaded. The dating app today confirmed its'loops' feature is available globally, after it was initially tested in Canada and Sweden. 'It all started with the swipe--that fun, simple movement that changed the way people meet,' Tinder said in a blog post announcing the new feature.

When Google first introduced its phone-calling digital concierge Duplex in May, some thought it sounded too human, while others worried that it would secretly record calls with people. Despite the massive backlash over the system, it appears Google is pushing ahead with plans to replace call center workers across the globe with its AI. According to The Information, Google is already in talks with customers, including a major insurance firm, about creating call center versions of the system. Google is hoping it's Duplex technology will be far more natural and lifelike that its competition. 'At least one potential customer, a large insurance company, is looking at ways it can use the technology, according to the person with knowledge of the project, including for call centers where the voice assistant could handle simple and repetitive customer calls while humans step in when the conversations get more complicated,' The Information said.

Conexant got Synaptics in the far-field voice-enabled market represented by products like the Amazon Echo, Google Home and Apple HomePod. In fact, Synaptics is designed into HomePod, and most Alexa-based smart devices. I can foresee in the not so distant future where we see voice input on just about every kind of device in the many rooms in the home, in the car and even at work, globally. Look at the way Samsung is driving Bixby into every one of Samsung's consumer devices. I also see voice as a big driver in the AR and VR market as voice enhances the UX as the user can't touch anything or of course, use a mouse.

Bixby Home is getting smarter. Well, in the sense that now in the US, Samsung's virtual assistant will offer sports scores and up-to-the-minute news coverage through a partnership with theScore. Swiping right on "select" Galaxy device home-screens including the S9 and S9 Plus gives access to the stats and news. To make the feature a little more useful, you can even follow your favorite teams and leagues so only the news that matters to you will show up. It all sounds pretty comprehensive too, with scores and news for EPL soccer, MLB baseball, NBA basketball, NFL football and NHL hockey.

If you're a dating app regular, you know that a photo only says so much about yourself. But do you really want to go to the trouble of recording a whole video for people who could swipe left before you've even spoken a word? Tinder thinks there's a better balance between the two. It's launching a Loops feature that (surprise) adds two-second looping videos to your profile alongside the usual still shots. You just have to trim an existing video to portray yourself as a fun-loving party person or tender romantic. The feature is initially available for iOS users in the US, UK, Canada and large chunks of Western Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

If your Google Home, Home Mini and/or Google Chromecast streaming stick were not working properly, you are not alone. Google Home, Home Mini, and Chromecast were down globally for many users for several hours, leaving a lot of people with trouble watching TV, controlling smart home gadgets, and listening to music. Yesterday, hundreds of Chromecasts and Home users began complaining about their devices not working properly on both the official "Made by Google" Twitter account and Down Detector. Later, Google confirmed that its Home and Chromecast across the world went down due to an unspecified "issue," and that the company was investigating the issue and working on a solution, but did not provide any kind of explanation about the glitch. The issue appears to be affecting devices that work using Google's Home technology, which is a smart ecosystem that allows users to stream content to devices.

FOX Business hits the streets to find out if people are truly ready to embrace robots at their job. Despite reports of people fearing robots will soon take their jobs, a majority of people say they are ready and willing to embrace them and even take orders from them at work, according to a new study released on Thursday. Oracle and research firm Future Workplace teamed up and polled more than 1,300 employees and human resource leaders about the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) at work and were surprised to find that most people are looking forward to embracing the technology soon. "It turns out that workers see a lot of potential in AI making both their personal and professional lives better not worse," Dan Schawbel, research director at Future Workplace and author of "Back to Human," tells FOX Business. Of those polled, many workers view AI as a way to eliminate routine tasks, increase their productivity and create a better employee experience overall.

The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has opened up new avenues for human advancement. AI technology has enabled automation which has powered up efficiency. AI has helped bring the possibility of self-driving cars, client-servicing chatbots, assistant technology like Siri, Alexa and Cortana, to reality. While the evolution of AI has opened up new avenues, the ethics of surrounding the technology still remain in muddy waters. The debate was stirred up again when Google launched Duplex, a chatbot so smart that it can carry out conversations on your behalf.

NEW DELHI: SBI Card, the country's second largest credit card issuer, today announced the launch of'ELA' (Electronic Live Assistant), a virtual assistant for customer support and services. Driven by Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, ELA is designed to enhance customer experience by providing relevant and instant responses to customer queries, SBI Card said in a statement. Customers can communicate with ELA in conversational language, enabling easy interface along with prompt query resolution, SBI Card managing director Hardayal Prasad said. The virtual assistant is currently hosted on the SBI Card website and will soon be integrated on the mobile app as well, it said.

Recommender systems can be formulated as a matrix completion problem, predicting ratings from user and item parameter vectors. Optimizing these parameters by subsampling data becomes difficult as the number of users and items grows. We develop a novel approach to generate all latent variables on demand from the ratings matrix itself and a fixed pool of parameters. We estimate missing ratings using chains of evidence that link them to a small set of prototypical users and items. Our model automatically addresses the cold-start and online learning problems by combining information across both users and items. We investigate the scaling behavior of this model, and demonstrate competitive results with respect to current matrix factorization techniques in terms of accuracy and convergence speed.