Amazon's Fire TV Cube comes with a remote control but the idea is to mostly use your voice. "Welcome back," comes the reply. And with that, Amazon's obedient assistant turns on your television, sound bar and the lights in the room, without you having to fumble with a remote control. That's one of the scenarios you might set up with the aptly named, hands-free 4K Fire TV Cube media player that Amazon starts taking preorders on today for Prime members and that I got to preview a few days in advance. Amazon has already carved out a spot in many living rooms with its Fire TV set-top boxes and streaming sticks--without divulging numbers, Amazon claims it has sold the most video streaming devices by units.

Now is an excellent time to add a 4K monitor to your desk setup as we've finally started to see significant drops for them. At $365, this is a new low for the Dell P2715Q, a longtime favorite in our guide. We've seen a few recent deals at $400 and just under, but this 27-inch monitor is still often priced around $425, so this is an excellent deal for it. The Dell P2715Q 27-Inch 4K Monitor is our runner-up pick in our guide to the best 4K monitors. John Higgins and David Murphy wrote, "The Dell P2715Q was the first 4K monitor we recommended, and it's still great, despite its fat bezels. It has more accurate colors than the LG, its stand is highly adjustable and ergonomic, and it also has a USB 3.0 hub and Dell's excellent three-year Premium Panel Guarantee. It's more accurate than the model that replaces it, the Dell UltraSharp U2718Q, which struggles with greens and cyans. We briefly recommended the U2718Q as a runner-up to the LG because we thought the P2715Q was discontinued, but since the P2715Q is still available, it's a better buy until Dell fixes the problems with the U2718Q's colors. The P2715Q's age and the fact that it can run only at 4K resolution at 60 Hz over over DisplayPort, not HDMI, keep it from being our top pick, but it's still a great monitor, especially if you want that USB 3.0 hub."

You can credit IBM's Watson for creating a platform for artificial intelligence integration into a multitude of business and customer-facing applications. You can thank Facebook for all the buzz about chatbots and the gold rush of developers and venture capital creating an onslaught of bot companies. However, the truth is we are only just starting to realise the potential of artificial intelligence and one of the most promising applications for AI to make a more than welcome impact is in customer experience. It can be debated that for all of the good technology has offered businesses over the last several decades, it has also comprised key elements of the customer experience. Call centres, websites, email, apps, et al, have allowed companies to scale and automate customer engagement while also introducing process efficiencies and cost management systems.

Sonos Inc. has announced its new smart speaker, called Beam. The home-theater device is said to feature Amazon's Alexa voice assistant and Apple's new AirPlay 2 technology at launch. Sonos introduced Beam during a Wednesday event. According to the Santa Barbara, California-based consumer electronics company, the upcoming smart speaker is designed to sit below a television set and replace the speakers that are built into existing TVs. Because it has Alexa, users can rely on the voice assistant to control Beam if they don't have a physical remote on hand.

Whether it is used to out-bluff world poker champions or schedule hairdresser appointments in a (mostly) convincing human voice, AI and its underlying machine-learning algorithms keep making big strides in their capabilities--and into ever-more intimate spaces of our lives. And, like any technological feat predicated on the collection and analysis of massive data sets, some of these breakthroughs come with significant privacy risks. New data-collecting techniques, however, could enable researchers to better preserve users' privacy yet still glean valuable insights from their personal information. Take digital assistants, where the fruits of AI innovation are increasingly manifested. Today, Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant distinguish between the voices of different people in your home, and can use these voice signatures to deliver personalized traffic reports and schedule appointments in the relevant speaker's calendar.

The move into 2018 also comes with a shift in digital marketing. New trends are entering the marketplace and your company needs to pay attention or you may be forced by the wayside. With the need to become more visible and reach more customers, the digital marketing of tomorrow offers advancements in emerging technologies as consumers demand a more integrated experience. Fifteen members of Forbes Agency Council share what they think will be the major digital marketing trends of 2018. Forbes Agency Council members offer their best insights.

Sonos has revealed the Beam, a speaker that sits under your TV. The company's pitch is that the device is really three different things all packed into one box: not only a soundbar, but also a music player and a smart assistant, as well. And in fact it is more than one smart assistant, with Sonos announcing at the same event that Siri will now be able to talk to Alexa, and that Google Assistant will also eventually be coming to its speakers. But another important point is that box all of that is crammed into is much smaller than its other devices. Until now, its only TV speakers have been the Playbase and the Playbar, which either sit beneath or in front of the television and sweep all the way in front of it.

Recommender systems play a crucial role in mitigating the problem of information overload by suggesting users' personalized items or services. The vast majority of traditional recommender systems consider the recommendation procedure as a static process and make recommendations following a fixed strategy. In this paper, we propose a novel recommender system with the capability of continuously improving its strategies during the interactions with users. We model the sequential interactions between users and a recommender system as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and leverage Reinforcement Learning (RL) to automatically learn the optimal strategies via recommending trial-and-error items and receiving reinforcements of these items from users' feedback. Users' feedback can be positive and negative and both types of feedback have great potentials to boost recommendations. However, the number of negative feedback is much larger than that of positive one; thus incorporating them simultaneously is challenging since positive feedback could be buried by negative one. In this paper, we develop a novel approach to incorporate them into the proposed deep recommender system (DEERS) framework. The experimental results based on real-world e-commerce data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Further experiments have been conducted to understand the importance of both positive and negative feedback in recommendations.

With its acquisition of artificial intelligence and machine learning developer HeavyWater, Black Knight is turning to its Artificial Intelligence Virtual Assistant to streamline the mortgage process, with an immediate focus on the originations sector. The company, which acquired the Philadelphia-based startup late last week, aims to eventually get to a place where tech can guide and advise underwriters on potential opportunities and in decision making, according to Rich Gagliano, president of Black Knight's Origination Technologies division. "AIVA makes the decisions and recommends actually a conclusion, the operator can agree or disagree, and as a result of that two things happen: that activity or that job task gets done, and in certain situations, creates a reinforcement learning for AIVA," said Soofi Safavi, CEO of HeavyWater. "That activity ultimately will be shadowed by AIVA to be able to actually give her the same level of cognition that a human expert has," he added. Though AIVA's primary focus for the short term will be on the originations sector, it will also eventually support mortgage servicing.

As smart speakers gained popularity, a big name in the space seemed to have fallen by the wayside. Sonos pioneered a high-quality connected home-theater speaker system in the early 2000s. In 2016, it began making a shift to support streaming music services on its products. It shipped its first assistant-laden speaker, the Alexa-enabled Sonos One, in 2017, but has now taken that idea even further. The company, on Wednesday, unveiled Beam, a smart sound bar, which will soon be virtual assistant agnostic: It's shipping with Alexa, gaining Siri control with AirPlay 2 in July, and adding Google Assistant compatibility later this year.