The likes of Apple's HomeKit and Samsung SmartThings may get all the credit, but they're not the only smart home ecosystems around. There's also Wink, which has been quietly building its ecosystem of products for a while now. To take advantage of the Wink ecosystem of products, you'll need a Wink Hub, and we recommend buying the second version of the hub if you haven't bought one yet. The hub is compatible with both Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant -- so you can still take advantage of voice controls. Once you are set up with a hub, you'll probably want to start building out your smart home devices.

Thanks to advances in technology, transactions are no longer limited to cash in-hand at a stationary cash register. Today, with proper connectivity, almost any device can integrate payment acceptance meaning purchases can be made in some unconventional locations. Consumers have reacted positively to these payment methods, encouraging more day-to-day items to be fitted with payment capabilities. Wearables -- Contactless payment has become a standard in some countries and on the rise in others. When integrated with normal accessories, payments are becoming more convenient for consumers.

How did you go about creating something that works so well? I can't imagine that your first version of this was such a smooth transaction for users. We had a few truths that we believed in where we've designed the product with these as the backdrop from day one. The first one is that we want this to be invisible software - we don't want this to be yet another app, a plugin, an extension, a web service, a Doodle, a something where you have to do additional work. We wanted something where we see software disappear and you hand over the job to that agent and that agent runs away, works on it and comes back once solved. That was the first battle.

We present a method for estimating causal effects in time series data when fine-grained information about the outcome of interest is available. Specifically, we examine what we call the split-door setting, where the outcome variable can be split into two parts: one that is potentially affected by the cause being studied and another that is independent of it, with both parts sharing the same (unobserved) confounders. We show that under these conditions, the problem of identification reduces to that of testing for independence among observed variables, and present a method that uses this approach to automatically find subsets of the data that are causally identified. We demonstrate the method by estimating the causal impact of Amazon's recommender system on traffic to product pages, finding thousands of examples within the dataset that satisfy the split-door criterion. Unlike past studies based on natural experiments that were limited to a single product category, our method applies to a large and representative sample of products viewed on the site. In line with previous work, we find that the widely-used click-through rate (CTR) metric overestimates the causal impact of recommender systems; depending on the product category, we estimate that 50-80\% of the traffic attributed to recommender systems would have happened even without any recommendations. We conclude with guidelines for using the split-door criterion as well as a discussion of other contexts where the method can be applied.

Many of us grew up watching the incredible potential of robots in movies and television. Robots showed us the brightest of the future. However, we haven't really seen the true potential of robotic technology being unleashed. While the popular TV cartoon show, Jetsons from the 60's showed us the infinite possibilities of humans and robots co-existing, movies like the Terminator or Wall-E scared us by showing the prospective dark side of Artificial Intelligence and technology. But the age where robots finally coexist with human beings is not really far.

Cortana might be super helpful at keeping track of your shopping lists, but it turns out it's not so great at keeping your PC secure. Researchers from McAfee have discovered that by activating Cortana on a locked Windows 10 machine, you can trick it into opening up a contextual menu which can then be used for code execution. This could deploy malicious software, or even reset a Windows account password. The vulnerability stems from Cortana's ability to listen for commands even while the PC is locked, combined with regular indexing that makes files accessible in the search function that Cortana uses. Even though potential hackers would need physical access to your PC to do any damage, this could feasibly take place in an office or shared environment.

Voice AI started as a method of convenience. Sending a text message or email through voice apps became a more natural and faster way of communicating than typing. Asking Siri to give you directions to the nearest Starbucks became a more efficient alternative than looking it up yourself. While these tools are still convenient, they have slowly become our "normal" and are no longer seen as "groundbreaking." Hence, we are impatiently awaiting the next wave of voice-powered capabilities, but what will that be?

Over the next five years, we are about to witness the world we live in entirely disrupted by improvements in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Children today are growing up with AI assistants in their homes (Google Assistant, Siri and Alexa) -- to the point that you might consider their mere presence an extension of co-parenting. As voice and facial recognition continue to evolve, machine learning algorithms are getting smarter. More and more industries are being influenced by AI, and our society as we know it is transforming. The transportation industry looks like it will be the first to be completely disrupted by artificial intelligence.

Moving to a new country can be hard. You don't know the language. Cultural differences create conversational landmines. And you just can't be sure that everyone will like you. As it turns out, that as true for people as it is for Amazon's Alexa voice assistant, which officially sets up residence in France today.

"I'm sorry George, I'm afraid I don't have an answer for that!" Recently I overheard my 6 year old son, George asking Siri if she had a willy. For those of you not familiar with either small children or colloquial English, try it yourselves, and see what happens! We will no doubt all have seen the amazing demo from Google and, whether it was as'real' as Google made out, this tech is coming. Microsoft also have one just in China for now, but again it looks amazing.These two tech giants are investing big and your future workforce i.e.