Amazon has been working to make its voice assistant more Alexa more useful to users, and this latest feature will certainly help with that. The company is adding the hours, phone numbers and addresses of over a million businesses to Alexa's database. Now, according to Bloomberg, users can simply ask Alexa to tell them the phone number or hours of a store, rather than having to look them up on their phones or computers. As long as your address is entered into the Amazon Alexa app, the skill will provide localized data. This data results from a partnership with Yext, Inc., which stores information about 1.2 million business.

Amazon's Echo lineup, like some smart speakers, uses proximity detection to decide which device is best-suited to responding to your voice commands. It's a clever way to prevent multiple devices from waking up at the same time. There's just one problem: support in non-Amazon devices has been inconsistent at best, creating a mess if you have third-party gear that doesn't use the feature. Thankfully, that shouldn't be an issue from here on out. Amazon has moved its Echo Spatial Perception technology to the cloud, ensuring that all devices can use it.

It seems like voice interfaces are going to be a big part of the future of computing; popping up in phones, smart speakers, and even household appliances. But how useful is this technology for people who don't communicate using speech? Are we creating a system that locks out certain users? These were the questions that inspired software developer Abhishek Singh to create a mod that lets Amazon's Alexa assistant understand some simple sign language commands. In a video, Singh demonstrates how the system works. An Amazon Echo is connected to a laptop, with a webcam (and some back-end machine learning software) decoding Singh's gestures in text and speech.

Sean Rad, a founder of the dating app Tinder, has purchased a home in L.A.'s Hollywood Hills for $26.5 million, according to a person with knowledge of the deal. The seller was real-estate mogul Kurt Rappaport, the founder of Westside Estate Agency. Mr. Rappaport purchased the property for around $5 million in 2014 from Mitzi Shore, founder of the iconic Comedy Store in Los Angeles who died in April. He completely remodeled it, according to a person familiar with the property, finishing work in 2017. It has a 60-foot pool, a game room, a large outdoor dining area, a bar with a Comedy Store theme, a gym and a wine cellar.

Everywhere you look, artificial intelligence is dominating the headlines. In financial services, it has been heralded as a way to make major advancements in cybersecurity and compliance, but in actuality, it's capable of much more. Conversational AI--using virtual assistants and smart bots to engage in intelligent conversations with customers--is poised to be one of the most impactful areas in the financial services industry. In a highly regulated industry built on core legacy banking systems, strategically leveraging the latest technology can be a challenge. However, the banks that adopt conversational AI will gain a competitive advantage by unlocking the ability to solve their most strategic problems.

Farewell, Kuri, we hardly knew you. Kuri the rolling, talking, video-capturing robot -- who made its debut at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show -- has been terminated. Mayfield Robotics, the Redwood City, California manufacturer, has announced it ceasing production of Kuri robots and will pause its operations to "evaluate the company's path forward." Marketed as a home companion, priced at $700, Kuri was an app-driven robot that could take videos with its high-def camera, play music and dance. USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham, who met up with Kuri a year ago, described the robot as "an Amazon Echo with wheels and eyes" that "can do all the things Alexa or Google Home can do now -- answer trivia questions, play music, run your smart home and a little more. Using the built-in 1080p camera, Kuri can also take, for instance, cat videos while you're away and play them for you."

You are settling into your window seat, bound for a summer vacation, when the flight attendant wishes you a happy birthday or commiserates about the lousy weather that delayed the last leg of your trip. It might feel like the flight crew has been scouring your recent social media posts, but at some airlines, that wouldn't be necessary. Carriers such as United Airlines, Delta Air Lines and Southwest Airlines are giving gate agents and flight attendants access to more customer data in hopes of giving passengers more personalized service. Still, there is only so much a birthday greeting can do to make up for a lost bag or late arrival, particularly when airlines want to steer clear of conversations that feel too personal. While in-cabin recognition might be the most visible way airlines are working to do more with the troves of data they collect, behind-the-scenes efforts to mine stats on everything from collisions between airport vehicles to turbulence touch almost every piece of a passenger's trip.

AI is no longer the stuff of science fiction – it's impacting patients today It's difficult to open a newspaper nowadays without seeing an article about artificial intelligence. But one thing you cannot escape is that AI is here now and it's only going to become more pervasive. While fear of an unknown technology is understandable, in many ways it does a disservice to the incredible impact that AI is already having on the world around us. In the healthcare space alone, it is offering ways to fundamentally rethink clinical practice, speeding up diagnosis, driving patient support programs and aiding drug discovery. In only five years, more than 200 venture capital and private equity deals to fund research into the use of AI in healthcare have been signed.

Google has a slew of artificial intelligence announcements it's making this week at its Cloud Next conference, which kicks off in San Francisco today, and many are focused on the company's democratization of machine learning tools. Starting today, Google's AutoML Vision tool will now be available in public beta after an alpha period that started back in January with the launch of its Cloud AutoML initiative, the company announced during its keynote. Cloud AutoML is basically a way to allow non-experts -- those without machine learning expertise or even coding fluency -- to train their own self-learning models, all using tools that exist as part of Google's cloud computing offering. The first of these tools was AutoML Vision, which lets you create a machine learning model for image and object recognition. Google makes these tools legible to those outside the software engineering and AI fields by using a simple graphical interface and universally understood UI touches like drag and drop.

There aren't many gadgets that I'm still using five years after I buy them, except for maybe a laptop. Even then, that's getting quite long in the tooth given how quickly upgrades arrive these days. Chromecast and Google Cast are still things that I use multiple times a day, every day. When Google first introduced the Chromecast in 2013, the company promised to make any TV with an HDMI port a smart display with the combination of a thumbdrive-like dongle and your home WiFi. That it did, but in the months that followed, Google expanded the tech undergirding its TV accessory well beyond that $35 device.